Achieving team presence: A Gestalt approach to coaching multi-disciplinary teams

This chapter begins by exploring the benefits and challenges of coaching multi-disciplinary teams particularly in the context of a business wide organisational development intervention. It first provides an overview of the increasing importance of multi-disciplinary teams to enable organisations to respond flexibly and innovatively to their environment. The key ability to work across disciplines or functions does not however come easily and offers a number of coaching challenges. To tackle these, the chapter offers a relational and field-theoretical Gestalt framework that supports coaching of multi-disciplinary teams by focusing on the self, other and situation dimensions of these teams. It argues that a key aim of a Gestalt approach to team coaching is that of developing the team's presence where presence is defined as "energetic availability and fluid responsiveness". The chapter provides two case studies to illustrate the work. It ends with practical reflections on the case studies, emphasising the benefits or applying a Gestalt approach to this work. A comment by Rick Maurer follows the chapter.