What lies beneath the team
Groupthink, team dynamics and psychodynamic team coaching.
A half day on what lies beneath the team: groupthink and dissent, team conflict, hidden dynamics, the leader's roles, team coaching and learning, and Tavistock and systemic team coaching.
- Level
- Explore
- Learning time
- 5 hours
- Where
- Leading people
- Price
- £129
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Senior leaders, team leaders, coaches and OD practitioners across public service and voluntary organisations
Overview
Capable, well-intentioned teams still make poor decisions together, and most team failures are quiet ones. This half day completes the Immerse More than the sum of its parts and begins with Irving Janis's groupthink, the Abilene paradox and Gary Klein's premortem, then conflict in teams and the East Kent maternity investigation. It explores hidden dynamics from Bion's basic assumptions to Isabel Menzies Lyth's social defences, and the leader as designer, coach and member. Team coaching follows, with Hackman and Wageman on timing, Hawkins's five disciplines and the After Action Review. It rounds off with the Tavistock tradition of systems-psychodynamic coaching and with systemic team coaching.
Aims
Above all, it seeks to help leaders and coaches see beneath a team's task to the anxieties and assumptions shaping it, design dissent into decisions so the quiet doubts are heard, and coach the team as a whole system rather than as a collection of individuals.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Design dissent into team decisions using the premortem and an understanding of groupthink and the Abilene paradox.
- Diagnose the anxiety beneath a team's task using Bion's basic assumptions and Menzies Lyth's social defences.
- Lead team coaching and debriefs that treat the team as a whole, drawing on Hawkins's five disciplines and the Tavistock tradition.
What you'll develop
Across this Explore, you will develop the ability to:
- Identify Janis's symptoms of groupthink and explain why intelligence offers no protection against it.
- Distinguish task, relationship and process conflict and explain what the meta-analyses say about each.
- Identify Bion's basic assumptions of dependency, fight-flight and pairing when they appear in a group.
- Use the functional team leadership model to identify which leadership functions your team is missing.
- Distinguish group coaching from team coaching and explain why design comes before coaching.
- Describe Edmondson's team learning behaviours and West's team reflexivity cycle.
- Describe Bion's three basic assumptions and recognise them in groups and in the coaching relationship.
- Distinguish individual, team, group and systemic coaching and choose where the most useful leverage lies.
Built from 8 modules.
5 hours of learning.
- 01Deciding Together: Groupthink and DissentTeam Development38 min
- 02Conflict in TeamsTeam Development39 min
- 03When Teams Go Wrong: Hidden DynamicsTeam Development37 min
- 04Leading Teams: Designer, Coach and MemberTeam Development39 min
- 05Team CoachingTeam Development37 min
- 06Team Learning, Reflexivity and DebriefsTeam Development37 min
- 07The Tavistock Tradition: Systems-Psychodynamic CoachingCoaching and Mentoring38 min
- 08Systemic, Team and Group CoachingCoaching and Mentoring37 min