The Practitioner’s Handbook of Team Coaching

22 The making of a team coach

Christine Thornton

 

 

Learning to coach a team is a subtle process. It cannot be reduced to a single training experience, even a prolonged one, and certainly not to the elements of a competency-based accreditation process. We learn to use our self as a thinking, feeling actor with ‘skin in the game’, yet retaining the capacity to reflect in circumstances often not conducive to thinking.

Within this, there are two distinguishable phases. Before working effectively with teams, we must first learn the fundamental skill, how to ‘hold’ a group. Intervening in the life of a team is more complex, requiring additional capacities (Scanlon, 2017; Thornton, 2017).

The chapter focuses on how learning experiences create an effective ...