The importance of relationships in organisational life is proven. At least for me. Relationships between leaders and the people they lead, managers and the people they manage, businesses and their customers, suppliers and stakeholders, really matter. It should not be any surprise. Relationships matter whatever the context; they enhance experience and outcomes when they are good and diminish those same things when they are bad.
Relationship has long been an interest of mine. As a probation officer I engaged in debates (still on-going today in the field of social care) about the value of the relationship in the rehabilitative process with offenders. There were many who believed it to be crucial. I was among them.
Once a management consultant, I became interested in the importance of community in enabling people to perform well at work. To me it seemed a no brainer that community — a set of relationships between people — really makes a difference.
As a leadership and life coach my belief is the same: relationship is where the magic happens and is the vehicle for impact and growth.
As my career has progressed, so has technology which has increasingly become the medium for many relationships in our social and personal lives. While we have expressed concern for the wellbeing of young people who are so reliant on technology for their (virtual) relationships, some parts of the business world have been slow to adopt wholesale a digital means of connecting, preferring to travel long distances to connect with teams and customers alike. The belief has been that face-to-face is the only way to develop meaningful relationships. I have been one of those people that has resisted the replacement of face-to-face relationships with virtual ones, despite my concern for the planet and the threat posed to climate change by global travel.
Despite that resistance, I have been coaching remotely for 8 years now. The majority of my individual coaching work has always been done online and I have never questioned its effectiveness. In fact I have always seen the benefit of coaching remotely and the additional freedom it gives to the coachee, protected and supported as they are by the increased privacy of the virtual medium. As a practitioner, you learn to listen even more intently and to pay even more attention to the details available to you through the face, tone of voice and even body (when you ask your coachee to stand up and move).
Team coaching, however, had remained an ‘in the room’ intervention for me, until Covid-19 arrived. In the last 2 months, I have facilitated a number of online team coaching sessions involving teams of between 7 and 17 people. I had felt some apprehension about how it would work and have honestly been amazed at how well these sessions have gone. There are a few lessons I have learned:
1. Video is key: the ability for everyone (including you as the coach) to be able to see each other makes a huge difference. This has had even greater significance and impact since Lockdown and the increased distance that has been placed between team members. Visual contact builds relationship and connection. There is no doubt. It also enables facilitation in a way that audio on its own, does not.
2. Faces seen up close speak volumes: it is more difficult to hide when your video is on and everyone’s face is lined up in front of you on the screen. Somehow emotional connection is increased, not decreased in this way, compared even to an ‘in the room’ experience. Some folk in sessions I have run have said they have felt more connected with each other in this online forum.
3. Listening generously increases: like most others, I invite people to mute themselves when not speaking. I have had many team coachees comment that they find the online medium more inclusive as it promotes better listening, causes people to be more respectful of others having their turn to speak and reduces instances of people talking over each other.
4. Outcomes are achieved in less time: my approach is to keep any one online team session to about 90 minutes. This seems to me to be the longest time people can be expected to engage in a meaningful way online. I have been finding teams respond with greater focus, energy and engagement to a shorter online conversation and seen them emerge a more energised and confident team from the experience.
5. Guided reflective introductions help people tune in: people are spending so much of their working day (never mind social evenings) online at the moment. Many of my corporate clients are talking of bouncing from one online call to the next without pause throughout the day. They have even less time to adjust mentally from one topic to another as they move between calls, not having even the time it takes to physically walk from one meeting to another, to change mental tack. In recognition of this, I have been starting team sessions with a shared collective meditation or visualisation, where I invite the team to pause and talk them through a few moments of reflection to help them become present. This has been really powerful in helping people really arrive in what is a different kind of space and conversation.
6. Keep it short, make it varied: we all recognise that sitting on zoom for 6 hours in a group is not going to work. I have been proposing a short set of focussed conversations, sometimes with reflective tasks in between, or a varied menu of differently configured conversations (like break-outs) interspersed with full team sessions. In this respect again, it does not differ from what you would do if you were physically in the room.
7. Virtual combined with ‘in the room’ does not work: in my experience, it’s all or nothing. Having everyone online is much more effective than having some online and some in the room (albeit socially distanced). It is much more difficult to ‘read the room’ remotely and participation becomes more uneven in this situation.
8. Pay careful, detailed attention as the coach: this is really no different to face-to-face. Coaches do pay detailed attention. We are good at this. Paying detailed attention to rows of faces on a screen in front of you is the same principle and, in my experience, takes a more intense level of concentration. It is, however, absolutely possible.
My conclusion? There is more of a place for technology in the building of connection, community and relationship within teams than I had previously assumed. I am also really grateful to those of my clients who trusted me with their team process online.
I am really interested in your experience, either as a coach or as a participant. Please share in the comments.