065: Robert Bier: Making Team Coaching Sticky, Simple and Fun

How can you make team coaching as simple, sticky and fun as possible?  And why is that critically important? Tune in to this week's episode of The Team Coaching Zone Podcast with Rob Bier--Founder of 6:30 Partners and Executive and Team Coach--to find out. 

Rob Bier has coached full-time for seven years. His background makes him equally comfortable working with the soft and the hard sides of business and people challenges. Prior to becoming a coach Rob served as founder and CEO of two private equity-backed companies in financial services, and previous to that he was a partner in Monitor Group, the strategy consulting firm.

Rob studied coaching with Professor Chris Argyris of the Harvard Business School, at the Coaches Training Institute, and with Nancy Kline of Time to Think. He has an engineering degree from Stanford University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

In this podcast episode, Rob shares his journey from graduate school in the United States, to working with the Monitor Group in the UK, to building his own leadership team in a financial services company that he started in the Netherlands, to moving to Singapore and establishing 6:30 Partners. 

Themes explored in the podcast include: connecting team coaching to business performance; team coaching in Asia; three guiding principles for team coaching: simplicity, stickiness and fun; the positivity-productivity framework by Team Coaching International; the white-water rafting metaphor of team coaching; and using “The Thinking Environment” from Nancy Kline to create psychological safety and surface hidden conflict.

Rob shares two stories from his team coaching practice: a success story with the leadership team of a tech startup; and a semi-failure that surfaced conflict too quickly.  He also discusses his thoughts on the future of team coaching and shares a number of tips and resources including: "Time to Think" by Nancy Kline; use of the VoxVote app; Patrick Lencioni's books The 5 Dysfunctions and The Advantage, and more.  He also telegraphs his own book, "The Big Ride," which will be coming out in 2017.

This is a rich episode that all new as well as experienced team coaches will not want to miss!  Tune in today to begin taking your team coaching practice to the next level!