Coaching and team coaching are gaining ever more popularity within the context of organizations’ learning and development initiatives. The days of ’someone smart will come and tell us what to do’ are a phenomena of the past: a solution to a problem is always best searched for within the minds of the problem owners. Hence, the essence of coaching is to help our client with the right questions and external perspectives to enable them to come up with their own best solutions. The goal and objective of team coaching is to enable a team to work on its own topics of interest through a team coach, who sees the dynamics of the team and relationships among the team’s members, making them think about things that they usually wouldn’t notice in and about themselves.

Action oriented team coaching adds another tweak to the above: team members can work in an accepting, safe space with elements of drama therapy, where situations, relationships and connections come alive and make themselves clearly visible for any topic’s owner, as well as for the team itself.

Watson’s action-oriented and drama-therapy-based Team Coaching is unique in the sense that instead of the usual cognitive, ‘think-and-speak’ method, it focuses on seeing everything ‘in action’: e.g. how does any given topic, notion, relationship or thought show on a stage that we create within the room, with the help of the group members. We can create any situation and difficulty or road-block easily with a vast toolkit that allow participants to see the heart of the matter(s) and go down deep, quickly. This in turn allows a much speedier way to finding the right solutions. And of course, there is a cognitive level within all this, to make it easy to understand what participants experienced with dramatic elements.

As a team coach, I haven’t met anyone yet, who hasn’t given praise to this action-oriented coaching method. Why? Because results and ’aha’-experiences come about quickly for the vast majority of participants experiencing this on themselves.

Stepping into another person’s world with role-switching; seeing ourselves with the mirror-technique; giving an ’internal voice’ to a team member in a given situation; seeing some of the resources I have (…which I haven’t even thought about as being available to me); or simply facing something holding me back from reaching a goal or doing something: many many different tools that make participants appreciate action oriented team coaching for what it is. Team members become engaged and able to see situations, people or more abstract notions with the help of drama therapy-based elements, because it comes alive on the ’stage’.

The whole method is highly spontaneous and creative – and perhaps this is the very aspect (of it) that makes participants inspired to dare to express themselves, or make themselves represent ’stress’, ’ambition’, ’courage’ or ’motivation’ (among many other attributes) in another team member’s life. These may, indeed sound strange at first, but participants quickly get to like playing this way.

Watson’s action oriented method – as seen from the above – is a very rich toolkit. A team that is brave enough to begin this journey may look forward to great rewards: their relationships with each other may gain new heights; their connection to each other and to their topics may become clearly visible; and as individuals, they are likely to perform better within the team, in part thanks to some serious self-awareness work (leading to an overall improvement in team performance).

The magic happens when we take action.