Coaching High Performance Teams: Relations Management
People are really the differentiating factor of organizations, more so in the times when products and services are easily and quickly copied.
Companies – and teams as a microsystem of companies – because they are made up of people, are inevitable stages of emotions that express themselves using mechanisms of identification, projection and transference.
We find alliances and complicities, confrontations, disputes, competition, envy and jealousy… loves and hatreds, alliances and betrayals. The people who integrate the companies (and those who do not integrate, communicate and relate to the company) with all their singularities, inform and are informed, in a dynamic process, in this context.
In the last century, Wilfred Bion said that “Companies are dead entities. It is the people who compose them who are alive and give them life. People grow and something will happen.”
People are the real differentiator factor of organizations, more so in these times when products and services are easily and quickly copied.
People, this huge asset (so special that gives life) that is guaranteed by many companies, are disregarded for their importance and there is a need for management that promotes the development and motivation of Human Capital are, as we know, the only asset that leaves at the end of the day and is expected to return the next day to continue to bring value and life to the company.
An asset that has its own volition… emotions, desires and aspirations! Being able to manage, develop and retain people, as critical capital, assuming these characteristics as natural (and essential to the development of companies!) and taking the best of them is a crucial challenge that an organization faces.
But the challenge is bigger and more complex if we think that people work in isolation, they are usually integrated into teams, and there is no doubt that organizational challenges are being won by team play!
The key to organizational differentiation, development and innovation is to increase the genuine involvement of people, while also building high-performance teams.
As Peter Hawkins puts it, rather than focusing on isolated people – and by this I do not mean that attention to the person is not important – the current focus of leadership should be on the interconnections, the interfaces, the inter-relational plane: relationships between people in teams (How do team members relate to each other?), between the various teams (How do the different teams relate to each other?) and between these and the other stakeholders (How do teams relate to each other? the remaining stakeholders?).
Seems complex to manage, doesn’t it?
Yes, but Systemic theory applied to consulting and coaching gives us tools to deal with such complexity and also the application of group analysis to consultancy and coaching gives us the framework and technique to provide positive and structural changes in the level of inter-relationships and inter-conceptions.
This Systemic-Group analytic framework helps companies at the interventional level of knowing what to do. The people and the various teams of high performance are thus invaluable assets for companies (not only for companies but also for sports organizations and for all types of organizations), but they are not islands!
What’s more, they are not born by spontaneous generation! Leadership and coaching work is required to move up to high performance.
And one of the tasks to be done is undoubtedly in terms of interrelationships, communication, management of emotions, the importance of bringing to light what is latent – what is beneath the surface – namely latent conflicts, divergences in plan of internal representations, among other aspects. We have to go much further than structure and processes because a company is much more than that … and it is also context.
Thus, the management of connections, of interrelationships, of emotions requires an emotionally intelligent leadership profile. Leadership capable of helping a group of employees become a true team, and a team to become a high performance team, is an integral and dynamic part of the rest of the internal and external environment.
Like a jazz orchestra, improvisation, unforeseenness, anticipation and harmony also compete in organizations to enable the challenges to be overcome together and lead to something of value and that (implicit and explicit) be incorporated into the DNA of the team and the company – strengthening the company and the business as a whole, allowing to obtain the best and most satisfactory results.
