Since 2015, webinars and courses at IDM have addressed the developmental structure of teams and central issues of team coaching. Specifically, they have clarified notions such as ‘self organization’ in teams and their ability to develop ‘collaborative intelligence’. The perspective taken has been adult-developmental, to the effect that self organization of teams is anchored in the self organization — thus the maturity — of individual team members, rather than being a mysterious quality of whatever team. The perspective greatly differentiates interventions that make sense with teams from a merely behavioral vantage point.
Team coaches need to address two dimensions of self organization: the social-emotional and cognitive one which broadly overlap and influence each other. The teaching of team coaching has been based on Laske’s social-emotional team typology that distinguishes three levels of team maturity. On each of these levels, a team is either downwardly or upwardly divided as a function of the relative maturity of team minority or majority. Clearly, each such team necessitates taking a different approach to intervention.
The attached set of slides details the CDF team typology. The typology distinguishes 6 types of teams, or ‘We-Spaces’, 3 of them up-, and 3 of them down-wardly divided.
The slides are helpful to readers of a forthcoming book by Jan De Visch and myself entitled “Dynamic Collaboration: Strengthening Self Organization and Collaborative Intelligence in Teams”, to be launched at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in May of 2018. Team coaching in a central topic in Chapter 3 of the book where the authors address how to build enabling-environments that enhance self organization in teams.
For inquiries about the book write to otto@interdevelopmentals.org
IDM Team Coaching Webinar (2015)
