My co-coach is messing up! What do I do?

Picture the following scenario (yes, it really happened to me): I was facilitating a workshop with two other coaches for a large team. We had agreed on the goal, the methodology, the structure, who would do what and had created a very nice spreadsheet clarifying as much as possible before. The topic was something like: “Working smarter, not harder” and we had integrated fun exercises into the team coaching for the team to experience their working together in a relaxed way (maybe veering into team training). The team coaching was very spacious to support the atmosphere of lightness, so we stopped early for lunch. One of the team coaches was a specialist in health coaching and instead of letting people go for lunch early, he started a 15-minute speech on why it was important to have a healthy lunch every day. You can imagine my horror. The group was not interested, this was not coaching, basically cringeworthy.

So, what do you do? Your team coaching colleague is basically messing up and you are there to watch the train wreck. You do nothing, smile and try to make your partner look good. Don’t make your team coaching partner loose face in front of the group. Swallow your cringe, think the mantra: “He must have good reasons” two-hundred times a minute and reflect on what happened together in supervision after the team coaching. Nobody is helped if you do it in the team coaching: the team will be disturbed even more than if you let it play out!

Here are some considerations about what to do when you feel your co-coach is messing up.

You might consider how the co-coach’s behavior is impacting the team. If there is not a big impact, do nothing. In the case of the short speech about healthy lunches, this was the best way to go. The team did not mind much, learning about healthy lunches is not detrimental to anyone. The criticism was mainly from my perspective as a coach, not from the team’s perspective as a client.

If there might be a big negative impact, you need to intervene. The best would be if you had clarified how you want to proceed if you or your co-coach disagree with what they are doing in the team coaching session beforehand. In any case, you need to proceed with caution. What you do in your mini-team of co-coaches models team work for the team that you are coaching. Here are some options:

- Step in and ask publicly what the other team coach’s good reasons are: “Ah, this is an interesting idea, could you fill me in what the intention is here, so I know how to support you?” Once you know the intention, you might suggest an alternative course of action: “Would you mind if I shared another way of going about this to offer to the team?” and then let the team decide which way they want to go.

- Ask for a small break: “Before we go into this, I have a few things that I would like to clarify, could we take a small break?” and then discuss the process with the co-coach.

- Share an observation: “I am noticing that some people don’t seem comfortable with this idea, co-coach, should we step back and agree on our process with the team?”

I know this is hard because we all are passionate about what we believe should or should not happen in a team coaching. One of the main challenges is to let go of our ideas of professionalism and acknowledge that there are many ways of engaging with a client that can be helpful. We coaches are notoriously over critical of each other as shown by Myers and Bachkirova in 2020 (Adrian Myers & Tatiana Bachkirova (2020) The Rashomon effect in the perception of coaching sessions and what this means for the evaluation of the quality: a grounded theory study, Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 13:1, 92-105, DOI: 10.1080/17521882.2019.1636840)!

After the team coaching, you can talk about what happened with a supervisor and explore what your ideas were, what you valued about the process, what each of you would have done differently and what ended up serving the team. This discussion can lead to both coaches’ growth and extension of perspective.

If you would like to extend your perspective together with colleagues, please join us for one of our free meetups and exchanges.