Peter Hawkins, in his book, Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership, describes five disciplines that support a team coach to focus on the multiple relationships of the team. These relationships include the internal relationship among team members and the external relationship between the team as an entity and their stakeholders.

The Five disciplines are:

• Commissioning and re-commissioning
• Clarifying
• Co-creation
• Connecting
• The core learning

Commissioning includes a clear purpose and defined success criteria. A good commission will include targets, resources information, learning and development, feedback, and technical and process assistance.

Clarifying is an internal process and refers to its collective endeavor. Clarifying includes purpose, strategic goals and objectives, core values, vision for success, agreed ways of working, roles and expectations, and key performance objectives and indicators.

Co-creating means that the team constantly attends to how they creatively work together. Team members notice when they are synergistically working together and how they are limiting themselves. They develop processes for meetings and for engagement outside meetings and includes growing their collective capacity to handle conflict in service of the greater system.

Connecting includes how the team works together and also moves the boundaries outside of the team to include critical stakeholders.

Core learning is the place where the team stand back, reflect on their own performance and processes, and consolidate their learning. Successful teams pay attention to team member well-being and long-term team viability by ensuring:

• social support
• team conflict resolution
• support for team members’ learning and development
• positive team climate

Which of these five disciplines are evident in your team or teams you coach?

What, if anything, is missing?

What is the impact of one or more of these five disciplines being absent?

How will you become more intentional about including each of the five disciplines?