Team Coaching: Grasping the Nettle
For a team, grasping the nettle means facing the tough stuff together - naming the unspoken tensions, tackling the tricky conversations, and stepping into challenge with honesty and care. It’s about choosing collective courage over quiet avoidance because real progress comes when a team is willing to lean into discomfort and grow through it - side by side.
Setting the scene
When I’m coaching teams, it is often noticeable how individuals in the team can take comfort in sharing frustrations and challenges which impact upon them either individually or collectively. This can be a sort of holding pattern which inhibits, constrains and demoralises – wishing somehow things could be different. Continuous questioning throws up further obstacles and roadblocks leading to moving at the pace of the most cautious member of the team at best – or stasis at the worst.
You’ll have your own views of what might encourage this, but for me the reasons include:
· Conflict aversion (Conflict can be scary)
· Unclear authority or roles and responsibilities (Are we allowed to do this?)
· Lack of clarity of team purpose and objectives (Why do we have to sort this out?)
· Procrastination (If we ‘kick the can down the road’, it might go away)
· Lack of confidence (Potent inner voices getting in the way)
Holding up the mirror
In the coaching work, this is sensitive stuff and requires sufficient relationship with team members to be able to offer the right kind of challenge, whether encouraging self challenge or bringing more of the dynamics at play to the surface. Time to build trust and rapport is critical. This will enable an honest assessment of where the team is and what it needs to enable a move to action.
Once time has been invested by the team to establish a safe and trustworthy relationship, the coach can help move the team to face what is holding them back.
As ever, there are so many ways in from creative, visual and embodied approaches to helpful self-challenging questions including:
· What’s stopping us dealing with this? – Why are we letting it/them stop us?
· What do we need to get moving?
· What would we do if we had a magic wand?
· What’s the worst thing that could happen?
· How will we support each other to hold the challenge?
· What else do we need?
This process works better as team members learn to apply these approaches themselves, deepening understanding, raising great questions, challenging each other and voicing self-challenge.
Over time I find the more I’m able to adopt an observer or witness role the healthier so that the team takes ownership of what they are not facing and what they need to do about it. Inevitably in some teams, this work can expose vulnerabilities and can be painful and cathartic: it is important that as coach I’m ready to offer appropriate safety and support to the team in these situations. This might take the form of protected space, a ‘time out’, light touch mediation or some 1-1 time with a team member.
The outcome of ‘holding up the mirror’ will usually result in some additional contracting and self-contracting around authorities, boundaries and team objectives. This is important and enabling for the team. The emerging clarity will build confidence and capability to move to action.
Moving to action
Momentum is important at this stage – particularly if the team has a tendency to move back into holding patterns!
Key questions that can be effectively offered at this point are:
· What are we going to do and when?
· What is the intention?
· Who is going to do it?
· How are we going to do it?
· How will we support each other in the challenge?
With support from the coach, the team can help each other at this point by:
· Preparation – not going in half-cocked. What evidence or data is needed?
· Rehearsing the challenge or the outcome of the challenge. Acting out the roles in a challenge can be very helpful and encourages the team to offer useful insight in the moment. Practising will build confidence and improve ‘performance’
· Concreteness. Absolute clarity of the purpose and justification of the intervention.
Grasping the nettle
With all the preparation and hard work done up until this point, all that is required is to go for it and grasp the nettle in whatever form it takes. This requires immediacy, no need for sledgehammers or pussyfooting. As a team there can be a mutuality at this point – a communal grasp even if one individual is ‘fronting’ it. This builds confidence and mutual trust.
The outcome of the challenge and any consequence will require working through by the team supported by the coach – what was the result? Was that the intention? What is needed now? What would be different next time? Did you get stung? Was it worth it?
On the face of it, it might seem that only courage is required to take a risk and grasp a nettle. However, a team needs many other ingredients as touched on above. Coaching support can enable a team build the self-awareness and process to work confidently with challenge thereby moving to action without fear or anxiety.
What are you preparing to face, that needs grasping?
Charles Greenwood is a coach at Oasis Human Relations, one of a group of thirty plus practitioners working in partnerships across sectors as coaches, hosts, convenors, speaking partners, facilitators, researchers and changemakers.
Here’s Charles to tell you a little bit about his approach to coaching:
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