How to build a team-coaching climate (Tool)

What Is a Team-Coaching Climate?

We’ve all heard of being a team player, but what exactly does that look like? Catalyst research shows that the most effective teams build an inclusive team environment where team members coach one another by providing constructive feedback and encouraging one another to learn, resulting in a team-coaching climate.1

The team-coaching climate is a team norm—an informal and shared expectation about the way a team works together—contributing to an inclusive team environment. Existence of a team-coaching climate is linked to experiences of inclusion and engagement for individual team members and drives team outcomes such as innovation, citizenship, and problem-solving.2

This tool shows you how to build your team-coaching skills, as an individual and as a team, regardless of schedule or location of your workplace. When everyone on your team does this work, you will build a team-coaching climate where everyone can belong, contribute, and thrive.

Why Is a Team-Coaching Climate Important?

A team-coaching climate (TCC) fosters a climate of innovation because it creates the conditions necessary to take risks, try out new ideas, and receive input from team members with diverse experiences and perspectives. By establishing TCC as a team norm, you build in the expectation that everyone can and should explore novel ideas as part of their role on the team. When the team cultivates an environment of seeking and providing feedback, new skills, processes, products, and ideas are incubated with a higher degree of success.3

A TCC is an important tool for success in the future of work because it provides a foundation for team learning and feedback on skill development, which ultimately creates an environment that fosters reskilling and upskilling more broadly. As team members need to learn new skills (reskilling) or upgrade their existing skillset (upskilling), a TCC provides support and an infrastructure to practice and refine those newly acquired skills. Furthermore, as distributed teams and hybrid work become more common, intentional team building is critical to building and maintaining an inclusive and engaging work environment, and TCC is a purposeful practice shown to drive engagement and inclusion.4

Team-coaching is a meta-skill that facilitates the growth of other skills.