Across the next three episodes, Katie talks with team coach and CRR faculty member Martin Klaver about the team coach approach. In episode 1, Katie and Martin discuss what it means to build a successful team coaching business. Across the conversation they discuss:
Martin Klaver is an experienced team coach and faculty member at CRR Global. He is enthusiastic about group dynamics and believes guiding systems in these dynamics and making patterns and potential aware is beautiful and rewarding work. Martin designs and supervises many Management Development processes where personal development (IQ and EQ), relationships with others (SQ) and relationships with systems (RSI) are fundamental. Fun, experimental and essence are themes that you can recognize in his methods.
Martin has a master’s degree in Business Administration and extensive work experience in HR and organizational development at various organizations. Based in the Netherlands, Martin facilitates with his team a diversity of organizations and leaders in their development. The purpose of his company is to bring more balance in the world. They focus to create an atmosphere of possibility in which the system can evolve into what is needed.
For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to build stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time
We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity to nature, to the larger whole.
Across the next three episodes, Katie talks with team coach and CRR faculty member Martin Klaver about the team coach approach. In episode 1, Katie and Martin discuss what it means to build a successful team coaching business. Across the conversation they discuss:
Martin Klaver is an experienced team coach and faculty member at CRR Global. He is enthusiastic about group dynamics and believes guiding systems in these dynamics and making patterns and potential aware is beautiful and rewarding work. Martin designs and supervises many Management Development processes where personal development (IQ and EQ), relationships with others (SQ) and relationships with systems (RSI) are fundamental. Fun, experimental and essence are themes that you can recognize in his methods.
Martin has a master’s degree in Business Administration and extensive work experience in HR and organizational development at various organizations. Based in the Netherlands, Martin facilitates with his team a diversity of organizations and leaders in their development. The purpose of his company is to bring more balance in the world. They focus to create an atmosphere of possibility in which the system can evolve into what is needed.
For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to build stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time
We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity to nature, to the larger whole.
Key
KC – Katie Churchman
MK – Martin Klaver
[Intro 00:00 – 00:06]
KC – Hello and welcome back to the Relationship Matters podcast. We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity, to nature, to the larger whole. I’m your host, Katie Churchman, and across the next three episodes I’m talking with team coach and CRR faculty member Martin Klaver about the team coach approach. In episode one we discuss what it means to build a successful team coaching business. Across the conversation we discuss defining what success might look like for your business and aligning your energy around those goals; acting with integrity and being at choice; Reframing team coaching as a process, not a product: it’s not something you sell; it’s a relationship you build; and the importance of continually applying the team coach approach to your own business. Martin Klaver is an experienced team coach and faculty member at CRR Global. He is enthusiastic about group dynamics and believes guiding systems in these dynamics and making patterns and potential aware is beautiful and rewarding work. Martin designs and supervises many Management Development processes where personal development , relationships with others and relationships with systems are fundamental. Fun, experimental and essence are themes that you can recognize in his methods. Martin has a master’s degree in Business Administration and extensive work experience in HR and organizational development at various organizations. Based in the Netherlands, Martin facilitates with his team a diversity of organizations and leaders in their development. The purpose of his company is to bring more balance in the world. They focus to create an atmosphere of possibility in which the system can evolve into what is needed. So without further ado I bring you Martin Klaver, talking about the team coach approach, part one: defining success.
KC – Martin, welcome to the Relationship Matters podcast, I’m very excited to have you on the show for the next three episodes.
MK – Thank you, I’m excited to be here Katie.
KC – Yes. And today we’re talking about the team coach approach, well that’s going to be our theme for the next three episodes, and specifically today we’re starting with building a successful business around team coaching. You have a very successful business and I’m curious about your process in terms of building this and also maintaining that.
MK – Yeah. So the first thing that comes up with me is what is successful? How it’s interesting that someone else says you have a very successful business. Why? How do we know that we have a successful business? And I think that’s really, for me, the first thing to start with. So what makes a business successful for you? And for me, the business that I jave with the partner, it is successful because we find it both very important to contribute and we cannot do that alone, so our client decides if we contribute, yes or no. We can contribute, but we get a responsive feedback from the client, of course. So I think that’s one of the important ones. Another one really important for us is to be successful is that work has to be a right balance with our personal lives and I think also there are parts of while we are successful, I want to have some energy to have flung from it. Put energy in it but I really wanna get energy back from the work that I’ve done and from the business that I work with. So I think those are three main things, for me, if I have a successful business yes or no. And money, I think it’s on six, seven, place six/seven, you know, that’s not the main thing. I think it's also good to know that maybe there’s a different way of a lot of organizations define success. I think you get more representative with the amount of money that they make, or the amount of clients that they have or whatever and that’s good too. So it’s not a wrong or right but it it’s good for people if they listening is ok, where does the successful come from? It's a starting point to define why, why am I in business? What do I want to get out of it? And from there on it’s more how we do it.
