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Working at Cornell

Team Coaching

photo of a circle of hands holding interlinked cogs

A powerful program to make good teams even more effective!

Benefits of Team Coaching

A team that has a purpose and common outcome or results can reap the benefits of team coaching. Benefits include increased and enhanced:

  • Performance
  • Communication
  • Efficiency
  • Morale
  • Innovation
  • Engagement
  • Learning
  • and a reduction in conflict

In team coaching, you work with Kathy Burkgren, an International Coaching Federation (ICF) certified team coach, who partners with an entire team that shares a common purpose and motivation that requires collaboration, coordination, and commitment to achieve its objectives and performance goals, and who mutually hold one another accountable.

Through team coaching, the team collectively raises awareness of how they could work better together, decides what they might do to increase effectiveness, raises morale and alignment with key stakeholders, and builds better connections internally and externally, thereby enhancing their capability to address current and future challenges.

How the Engagement Works

The team coach works with the team leader to set agreed-upon expectations of the coach, team leader, and team. The coach then engages with the whole team and team leader to define the team's expectations of the coach and the team's coach.

The team coach serves as a mirror reflecting back to the team, asking questions, sharing observations of things they are noticing as the team discusses topics important to their success. The team coach listens for common understanding, differences in leadership styles, whether everyone has time to process, what is and isn’t being said, tone, language that impacts team success, team dynamics, non-verbals, conflict and providing a lens for the team to discuss them.

Why Team Coaching?

It comes down to two things: Trust and Results. Trust is what allows people to openly share and contribute. Trust includes having the well-being of others in mind. Trust with teams is positively correlated with performance and negatively correlated with stress. There is a circular relationship between trust and dialogue. The safer the environment the easier it is to engage in dialogue. Before we start to build trust, we have to establish a common understanding of what trust means to team members, both individually and collectively. Trust is given the opportunity to build throughout team coaching.