Essay concepts and applications

A
The primary challenges of organizational teams are based on the need for individuals with different roles and tasks to come together, communicate effectively, collaborate and essentially work as one unit towards a common goal. The main challenges involve leadership, empathy and commitment. Tuckman’s five stages of team development are involved in addressing these challenges as they focus the team in a systematic way on fulfilling the demands of each phase of development starting from the beginning and going through all the way to the end. The five stages are a) forming, b) storming, c) norming, d) performing and e) adjourning (Tuckman & Jensen, 1977).
The first stage—forming—focuses on the moment when the group is coming together for the first time. Typically, there will be worries and concerns that each member has. The forming stage is the period wherein these anxieties should be stated: every member should be allowed to communicate them. The goal of this stage is for the members of the team to focus on one another rather the work and show empathy towards one another. This builds positive relationships, trust and security. The second stage—storming—is where the team’s leaders emerge. The third stage—norming—is where the group begins to come together as a single unit, with all members feeling comfortable about their roles, what is expected of them and so on. The fourth stage—performing—is where the team begins really executing at a high level; the goal of this stage is for the team to start achieving its goals and objectives. The fifth stage—adjourning—is where the team has finished its task and now the work is done; however, before disbanding, the team members thank one another for their hard work and support so that everyone leaves on a positive note and feeling good about teamwork in case they are called back together again in the future.
B
Emotional intelligence (EI) is critical to a team’s success and individual members have to develop their EI to be better teammates and understand the needs of the other members. An EI model is involved in a team member’s progression from independent worker to team player by acting as a guide that the member can use for developing this necessary skill. Salvovey and Mayer (1990) developed an EI model in which EI was defined as “the capacity to reason about emotions, and of emotions, to enhance thinking,” including the “abilities to accurately perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth” (p. 197). Their EI model was called the ability-based model which shows how emotions can be used as sources of information that a member can use to obtain a better understanding of what another team member is saying or needing. The EI model empowers the individual to become more of a team player by being more responsive to others’ needs through the application of EI skills.
There is an EI competency that I consider to be most important in this process: the competency of understanding emotions, which is one of the four main abilities in the ability-based model by Salvovey and Mayer (1990). It indicates that in order to be an effective communicator and team player, one has to understand emotions, where they come from, what they mean and how they can be used effectively. Without a comprehensive understanding of emotions and the life of emotions, one will not make a good team member. One will come across is unsympathetic or uncaring. Implicit in this competency is the idea of self-awareness, another important competency that helps one to understand one’s own emotions as well.
C
1
The most essential coaching competencies in the coach-client relationship are: a) the ability to listen, b) the ability to empathize, c) and the ability to recognize the root causes of problems so as to facilitate the development of appropriate goals for the client (O’Broin & Palmer, 2006). These competencies are most essential for a number of reasons: first, the coach must be able to listen to what the client is saying—this is the only way to truly begin to understand the issues that the client is having. A coach who simply enters into a coach-client relationship based on presumptions and assumptions will not be effective at addressing the problems that are unique to the particular client. Second, the coach has to be able to empathize—i.e., to understand in a deep-down way the issues that the client is having. This means the coach can put himself in the client’s shoes and see things as the client sees them, which helps to better understand the problem so that formulating a solution can be possible. Third, the coach has to be able to see below the symptoms or surface problems to the underlying issues that are the ultimate cause of the problem. If things are only addressed on the surface, nothing will improve. The ultimate source of the issue has to be addressed underneath everything that is happening for any real or lasting improvement to take effect so that the organization has a fighting chance going forward.
2
Evaluation assessments and tools that would be used to identify a client’s development needs could include a basic needs assessment, which could include surveying the client with a questionnaire, conducting an interview with a focus group, using existing data sources if available and identifying the client’s stated goals. These tools are available to the coach to help ensure that multiple data sources are used to confirm that the right issues are identified and treated.
The first, which would be surveying the client with a questionnaire, would consist of asking the client a list of pre-piloted questions that will help the organization to identify the clients’s needs. The standard measure would be something like a Likert scale tool, with responses ranging from 1 to 5, indicating agreement or lack of agreement with the stated assertion in the questionnaire. This would give the coach a way to quantify the client’s needs and assess them.
The second, which would be conducting an interview with a focus group, would involve looking at what the needs in an organization are from the perspectives of role players and stakeholders. Overall they could provide deep qualitative data to help identify what issues need to be brought to the fore. Focus groups allow for important themes to emerge during the interview process.
The third, which would be using existing data sources, such as performance reports, sales, etc., and aligning them with the client’s goals, would allow the coach to see whether the client is on task to achieve the goals according to the data sources available. For instance, if one of the goals of the client is to achieve a certain revenue, sales data would be helpful and performance data could show where the greatest initiative is being shown in the workforce.
References
O’Broin, A., & Palmer, S. (2006). The coach-client relationship and contributions made
by the coach in improving coaching outcome. The Coaching Psychologist, 2(2), 16-20.
Salvovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence: Theory finding, and
implications. Psychological Inquiry, 15, 197-215.
Tuckman, B. W., & Jensen, M. A. C. (1977). Stages of small-group development
revisited. Group & Organization Studies, 2(4), 419-427.