Just when I thought I knew everything I needed to know about coaching after having just completed a fairly arduous, albeit pleasant, journey to become a professional coach and after having just been accepted as a member of the International Coach Federation (ICF) and soon, hopefully, also by the Philippine chapter of ICF, here comes an invitation from Master Coach Julius Ordoñez’s Benchmark Consulting to attend an orientation session for team coaching.

The challenge of a team coach without a doubt is far greater than a one-on-one coaching situation

My curiosity piqued, I decided to attend as I wanted to understand the difference between what I had just completed, the Accelerated Coaching Training Program (ACTP) and team coaching. Together with other ACTP graduates, we were given a bird’s-eye view of the latest offering of Benchmark Consulting.

The session started with the subtle question of: what is the difference between a team and a group? Like all subtle questions, although the responses from participants varied, the replies basically revolved around the key concept of a common goal that an aggrupation of individuals sought to achieve. The main difference though lies in how the goal is expected to be achieved. What do I mean?

A group is an affiliation of individuals who act or operate independently of each other to reach a common goal. A good example that comes to mind that clearly illustrates this are the various political affiliations or groups of aspiring candidates to the forthcoming electoral games in our country this May. They are only distinguished loosely between those sympathetic, for the moment, to the current administration and those who are deemed to be the oppositionists or, generally speaking, the groups of people who are currently “outside the kulambo.” Both types of political affiliation of individuals aspire to be senators, congressmen, mayors and other local government officials. All are desirous of a common aspiration: political power. They may have joint political rallies on occasions and may espouse on the political stage, apart from the usual singing and dancing, a common political pitch but my guess is that all operate quite independently of each other and would make individual moves that would best serve their personal interests — that is, to get elected with the highest number of votes for themselves.

What on the other hand is a team as compared to a group as just described? A team is a group of individuals, similar to groups, with a common goal, but with the key difference of having the individuals with assigned roles in the team perform interdependently with each other complementary functions based on their unique skills sets and individual strengths in order to enable, as a whole, the accomplishment of the team’s objective.

An easily understood example is the Gilas team under Coach Yeng Guiao which defied the odds by sweeping their remaining FIBA qualifier must-win two games in a literally frigid environment away from home. In a short period of time, Coach Yeng had to ensure Andray Blatche, a hot-and-cold, ex-NBA player he never coached previously, despite the lack of team practice, would blend well with the likes of other basketball superstars like spitfire Jayson “The Blur” Castro, deadshot Marcio Lassiter or five-time Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) MVP June Mar Fajardo, now relegated to the role of a reliever to Blatche.

It must have been not easy for Coach Yeng to manage the different personalities coming from competing home clubs in the PBA who surely had their own expectations of playing time. The challenge of a team coach without a doubt is far greater than a one-on-one coaching situation. You essentially multiply by the number of individuals in a team the different usual challenges a coach faces with a single coachee. Furthermore, there are common challenges unique in team coaching a coach would have to contend with such as: managing the egos of the team members, lack of trust with each other’s capabilities, getting everyone on board, resolving conflicts in the team, motivating the team to collaborate and challenging the team to raise the bar and exceed expectations.

And how can the coach overcome these challenges? To whet our appetites to attend the full-blown two-day team coaching seminar Benchmark Consulting will be conducting at the end of March, Julius briefly shared with us an overview of the different how’s. These are some of the key points I was able to pick up: above all, the coach must model good emotional management — in other words, keep your cool; encourage truthfulness and being frank with each other; be objective and not be judgmental; develop teamwide empathy and encourage them to see each other’s perspectives; make sure no one dominates the discussions; recognize each other’s strengths; instill a win-win mindset; always reach an agreement and affirm and celebrate wins.

Finally, Julius shared with us the different stages of a team’s journey towards the coach’s ultimate goal of achieving team synergy. The first stage is: membership, essentially when individuals tend to be too quiet, too polite and reluctant to comment and defer a lot as the quest for friendly, familiar faces to naturally gravitate around with occurs; second, when subgroups or silos are created as people become more familiar with each other and similarities of views become apparent and the spirit of “us versus them” attitude surfaces; third, the conflict stage when the team becomes very open with their conflicting views, everyone speaks out and questions, challenges of opposing views are frequent; fourth, the individuation stage when people accept and respect each other’s views and uniqueness, people listen more, people may assert their views but do not impose, and finally, the end stage of team synergy when the people start working in synch and in perfect harmony with each other to achieve the team goal.

The orientation session unfortunately abruptly ended at that point. Julius certainly achieved his objective of whetting our appetite to learn more and hopefully become proficient with team coaching!