6 Reasons Why A Coach Is Just What Your Team Needs

No one better than a coach to steer a team along the right path and change the course of conversations in such a way as to generate results.

- Sameer Dua

There is actually just one reason your team needs a coach—to help deliver results. At the end of the day, it is all about results. The very reason your team exists is for the sake of generating results. The question then is: what does it take for a team to generate results?

As someone who has worked with global organizations on ‘conversational leadership’ and shifting team and organizational conversations, I can tell you with a fair degree of understanding that the points shared below may seem simple, yet are not trivial. There are rigorous conversations required within a team to ensure that the team generates results—those that matter to the organization.

While results are the single important reason your team needs a coach, I use the acronym RESULT to articulate the advantages a coach would bring to the team.

R is for responsibility: A team can work and succeed together only when its members take responsibility for not just their promise in the team, but for the overall team objective, or the team promise. Coaching is an excellent way to make each member aware of this responsibility and instill in them a sense of commitment to the team promise, and thus, to the team too. Coaching conversations enable a team to work as one cohesive unit. In a team, there are no personal interests opposed to the interests of others or opposed to the interest of the team. The coach enables the team members to align individual interests with team interests, and then take responsibility to generate outcomes that take care of these.

Often, team members get confused between the usage of the words accountability and responsibility. While individuals in a team are only accountable for their role in the team, ie, their key result areas, they also need to take on the posture of owning the team results.