Accountability Through Team Sovereignty
This article was written by Janet M. Harvey, MCC, CMC, CCS and originally appeared in choice, the magazine of professional coaching. Click here to receive a FREE digital issue.
How team members participate in terms of attitude and mood is contagious and generates a field of experience that is highly influential on the team’s choices and actions. When anyone shows up unconsciously it is very easy to get seduced into an ineffective energy exchange. All of a sudden, the team realizes that forward movement is derailed. It only takes one person who’s cranky and the next thing you know, everybody’s cranky! When that person shifts, by pausing to take a breath and notice the experience, the cycle of negative energy is broken. When a team engages a coach who is continuously perceiving the field and models this way of noticing, with time, this capacity to notice and invite naming occurs by any team member, e.g. “What’s got us all in a spin here? Let’s pause for a moment and see what wants to be tended here.”
When a team coach chooses to be unconditionally curious by asking, “What’s happening in this field? What’s happening in our exchange?”, the members explore meaning as the basis of the exchange. This is a first step that assists the team members to transcend feelings as being personal in order to give more attention to what improves progress toward outcomes. The coach elicits members to make a connection between the meaning of experiences between members and the parallel process that occurs outside of team coaching sessions. Before finishing a session, it is essential to connect meaning with practical, concrete, forward-moving choices.
Figure 1, Accountability Through Team Sovereignty, captures the flow of energy in a team that achieves high performance in a sustainable and psychologically safe fashion. Sovereignty means to be self-ruling, independent and in charge of the relationship with the conditions of our lives. When we each take our own life into our own hands, we also take it upon ourselves to act with integrity and response-agility.
When applied to teams, the principle of sovereignty strengthens self-management capacity. All work involves a request and a promise. In organizational life this comes in the form of granting authority to make decisions and take actions, the request. The promise comes in the form of accepting responsibility to fulfill the request.
By inviting the members of a group to craft agreements that declare what behaviors will generate the best work together, the team coach is free to notice, name and negotiate on behalf of the team.
These skills are focused upon the field of exchange the members generate, and that field is the coaching client, rather than the individual members. Four questions – simple on purpose – open up the dialogue very wide in order for the members to experience and perceive each other’s point of view.
- What brought you here?
- What is this team expected to deliver?
- What agreements are needed for you to accept responsibility?
- How would you like to approach delivering the expectation while honoring your agreements?
When these questions are not posed and answered, the field of exchange is filled with assumptions and preferences that are invisible and yet operating as if they are agreed norms. Conflict most often erupts because of these invisible motivators of behavior and mindset. It’s never too late to pause and invite members to establish an open and psychologically safe climate for being sovereign together.
When applied to teams, the principle of sovereignty strengthens self-management capacity.
BEYOND CREATIVE IMPASSE
Inherent in team conflict is a paradox between “stuckness” and movement. As with any paradox, the intention for effective work together is to exchange an “either/or” experience for a “yes/ and” experience. Teams naturally seek to harness insight. Awareness and choice are available when members are coached to embrace the paradoxical experience. This is a paradigm shift from a traditional approach to teamwork that emphasizes conflict resolution toward an approach that embraces conflict as the seed of creativity for new solutions. Breakthrough resides in the heart of the paradox.
When coaches explore new ground by inviting team members to consider multi-dimensional perceiving, the patterns of emotional response noticed in the collective field are brought into awareness for the team as a whole. When those invisible patterns are made visible by naming, the strength and resource within the pattern of behavior becomes available for everyone to see. The space is opened to negotiate for more conscious choice. Ultimately, awareness and clarity become a foundation for activating individual creativity and synergistic movement that will most fully align with the team and then what the organizational system values most.
Inside of organizations this paradox phenomenon is multiplied by the number of times individuals join and leave teams; even with learning, the impetus toward paradox is in the culture. A coaching approach emphasizes creating awareness and will accelerate the discovery of the unconscious paradoxes operating so that the team addresses the source of stuckness more quickly. Being generative as a team coach allows everyone to originate, create, learn and produce results in any context, with synergy and accelerated performance.
What questions do you ask during team and group coaching to encourage discovery of unconscious paradoxes? Share with us today by commenting on this article on our LinkedIn page.
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Thank you, Janet M. Harvey, MA, MCC, ACS, for these interesting insights.