KC – I love that. Defining what success looks like for your team as a team coaching company, aligning around that, because I’m sure it’s very easy, particularly early on when you’re setting up a business, to get stuck in those traps of oh, I haven’t got enough clients or I’m not making enough money, but maybe actually you’re satisfying your version of success – you’re just not seeing that. And so you’re really practicing, I guess, what you preach in terms of the team coaching approach then that you take to your client as well.
MK – Yeah, I think that’s also the energy that they feel, so if the client comes to us and we’re in a conversation, in the first conversations that we’re having and we feel that we don’t contribute to something, we don’t accept the assignment, so we maybe someone else is good for you, not us. So it really helps also to get the clients that we want to work with and be successful in it. If we feel that ok, this is like a process that we don’t get any energy off it, maybe we shouldn’t take it on. Those kinds of questions is really helpful and now it’s easy, I have also to say now it’s easy, more easy because I have my business for like almost 10 years now, it’s also a growing process. If I’m honest it’s not the way that we started immediately. I wish we did, then we wouldn’t have had a lot of clients or assignemnts that took a lot of energy or, you know, maybe it paid well but ah no, it wasn’t great or, I think that’s a learning point for now and I think for a couple of years and ah, that really feels good. And I think also because it feels good that has the same effect on the client, they feel it too. They feel like ok, these guys or whatever who are sitting in front of them, they know what they’re doing, it feels right. You know, it’s like creating that emotional field together and spreading the emotional field to the client. And that helps for, to get clients and to get assignments.
KC – There’s a strong sense of integrity and I wonder if the work comes easier when you’re trusting in that, that sense of who you are as a company. Has that been the case for you?
MK – Yes, I think we’ve never been, we’ve never been worried about the amount of clients. I think we have always been in a position where we have more questions about clients than we could say yes to. And there is a little bit of a fluctuation in it, of course, but we’ve never been out of clients or really worried about… well, we worry about it, but if we look back we never had to worry about it.
KC – The point you made before about how we’re at choice as well when it’s our business, particularly when we’re starting up, we can chose as well who we engage with and if that’s going against, perhaps, our company values, we can turn it down, we don’t have to say yes to everything. I so often come back to the power of a positive no because it’s hard, early on, to say no to things.
MK – Exactly, early on. Of course. And we’ve said yes to some clients that now we’d have said no to. I think that’s also good, it’s not a bad thing to the learning process when you start off a business. Now I’m very clear when we are successful as a business, well we weren’t so clear when we started off. So that’s also the learning process when you start off in business. It’s like the high dream that in ORSC we talk about, we have a high dream and when you start off you have like, it’s not so clear what the high dream is. So by learning, by doing, by having clients that don’t work with you very well or they’re not so successful, that’s also information about what a high dream is or isn’t.
KC – So you didn’t have it completely worked out 10 years ago?
MK – No, no.
KC – Ok, that’s very reassuring for me and I’m sure many of our listeners who are still trying to work out what’s their niche within this coaching market, even within team coaching there’s real breadth.
MK – Yeah. And it shifts a little bit. So, for example, I think for now 80% of what we’re doing is team facilitation, so really the ORSC work in that way. And that wasn’t the percentage that we started off with. I think it was like 50%, we did some training, individual coaching with it, but then we found out that well, what we feel that we can contribute with or that we can happy to do, we get energy off, was the team coaching. So then, and we knew if we get a nice training question and we could give the training with good money, great. But if we said yeah, that wouldn’t be, we could only spend the time on one thing, so by saying yes to that we don’t all, not all create the space for the team coaching that we really wanted to build. So by learning and doing that we created more the time and space also for that high dream, to really become visible and become reality.
KC – Yeah, I love the space for team coaching because I think it’s still very misunderstood and so often I get requests for team coaching and really what they’re asking for is training, yeah. And so how do you go about, because I know you have a marketing background as well, so I wonder how you hold the team coaching approach from your company and honor that so that people don’t end up thinking they’re getting one thing and then signing up for something else.
