We coached the team heading up the UK Department of Health’s Workforce Strategy division, whose role was to ensure the NHS delivers high quality compassionate care. We met together and apart over a period of 12 months, addressing a range of topics and left them clearer and more unified around their joint purpose, and more disciplined in their work with each other and key stakeholders.
The shift our client was looking for
We first met the Workforce Strategy Division’s leadership team before the Department of Health was renamed in 2018. At the time, the Department (‘the DH’) led, shaped and funded health and care in England, working with 23 agencies and public bodies.
This particular team consisted of the Director and four Deputy Directors, located in Leeds and London, as were their staff. The team’s remit was to ensure the nation’s health and care workforce could deliver high-quality compassionate care.
The team was newly-formed in name, but in reality it was a mix of newcomers and longstanding members. The Director who led it asked us to support them as the role, purpose and structure of the DH shifted in response to significant reforms. He wanted the finer details of the coaching agenda to come from the whole team, not just him – which matches our own view that a team, its leader and its coaches should all shape the direction the coaching takes. It also chimes with our belief that this kind of work needs to be done systemically, attending to the various systems in and around the team that influence its ability to deliver.
The approach we took
We met the Director and his Deputy Directors individually and in sub-groups to understand the nature of the team’s challenge, address any questions and concerns about team coaching and to get a feel for the team dynamics. The team provided existing staff survey data and completed our High Performing Teams Questionnaire.
We then ran five sessions with the team as a whole, 4 – 8 weeks apart. Topics included getting clarity on where interdependencies existed; aligning the team around a core, shared purpose; the Division’s organisational development agenda; alternative allocations of work across the team; raising the team’s collective and individual profiles in response to stakeholder feedback; and enhancing the team’s ability to coach itself.
We also drew on the Director’s 360° feedback, his own boss’s perspective on the team, a second interim staff survey, and our observations of the team in action.
Towards the end of the programme, the Director announced his move to a different Departmental role. In our final session, the team analysed before-and-after data from our High Performing Teams questionnaire to assess its progress, identify any remaining gaps and plot a course for the future.
The impact we had
The Director and his team told us the coaching helped them become sharper on their joint purpose and more unified in acting as a team; more disciplined and efficient communicators, better at handling significant differences of opinion; better at naming and addressing flaws in their own ‘team process’, such as going off on a tangent or avoiding difficult topics head on; and more proactive in managing their profile across the organisation. One essential shift, given the Director’s departure was that the rest of the team had become far less reliant on his advice and guidance.
“The team coaching was really helpful in working with us to clarify the role of the team (particularly alongside other teams that people were part of) and to build the relationships and understanding to work together more effectively as a team. The commitment that we made to ourselves and to the coaches was important in making sure that we kept focused on these team issues. The coaches then provided an independent perspective and a challenge on team and organisational dynamics which helped us make more progress.”
Challenges faced on the way
No team coaching engagement is without its challenges. On this occasion our key challenges can be summed up in six common questions, all of which are worth bearing in mind, if you’re seeking team coaching:
Are we a team? Some had remits with obvious shared interests; others didn’t – which raised differing views on what ‘team’ even meant here. Through activities designed to delineate real interdependency, the team clarified what to attend to collectively – for the department as a whole.
What is team coaching? Some of the team initially expected more of a ‘teaching’ relationship than a coaching one – looking for us to evaluate and educate them using case studies and management theory. That created uneven engagement, and we had to clarify expectations and test the team’s appetite to continue. Coaching is a collaborative, adult-to-adult relationship: more ‘done with’ than ‘done to’. Once that landed, we brought more humour, challenge, energy and openness to the work and achieved more focus and learning.
What are we hoping to gain, and how will we get it? It took longer than expected to get the whole team together, and we were eager to show tangible progress – so we crammed too much into the first session, rather than first aligning everyone around shared objectives and a rough roadmap. We were trying to build before we’d laid sufficient foundations.
Where does this work sit in our priorities? Everyone had busy schedules and different areas of focus, which created understandable tension over which team to prioritise, and some guilt about time away from the teams they led. Over time, it became clearer that coaching related directly to day-to-day work rather than sitting apart from it – which made both relevance and time commitment easier.
What about my own individual needs? We met everyone individually at the start, and some again at the end. Meeting one-to-one throughout could have delivered additional value and attended more directly to individual needs.
What’s our stakeholders’ stake in this? A team’s stakeholders are the real beneficiaries of good team coaching. The Director’s manager offered valuable insight, but we’d have had even more impact with had we had more contact with him and some of the team’s other key stakeholders.
