Team Coach

1. The Role in Brief

A team coach is an expert in how to run and facilitate the Business Design process. They are not part of the Project Team. They are responsible for the team's performance, not for its result — a team that has worked with method and rigour has done its job, even when the business model it arrives at is not the one anyone expected.

A team coach helps every individual in the project team to:

• apply the Business Design approach with its Guiding Principles, End-to-End Innovation Process, Roles and Tools & Methods,

• play their assigned role and get past their own barriers and fears,

• grow into a high-performance team that takes full responsibility for the project.

2. Staying Out of the Content

That responsibility only works when the coach stays out of the content. Take a position on which business model is the right one, and you lose your independence — you become a team member or a stakeholder, and someone else has to coach. And remember who the team is working for: the Project Sponsor, not the coach. There is also no team coach without a project charter — the mandate for everything a coach does with the team comes from the agreement with the sponsor, so read the charter as your own contract and not only as the team's briefing. If the frame does not hold, say so before the kick-off.

3. Trainer, Mentor, Coach

Team coaches do not have one way of working; they have three. Which one fits depends on what is limiting the team right now: skills it does not have yet, or something getting in the way of skills it already has.

Switching between the three is the actual skill, and it can happen twice in one workshop. The less experience a team has, the more time a coach spends training; as a team gains experience across iterations, the balance moves towards mentoring and coaching. Directive help finishes today's task and builds dependency; asking takes longer and builds a team that needs the coach less.

4. Responsibilities

A good team coach works closely with the project sponsor and the team, but is not necessarily the team's friend. Taking a team — and often the organisation around it — out of its comfort zone is part of the job, and so is helping them get there feeling safe and supported. Be prepared for an emotional roller coaster that may look like this:

Broken down, this means a team coach is particularly involved in:

• preparing workshops and moderating team discussions,

• giving methodological guidance and assuring methodological precision (Guiding Principles),

• asking questions that open up new perspectives — for example: "I understand you don't think this is going to work. However, what could we do to make it work?",

• supervising how the team works together, and raising critical points objectively so the team can resolve them,

• managing important stakeholders, above all the sponsor,

• intervening when the project team derails, and working on a solution together with the team (see Team Interventions).

5. The Role Across the Five Phases

What a team coach does depends on the project format. The role runs across all five phases of the End-to-End Innovation Process, and it changes with each one:

6. Key Activities in Phase II and IV

Phase II

In Phase II, team coaches mostly work with exploration projects. The table below shows the key activities across the three steps of Exploring Playgrounds:

Phase IV

Phase IV is the format most team coaches meet first. The table below shows the key activities across its five steps:

7. Developing Your Craft

Coaching is a craft that develops through reflection. Experienced team coaches review their projects — and their own use of the method — together with a Team Co-Coach rather than on their own.