MK – Yeah. I think it’s, the intake is important. When we first meet the client what is the questions, what are they looking for? But we also have, after two three years we said a couple of things about the way we work and one that really points to this one is we feel that we are responsible for the process but you are from the content. So we don’t decide anything that you should do, we don’t tell, we guide you, and I feel that is a strong difference between training and team coaching. Training is more like we have content and we want to deliver you the content. Whatever the content is, you know. And yes, it’s still a team process if you do a training with a team but you still, as trainers, facilitate, decide what the content is. For me, team facilitation is no, that all the content belongs to the team, not to us. We don’t make any decisions around that. We can maybe do some suggestions or something like that but it’s for the team. I also notice whenever, for example, my background is a little bit of marketing but also with HR and we would work with teams of HR, sometimes I get triggered about the content because I notice stuff! And yes I step into the trap and talk with them with the content. And I always feel that when I do it it’s, I take a little bit of their responsibility and ownership away from them because my ownership comes in, of the content, of what they should do. But I will be leaving again. So, you know, it’s really them, so that is for me a learning point, I’ll just step into that one. But that is for me a very important distinction between training or team facilitation.
KC – Trusting the team wisdom – do you feel that’s what makes team coaching so important in this day and age and why perhaps you focus on that as opposed to team training as a company?
MK – Yeah, for me it has to do with responsibility. They own the ship of what you want, what you want to be happening. I don’t know the right words now, but it’s taking responsibility for what you want. I think training is very good if you really want to practice, you know, learn a new muscle. Not so much team coaching. And there is also a great area in it, because we speak a lot of training some muscles as team facilitation and the relation system intelligence, so there is some training aspects in it of course. But the main thing is ownership of the team, from my perspective. And so where we have training there’s a lot of ok, how to, how to, and of course there is teams processes going on, and with team facilitation we’re like, I am facilitating a team process and of course there’s a little bit training. There’s always a little bit of training some skills or whatever.
KC – But the purpose of it or the place you come back to is always and what’s the team going to do with this now?
MK – And most of the time when you do that it is, it really brings up the issue in the team. For example how do we take responsibility for what we want? No, you cannot look at me because I’m not gonna tell you. I can’t help you facilitate this process that you’re going through, but I will tell you, you know, as a trainer or a consultant, yes you have a voice of course, but for me not as a team facilitator. At least my definition of it.
KC – Yeah, this is where it gets tricky though because I think for those of us who’ve been through team coaching, training, and experience team coaching, we get it, but it’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been through the process so how would you go about introducing this to new clients starting that understanding of it?
MK – If we are able to we’re not starting off with introducing this. We’re starting off with what is going on with the team. This morning I had a conversation, we’ve just finished facilitating a team process has been introduced by the director, and now we’ve talked to the leader of the team and she was, she had a lot of questions. And what we did, we didn’t answer those questions because then it’s like ok, now we’re going to answer everything that goes, we have to answer something that you’ve made up in your mind about it, you know, so we just asked some questions first about the team, and if you would have a session what would you wanna get out of it and so what can we contribute, stuff like that. And after that, then we use that information to give the answers that also the assumptions that was going on, in this case her mind. And for me it’s the difference between trying to sell it and just trying to maybe tell it how it works, or, you know, making it a little bit more visible and real.
KC – You said offline, just before we started recording, that you don’t believe team coaching is so much a product which I thought was really interesting because that, in terms of sales, makes it quite hard to sell. And so, to your point, maybe we don’t try and sell it as a product at all, but rather as a process would you say?
MK – I think more selling like a process than a product, yeah. That’s more the case, yeah.
KC – And I’m curious about the way you have a team and a business partner and are you doing this work quite a lot amongst yourselves? So in terms of the team coaching approach you’re out there in the world working with other teams, but do you try and bring a lot of what you’re teaching into your team too?
MK – Yeah we try to apply everything on our own team. That’s interesting because sometimes we feel the difficulty of it, you know, yeah. I think it works really well, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t take an effort.
KC – That must be humbling?
MK – And, yeah, it is sometimes difficult. It is easier just to say how things should be done, you know, in my mind, it’s faster. But I know if I do that then no, it won’t help the process of my company, so ok, wait Martin, I have a voice, I need to listen to all the other voices also, you know. And I don’t have to do everything with the, you know, after that you decide with each other what to do and yeah, sometimes me or my business partner we decide and that’s also ok for the role that we’re having in the company, yeah, just try to apply it. So I think also, the tool that we use the most is the DTA from ORSC, the design team alliance. We use it with our clients always but we use it also always on ourselves. The struggle for me is sometimes it takes time, it feels that it takes time because you really want to go to the content and let’s go on, afterwards is always the best way and I sometimes need to be reminded of that. Depending on the role that I’m having. It’s easier when I’m facilitating a team to remind me of that than when I’m in the role in my own company, as an owner, a co-owner.
