coaching

My years of working in the tech industry taught me many things about teams, and the many characteristics you want to see in a team. You want the team to be productive. You want the team to be creative. You want the team to get along well. You want everyone to be willing and able to bring their full selves into the work of the team.

When teams do ‘team’ well, you see all of these characteristics, and the result is magical. Good interpersonal dynamics in the team lead to mutual trust and support, which boost creativity and productivity. The team works through conflict in ways that ensure that every voice is listened to and accepted.

Our mission is to support the creation and maintenance of work environments where all individuals are welcomed, respected and supported, all voices are listened to, and all are free to contribute their best. Achieving this goal requires building good teams, and not just teams with good ‘velocity’ or teams whose ‘task burn-down rate’ is steady.

This is where diversity enters the picture. There is mounting evidence that diverse teams also increase creativity and productivity. Certainly if your company has a more diverse team, it is better at understanding the needs of a broader set of consumers of your product — for example the article How Diversity Can Drive Innovation notes that “inherently diverse contributors understand the unmet needs in under-leveraged markets … a team with a member who shares a client’s ethnicity is 152% likelier than another team to understand that client”. A well-functioning diverse team brings a broader set of experiences, needs and values into product discussions, so the resulting product can serve a wider audience in a more intuitive way.

Building a team which is both diverse and good (by the characteristics above) is challenging. However, having good teams and having diverse teams both require the same soft skills – things like welcoming people who are different from you, listening to them, supporting them, understanding their situations. Diversity training teaches a lot of theory, but does not do much to help teams apply what they have learned to their team situations. In fact, some even find diversity training to be threatening, especially when not coupled with efforts to make all groups feel accepted and valued. Other trainings, such as training in communication, empathy and listening, also are beneficial for building good teams, but again, hard to apply. Coaching is an approach that can help solidify these lessons into concrete improvement — for example, a study on executive coaching shows that training with coaching dramatically increases productivity over just doing the training without the coaching.

Because of this, we advocate that you supplement your diversity training with coaching for teams and managers to help them apply the lessons they have learned into the daily operation of their own teams. Our approach is to work with you, starting from your own trainings, and to provide coaching to selected teams within your organization as related to those trainings. Coaching sessions include group sessions with the team, individual sessions with the team manager, and laser sessions (short sessions which focus on a specific situation) with individual members. Please come and check us out!