Team coaching for your school’s leadership team
What is team coaching?
Team coaching can take a number of forms, including:
- Coaching the whole team on their collective actions and responsibilities for running the school
- Coaching the individuals, within the team context, to help them with personal goals
- Coaching the whole team on their working practices as a team, their engagement and relationship building within the team
Typically, team coaching is a combination of group coaching and 1:1 coaching sessions, using coaching approaches, and respecting people’s confidentiality.
Who is this for?
In schools, we tend to work with the senior leadership team in our team coaching activities. Depending on your school context, this could be the operational leadership team, or it could be expanded to include the chair of governors and/or the school business manager. We work with the team that you want us to work with!
Why coaching for school leadership teams?
The weight of both individual and collective responsibility is high for school leadership teams.
And generally, most SLT meetings and activities focus on operational demands, with the occasional foray into strategy.
Rarely do teams have the luxury of reviewing team working practices. Team coaching provides this opportunity, in a focussed and productive way.
And team coaching is for all school leadership teams. It is a myth that only ineffective or dysfunctional teams can benefit from coaching! The vast majority of leadership teams work well together, so our mantra is to help you go from good to great!
What is the offer?
Our team coaching offer tends to follow a full year cycle, with these elements in it:
- Initial strategy meeting with the head teacher, to set the direction and overarching goals
- Initial group session with the whole SLT group, to contract and agree specific goals
- Further half termly meetings with the SLT. These sessions can be Topic specific, Project specific or Working practices specific
- Optional 1:1s – there can be 1:1 coaching sessions with the head and some/all of the SLT, between the group sessions
- Year end review, reflection and acknowledgement of the impact of the coaching
HOW DOES IT WORK?
This coaching will take place online or face to face, depending on your schools and our coach’s locations.
There are a range of practical options, including:
- Online coaching, to maximise everyone’s busy schedules. This can work whether all the SLT are on site, or are working from home
- Meeting face to face in your school
- Meeting off site, in a neutral place
Benefits
Each school is different, and the benefits that each school can have from team coaching is unique. Some of the benefits we have seen from engagement in team coaching include:
- Greater sense of harmony and unity in the team
- Sharing the workload and understanding colleagues’ stresses and pinch points
- Differences in personality, beliefs and values between team members becoming a strength rather than an obstacle
- Focussing on responsibility rather than blame
These outcomes are often achieved within schools without using coaching. But coaching can make it quicker, more sustained. Also, coaching takes the pressure off the head to micro manage all aspects of how the team works. Coaching works for teams.
“Sue’s team coaching has been an incredibly positive experience for our Senior and Middle Leadership teams at Bridgetown.
Working with Sue has helped us reach a depth of communication together which is undoubtedly having a significant impact throughout the school.
Sue’s empathetic and courageous approach supports us to be visionary, brave and appreciative of each other’s skills and talents within the team.
We feel we are tapping into the potential of the team as we work under Sue’s expertise in both educational leadership and coaching, and are excited and proud of what we are achieving together.
I cannot recommend Sue highly enough as a Team Coach.”
