# Team coaching frameworks

Depth for team mode. Pairs with team_mode_guardrails.md (which governs how
individuals may be referred to) and session_arc_templates.md (the facilitation
arc).

## Hawkins' Five Disciplines (the five Cs)

A systemic model of what high-performing teams attend to. Use it as the backbone
for team development content and the facilitation arc.

1. **Commissioning.** The team's mandate from its stakeholders: why it exists, what
   it is chartered to deliver, and the success criteria set partly from outside.
2. **Clarifying.** The team's own clarity on purpose, goals, roles, values, and how
   it makes decisions. Internal alignment.
3. **Co-creating.** How the team actually works together day to day: collaboration,
   collective strengths, friction, and complementary pairings.
4. **Connecting.** How the team engages its wider stakeholder system: customers,
   partners, the rest of the organization.
5. **Core Learning.** How the team reflects, learns, and improves over time; its
   growth mindset and feedback rhythm.

A team guide should touch all five, but weight Co-creating and Core Learning, since
those are where assessment-informed team development has most traction.

## Psychological safety (Edmondson)

- Definition: a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking;
  members can raise concerns, admit mistakes, and ask for help without fear of
  humiliation or punishment.
- Evidence: strongest single factor in Google's Project Aristotle; but it tends to
  work indirectly, through team learning behavior and team efficacy, rather than
  directly on performance. It is the engine, not the fuel.
- It is not comfort or consensus. It enables productive conflict: surfacing
  problems and disagreeing constructively.
- How to build it in a session: the facilitator models fallibility and curiosity,
  frames the work as learning, sets explicit norms, invites quieter voices, and
  makes clear no individual is being evaluated in front of the group. Open with
  collective strengths before any friction discussion.

## Stages of team development (Tuckman, used lightly)

Forming, storming, norming, performing. Useful as shared language for where a team
is, not as a rigid diagnosis. A team in storming needs safety and clarifying; a
performing team benefits more from core-learning and stretch.

## Team-level interpretation discipline

- Describe the team's collective makeup as a distribution, not a verdict on
  anyone: where it has dense coverage (for example structure, pace) and where it
  has thinner natural coverage (for example reflection, external relationship
  building).
- Frame thin coverage as a development opportunity for the team, never as a named
  person's deficiency.
- Complementary pairings are mutual: state what each party gains.
- Keep the show/infer discipline: what the profiles show at the aggregate level vs
  what the facilitator infers about likely interaction patterns.

## Measurement for teams

- A short psychological safety pulse (a few items, repeated) is the most defensible
  recurring measure.
- Track whether the agreed team experiments were run and what was learned, not just
  outcomes.
- Re-run a coverage map or pace audit at a later checkpoint to make change visible.
- State team-level claims with humility: the team-coaching evidence base is younger
  than the individual-coaching one.
