The Practitioner’s Handbook of Team Coaching

11 Coaching for consciousness

Team coaching to support system, relational, and internal awareness

Tish Robinson and Dori Yanagi

 

“We need help!” said a manager of a failing merger, as the dissension in his team dragged on, and morale declined. The merger had been struggling for several years, in large part, because employees of the legacy companies still had not bonded with each other.

When the team coach was first brought in, team members were reticent to discuss their experiences and feelings because (as they explained later) they had been subtly derided for expressing their emotions by a previous boss. The team coach patiently listened and asked broad, interest-based, open-ended questions. Then, at one point, she reflected back to the team ...