Summary:

Shanna Goodell discusses how to build elite teams through coaching. She defines an elite team as one that drives for results, has high engagement and trust, and ensures that each individual is thriving. Shanna explains that team coaching involves understanding the team's goals, strengths, and dynamics, and then working with the team to overcome challenges and develop strategies for success. She emphasizes the importance of building trust and creating a safe space for open and honest conversations. Shanna also highlights the benefits of using video call platforms for coaching, as they allow for broader reach and more frequent sessions. She advises other learning and development professionals to focus on grassroots efforts and find teams that are eager and willing to engage in team coaching.

Key Takeaways:

• An elite team is one that drives for results, has high engagement and trust, and ensures that each individual is thriving.
• Team coaching involves understanding the team's goals, strengths, and dynamics, and working with the team to overcome challenges and develop strategies for success.
• Building trust and creating a safe space for open and honest conversations is crucial in team coaching.
• Video call platforms allow for broader reach and more frequent coaching sessions.
• Focus on grassroots efforts and find teams that are eager and willing to engage in team coaching.

Chapters:

[0:03:00] Approach to coaching a team and focusing on common goals

[0:06:35] Customization of team coaching and combining traditional learning with coaching

[0:08:19] Importance of coachability and addressing challenges within a team

[0:14:06] Benefits and effectiveness of coaching over video call

[0:15:55] Holding individuals accountable can be challenging due to business priorities

[0:16:34] Leader involvement is crucial for coaching success

[0:17:09] Start with eager teams and let success spread organically

[0:18:46] Closing remarks

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Shanna Goodell is the Head of Global Learning and Development at Druva, and it's a real pleasure to have her here with us in the studio today. Welcome, Shanna.

Shanna Goodell: Thank you for having me on your show.

CheeTung Leong: Tell us a little bit more about what you do at Druva.

Shanna Goodell: At Druva, I was brought in to build out the, Global learning and development framework and platform, as well as focus on the talent management and engagement for Druva.

We are a global company in offices over in our APAC region, the Americas, as well as EMEA.

CheeTung Leong: What is the breakdown of your employee population around the world? Just so that everyone has context, cause you, you are quite global

We have, five or 600. Engineers over in our Pune office and in our headquarters, Santa Clara, California. We have our sales and marketing team. I think it's close to maybe 140, 150 folks in that office. And then over in EMEA, we're dispersed over in the EMEA region.

CheeTung Leong: You've obviously had many years of experience in the industry, and you've had to build elite teams across multiple different companies industries, and so on.

How do you go about doing that with a coaching approach? Tell us a little bit more about this approach and what does it mean within a team setting?

Shanna Goodell: Yeah, and I think there's been a long history of coaching really evolving from one on one coaching to executive coaching, leadership coaching.

From my perspective, an elite team is a team that really drives for results. Always elite team is a team that has high engagement where there is high trust. There's team members who are willing to support each other and also challenge each other in a way that is respectful, but with the positive intent of really reaching that goal and the end result.

But when you work with a team, it is, what is the common shared goal that this team is striving for? And then coaching around that.

CheeTung Leong: I love how you centered this around both the team and the individual thriving, and I'm maybe more familiar with individual and executive coaching. But what does it actually take to, to coach a team?

Shanna Goodell: Each coach is going to do it differently. And the way that I approach a team coaching session is first talking to the leader. What is it that the team goal is? What are they striving for? Doing a little bit of analysis around.

Identity, right? And has its own unique culture within a larger organization. So as a coach, it's really important to understand the workings of the team before you go in. And the 2nd piece is really making you Sure, that I as the coach understands what is it that the goals that they're trying to achieve each session that we go into, it's focused around a common goal.

Where is it hard for the team or for individuals to step in and influence what are the situations, who might the individuals be that are more challenging and then doing that deeper, you can see it goes deeper and deeper into the layers, scaffolding it around getting really to the root cause of what are some of the challenges.

Then collectively getting the group to come up with strategies and actions for how to overcome those challenges. What I love about team coaching is. When you think back 10, 15 years ago, before team coaching has really come to the forefront, you would bring in a team such as this and do a training around whether it's influencing skills or presentation skills, or how do you set strategic direction?

is customized so you can take those models, those skills and bring it to life in discussing the challenges that they face every day. So I think there's room for both of the traditional learning and the team coaching. My experience with team coaching is You're really able to take the skills and concepts from traditional learning and put them into play in real time where you are meeting the team where it's at.

CheeTung Leong: Thank you for spelling that out. It sounds like a pretty bespoke and relatively complex process because every team, as you said, is different. And what are some of the common tools that you use when approaching a team to start a coaching relationship with them? What are your favorite tools for approaching this conversation?

the problem solving that can happen in their business. So it's not just a conceptual skill that we're working with, but it's very relatable and very actionable. So the tool really is getting to know the individuals, getting to know the business. The other piece is when you are kicking off a coaching session, being super clear around.

