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The ICF Team Competencies

The building blocks for effective coaching. Masterful Coaches will use these competencies to make the most of team coaching opportunities.

team coaching conversation
Team

The Team competencies Extend the Impact of your Coaching.

The International Coaching Federation envisions these team coaching competencies as an extension of the individual competencies.

These competencies work in tandem with the individual coaching competencies to support effective team coaching.

You’ll notice similarity in language to extend and maximize impact.

Why the Competencies Matter

Developing the Team Coaching Competencies.

The ICF Research Department worked with an outside research firm and a group of subject matter experts from across the team coaching domain. This team included Karl Van Hoey, Katerina Kanelidou, and Jonathan Reitz.

The work group focused on a systemic process to develop the Team Coaching Competencies.

  • A comprehensive literature review
  • Task and KSAO workshops
  • Semi-structured interviews
  • A global survey to determine the importance of specific Team Coaching tasks and KSAOs and their relationship to facilitation
  • Competency model workshops to review the job analysis data
working team

An Introduction to the International Coaching Federation’s approach to Team Coaching…

Due to the desire for teams to perform well, consistently and over a long period of time, ongoing team development is necessary. As a result, team coaching is growing rapidly. Team coaching is an experience that allows a team to work towards sustainable results and ongoing development. It is becoming an increasingly important intervention in corporate environments as high team performance requires aligning toward goals, remaining innovative, and adapting quickly to internal and external changes. Team coaching exists under this umbrella of team development, along with the following modalities: team building, team training, team consulting, team mentoring, team facilitation, and team coaching. These modalities are further compared in Figure 1.

To develop a set of team coaching competencies, ICF designed a rigorous, evidence-based research project. The aim of this study was to determine which Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, and Other characteristics (KSAO) team coaches use in addition to the ICF Core Competencies. The following activities were undertaken:

• A comprehensive literature review,

• Development of team coaching critical incidents,

• Task, and KSAO virtual workshops to garner an understanding of the experience of team coaching and how it differs from one-to-one coaching,

• Semi-structured interviews to understand how team coaches experience coaching engagements and what team coaching means to them as a profession,

• A global survey to determine the importance of specific team coaching tasks and KAOs and their relationship to facilitation, and

• Competency model workshops to review all of the job analysis data.