KC – Oh absolutely. Yeah. I don’t think this work ever becomes sort of default or autopilot, it’s something that we need to constantly practice and remind ourselves of.
MK – Yes, and if I’m honest, that’s also the irritating part of this work for me. Yeah, because you have, but that’s relationship and we know, we’re being taught about that, it constantly needs attention. But it does, sometimes, ok, yep. But I think also this is a way of, I love that your question goes in this direction because for me, it also, I think also this is one of the way that I feel we are, in our terms successful with my company. That we really apply everything to ourselves. We try too, at least. You know, and not everything goes well or is great or is successful in a way but that’s ok, you know, that is fine. But I really truly feel that it has an impact on clients and I think that’s also why a lot of clients want to work with us, we do what we’re saying and you know, it’s in line with everything. At least I hope so. Well that’s the reaction I get from clients. It’s sometimes difficult to say about your own company I feel but that’s what we’re getting from clients.
KC – Well I’m sensing a system in a constant state of emergence, right? It’s not something we get right, we practice what we preach but it doesn’t mean we get it right and arrive and then we don’t have to keep trying, and I sense there’s sort of energetically you’re aligned as a company.
MK – Because of the DTA. That makes us energetically aligned.
KC – Ok. So, one final question around this, and this has gone in quite a different direction from what I was expecting which is what I love about these podcasts. In terms of someone trying to set up a team coaching business, what would be your number one piece of advice for them right now?
MK – Number one piece of advice. I think at first focus on self. So it’s about exploring the different aspects in self around how do I feel around team coaching? You know, where is my strength? Where is a little bit where I show my weaknesses or, hmm, what is the area I’m becoming enthusiastic of or, this a little bit more I fear. You know, be very curious about all those things, I would say. There’s the same thing about what we’re teaching in ORSC about relationships. For a, first focus on selves and the more you are aware of selves and all the aspects of it, the more you are able to step into right relationship with someone else, or not, you know, or decide not to step into the relationship because you know, some aspect may be, you don’t want that or whatever. So I think that’s really important, and also just to acknowledge that there is a process when you start. Really take time on spending time on that part when you start. And it’s ok and you probably don’t get it right, yeah.
KC – I think I’m coming away with the fact that this is a relationship, it’s a two way street with the client and it’s not just about hopefully the client picks me, it’s very much about am I going to choose, are they aligned with me too? And that helps me to see that relationship dance a lot more than, perhaps, so often we’re quite the one way street approach to business.
MK – Yeah. And for me it’s about, it’s not a product, you know, and if the clients are in the content, they’re repones to the client and you’re the process, that’s working together. You need each other. Well it’s not like I’m sending you here, here you go and bye bye, no, it’s, you’re stepping into a process with each other.
KC – So it’s not selling a product at all, it’s actually building a relationship in itself and doing the work in that way.
MK – Yeah.
KC – Thank you so much, Martin, for this first of three fascinating conversations. I look forward to continuing on with you next time.
MK – Yeah, thank you, me too.
[Music outro begins 21:29]
KC – A huge thanks to Martin for that really useful conversation. Here are my key takeaways. As a business it can be hugely helpful to spend time defining what success looks like for you. This can help you to get clear on your goals so that you stay aligned with your business values and lead with more intentionality. It’s important to define the difference between team training and team coaching. The key difference is taking responsibility for what you want. Training is great for learning how to work a new muscle, but the agenda is designed by someone on the outside. Whereas, in team coaching, the team owns the content. They decide on the agenda and take responsibility for what they want. As team coaches it is important to apply the tools to ourselves, however practicing what we preach can be a humbling process. Whilst it can be easier for one person to say how things should be done, it’s not necessarily harnessing the power of the team’s intelligence. Going slow upfront, for example through designing a team alliance, may feel time consuming in the short term, but it helps us to work so much more effectively in the long run. And finally, we never arrive with our relationships. They require constant attention. Thank you for listening to the Relationship Matters podcast. If you enjoyed this episode please share it with your colleagues and friends so that we can continue to spread these ideas across the globe, and if you haven’t already, do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. And for more information on the ORSC courses please visit CRRGlobal.com. For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time. We believe Relationship Matters from humanity to nature to the larger whole.
[Outro 23:45 – end]