And, there's an element of is this team or these individuals, do they have the coach ability or coach mindset where they're willing to have the tough conversations they're willing to have that self awareness and self reflection around how can I contribute in a different way? to help the team achieve its goals.

It's such a waste of time. Like why do we need coaching? And do you find that you only want to coach teams that actively invite you in and reject others where actually you might, it may be in a situation where the people and the teams that most need coaching are the ones that rejected first.

So how do you balance that, particularly within an organizational context?

Shanna Goodell: As OD practitioners , we don't often get the team that is the easy team where they're super gung ho and they both have their challenges and they're both great to work with.

So with teams that may not be open to coaching or teams that are struggling, there may be teams that are having some aspects of challenges with the team culture, respect or trust. These are great teams to be doing team coaching with.

They're not wanting to engage or may not have that open or growth mindset. And that's part of the system, right? That's part of what this team is dealing with. So you do have to address it, whether it's, head on or on the side. There's many different ways that you can do that when I approach a team coaching, it's you leave with the systems mindset that there's many different relationships that are happening.

CheeTung Leong: Let's take this team, for example, say, if we have a. Say a marketing team with, a good seven, eight folks on the team involved in different work streams. And they have had challenges around working together to perform well. So you have maybe half the team that are high performance. And then the other is okay, average performance, but not terrible.

And their main problem has been communication flows. When you first approach a team, do you structure out something like a three month program with them or is everything very bespoke? How do you go about approaching this?

At the end of this engagement, and I generally do recommend working with teams for many months because you can't just we know that having one session doesn't change behavior or mindset that it requires multiple conversations, multiple actions being taken and opportunities for people to try out what we've talked about.

And then come back and have a conversation around great. These were successful, but these other actions that we tried to take her or behaviors didn't really work. A good example is I was brought in to work with the team and it wasn't from the leader. It was from another individual in the organization.

We met monthly, there was a topic around that, and we did alternate between developing skills with what I would say, more traditional learning and then infused it with coaching. Throughout. So that's really where the art and science of it comes into play.

CheeTung Leong: It sounds like there's quite a bespoke type of approach and a high level of emotional intelligence that this coach needs to bring to the conversation. Now you're working in an organization that is cross border, cross time zone with a lot of, remote interactions.

Shanna Goodell: It's interesting with zoom and other platforms. I have not seen any resistance or pushback to do coaching over those different platforms.

To me, I see it as it has a broader reach for coaching individuals and coaching teams. For example, at a previous organization. We did a senior level program where we brought them together. We had some learning there's coaching on the side. And had we required everybody to be there in person, a, we would not have been able to meet as often because of the cost and.

CheeTung Leong: I'd imagine through this process, the team individuals, they're going to build a certain amount of accountability with each other and have certain degrees of commitment. Towards that coaching relationship, do you, have you found it difficult to hold them accountable to these commitments?

Especially if in many cases I can imagine, the business needs is going to be saying I've. I've got a business to run, all this stuff, which is nice and warm and fuzzy sound great, but, I'm, sorry, I've got a business to run, can we push this back another couple of weeks, or can we push it back a couple of months?

What is important is that the coaching sessions are valuable enough where people will do their best not to miss it. That People will do their best to follow up if they miss the session and from the leader perspective. It is the leader is involved in those coaching sessions. So it's not just the leader is off and we're doing the coaching session with just the team, the leader is involved.

And that's a key component to the success is that the leader supports it as a sponsor and is actively involved where. They're seeing the leader, roll their sleeves up, dive in, engage in the conversation expose their vulnerabilities around, what are the challenges.

Shanna Goodell: The advice that I would give is... To focus on the grassroots efforts. And what I mean by that is find the team that is eager and willing and ready to jump in for team coaching, work hard to achieve what the goals of that team coaching is.

And then that is contagious, that catches on. So when another team hears. That they have been going through team coaching and the positive feedback around. Not only are they achieving their goals, but the engagement is higher. It's a team that everybody wants to work with and work on that. It is. The excitement.

But if you find that team that really wants it and is eager, it just takes one or two teams for it to take off.

CheeTung Leong: So really good advice. So find those bright spots, those teams that want to lean into the success and then get them that success. Before spreading this, and it should go a little bit more organically from there where other teams want to achieve similar success and then come to you for that.

Thank you for sharing that Shanna. And that's pretty much all the time we've got for today, but if people wanted to find you to continue this conversation, what's the best way for them to do

Shanna Goodell: they can connect with me on LinkedIn, Shanna Goodell.

CheeTung Leong: Thank you so much for hanging out with us today, Shanna.

I'm co founder of Engage Rocket. Thank you for listening.