Why Team Coaching is Essential for Boards

Governance is only about 'what' we do. To be effective, boards need to start paying attention to 'how' to do things.

We are all familiar with the concept that what is modelled at the top dictates what happens throughout organisations. The fish rots from the head down.

And we have known for decades now that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Peter Drucker's famous quote resonates with everyone who reads it, yet organisations - from the board to the C-suite and beyond - still spend all their time focusing on “what” they need to achieve, sometimes with a sprinkling of “why” thrown in at the annual offsite or end of year reflection, but little to no time is spent on the “how” of it all. And the “how” is where culture comes from.

The problem with culture is that it's primarily spoken about as something that needs to happen “out there”.

“What culture does this organisation need to have to succeed?”

Culture does not come from a strategy on a slide deck or flip chart. It is the felt experience of “how we do things around here”.

The more fruitful dialogue for boards and leadership teams would be:

“What culture does this group need to have to model the culture the organisation needs?”

“How do WE need to show up to build that culture?”

“What behaviours will support that culture?”

However, this is an uncomfortable and slow conversation (let's face it, any work that requires holding up a mirror under a fluorescent light, sucks). Most boards, executive teams, and senior leadership teams are unequipped to have such conversations. Instead, they retreat to their comfort zone of policies, slide decks, numbers, performance tracking, and documentation.

If you’re a board member, let me ask you this: Do you expect your people to be doing this work?

In any organisation, development programs - whether coaching, team coaching, or leadership skill building - inevitably elicit the same question from participants, “Why aren't our leaders doing this work?”

So, why aren't you?

If you are on a board, ticking governance boxes and ensuring minutes are being recorded while claiming to understand that culture is inherently linked to sustainable performance, then (I'm sorry to be the unflattering mirror here) you are the emperor with no clothes.

“But look at us! We're high performing!”

Unfortunately, no one is defining what high performance actually is.

My experience working with teams - from boards to cocktail bars - has taught me that, in most cases, any working group is so relieved not to be in a toxic environment that they mistake a neutral state (“We get along well, we agree on the way forward, we meet our measurable deliverables”) for high performance.

In the dating world, this is called 'settling’.

A question I often ask teams when I am coaching them in-situ is: “If your stakeholders were observing this meeting right now, what feedback would they give you?”  OR “If this board meeting were a footy match, what would the fans be screaming at you?”

(Hint: The answers never include “high performance”.)

To come anywhere close to high performance, teams and boards need to spend time reflecting on and deciding how they work together. They need to figure out how to create enough psychological safety so there can be constructive heat and conflict, leading to better outcomes, without defaulting to simply ticking items off agendas or deferring to rank and power when things get stormy.

How do we harness the collective potential of the intellect and experience in this room to create something more than the sum of its parts?

More often than not, boards - and consequently the teams in the organisations they support (“The fish rots from the head” remember) - behave more like a group of individual stars  vying for their own goals and stats rather than learning to work together like a footy team; knowing when to step in and when to step back, for the greater good.

A “team” isn't a team because we call it one. And high performance isn't the absence of conflict or the presence of acquiescence.

So why is this not being addressed? Why are boards so hesitant to challenge the status quo and do the work that might actually make them stronger and more impactful?

It's a combination of two things:

1. Thinking they are already doing it

2. Thinking they know how to do it

I'm 20 years into this gig and I'm yet to see any board, Executive Leadership Team (ELT), Senior Leadership Team (SLT), or Leadership Team (LT) meeting that stakeholders would call high performing. Some are barely functional. Yet, most are self-congratulatory.

So, here's the pitch: if you are on a board and you want to do the work that will actually support your organisation in transforming its culture and performance, it starts with you. Put your money where your strategy is. Hire a team coach - trained in working with teams, moving them beyond forming and into storming and performing - to do this work. Do the uncomfortable work of looking in the mirror as a collective. Spend the time figuring out how this collective needs to work together to actually be of service.

Or, you know, just keep doing what you're doing.

Because it's working so well.

Charity Becker is Institute of Executive Coaching and Leadership (IECL) 's Head of Coaching & Leader Development and is an experienced coach and coaching supervisor.