The Team Coaching Toolkit

Question. How do you build a brilliant team?

Answer. Find the right tools to set the dynamics right at the start and then keep the team talking.

If you have ever been part of a great team, you will probably remember it as a life affirming and career changing event. Sadly most of our experience in work groups are less inspirational. The research on team success is quite clear. If you invest time and energy getting the behaviours right when the group first comes together, then the trust and collaborative communication that are essential to success are likely to follow.

Theory is one thing, but how do you make this work in practice? This book sets out 55 tools and techniques proven to get your team talking, connecting and collaborating. Each tool is set out with a step-by-step guide to implementation, as well as an explanation on the theory that underpins each exercise.

Whilst some of the tools and techniques are published on this website, the book contains a full portfolio of processes and routines that will help you get the best out of the people you are working with.

The team coaching toolkit book uses a model of team coaching designed to tackle the problems created by today's complex work environment. Based on the latest research into team effectiveness, the book takes you through the full lifecycle of a team from inception, set up, delivery and ultimately disbanding.

• Section One: The theory
1. Introduction
2. Using tools to shape team dynamics
3. The emergence of the team coach.
• Section Two: Team coaching techniques
• Technique 1: Systemic thinking and the spheres of influence.
• Technique 2: Facilitating a thinking environment
• Technique 3: Slow down to speed up.
• Technique 4: Curious enquiry.
• Technique 5: Influential questions.
• Technique 6: Listening for clues.
• Technique 7: Adopt an 'Agile' mindset.
• Technique 8: Using case stories
• Technique 9: The importance of visual information
• Technique 10: Developing your maturity in complexity
• Section Three: Team Coaching Tools
4. Tools for assessing the project environment
1. 1. Complex or simply complicated
2. 2. Assess the project environment
3. 3. Articulating stakeholder paradoxes
4. 4. The cup of team meeting
5. 5. Acknowledging cultural diversity
6. 6. Dangerous assumptions and leaps of faith
7. 7. Surviving the storming stage
8. 8. Force field analysis
9. 9. Roles not Jobs
5. Tools for setting a project up for success.
10. The Big ''Why?'
11. Introvert and extrovert thinking
12. Learning from the past
13. Establishing your rules of engagement
14. Taking feedback
15. Building the future story
16. How to motivate or annoy me
17. The collaboration canvas
18. Create an awareness of behavioural gravity
19. Establish a ‘no blame’ culture
20. The Team integration manual
6. Tools for improving communication
21. Establish a Collaboration and Integration work stream.
22. The language of collaboration
23. Building a team psychometric profile
24. Every speaks and everyone is heard
25. Systemic problem solving model
26. Who plays the fool?
27. The 'So What?' monitor
28. Agree you meeting strategy
29. Identifying the elephant
30. Perceptual positions form the extra chair.
31. Building stakeholder support.
7. Tools for building resilience
32. Press reset.
33. Taking the resilience temperature
34. Constructive challenge
35. Coping with difficult news
36. Fault free conflict management and the Evil Genius.
37. Hedges and Ditches
38. The pre mortem
8. Tools for learning, innovation and improvement
39. The Mid point review.
40. Knowledge stock take
41. Capturing the Knowledge
42. How are we performing?
43. The Pre-mortem
44. Running a Lessons Learned workshop
45. Purposeful closure.
• Section Four: What next?
9. Reading list and other resources.

Some tools, with limited information to make them useful, and without a framework to put them in.

The tools themselves are OK, but it is more a random collection of small meeting tools to be used at workshops. It lacks a coherent focus, but the tools can be used, if you're experienced (at which point you probably doesn't need this book).

Not a bad book, but not something you'll miss.