Coaching the team as a leadership skill

Coaching the team as a whole, not just individuals, is becoming a key leadership skill. Team coaching, whereby you use coaching practices in team meetings, has parallels to the same practices which foster team psychological safety including developing strong collaborative relationships amongst team members; coaching the team to solve problems collectively and using an inquiry/Socratic approach to help them think differently about challenges; and seeing failures as learning opportunities and creating a culture where failing is okay (with frequent post-mortems asking "what did we learn?"). All of these have to be part of the routines and culture of the team, not ad hoc measures.

The challenge for most leaders is that they spend the majority of their career directly "getting things done" and to be successful as a leader of others, they have to learn to step back and use a different approach. The opportunity is that you can foster a bigger collective impact beyond what many 1:1 conversations can accomplish. If you've never read about Google's quest for the perfect team, search for Project Aristotle; it has facinating, thought provoking ideas for any leader/manager of others.