It’s hard to imagine anyone who has worked harder than Peter Hawkins to help team coaches race up a steep learning curve to develop a well-grounded, widely educated, evidence-based approach to systemic team coaching. The third edition arrived only three years after the second edition, a generous and timely gift for those called to support collective transformational leadership. 

Well-crafted chapters address high-performing teams, transformational leadership teams, the history and process of team coaching, coaching a variety of types of teams including boards, dangers of team coaching, and advice to the C-suite in developing shared, collective leadership. Hawkins also introduces a new model for our times — ecosystemic team coaching. He provides a map for learning and supervising team coaching, as well as a menu of team needs connected to tools and techniques suited to each need. 

Here’s what Hawkins summarizes on the key performance indicators (KPIs) of transformational teams:

1. The KPIs are collectively created by the team, which everyone in the team fully owns and is committed to and to which they hold each other mutually accountable; 
2. They cannot be achieved by the current way the team and its members currently operate; to be attained it requires the team to change its behaviours, ways of thinking and relating, its ways of partnering internally and externally, and its team processes.

Hawkins shares his description of the ideal team — one we would all love to be on:

1. We know exactly what is required from us.
2. We have a passion about our collective purpose, which we know we can only achieve if we were all working at our best individually and together.
3. We look forward to meeting and there is a keen interest in each other’s successes, setbacks and learning.
4. There is a real sense of partnership, not just among the team members but with the board and stakeholders.
5. The work is an adventure and a classroom, every setback an opportunity for new learning and every challenge a spur to creativity.