039: Ruth Wageman, PhD: Reflections on the Theory, Research and Practice of Team Coaching

Join Dr. Krister Lowe and today’s special guest Dr. Ruth Wageman--a leading scholar and practitioner in the area of team coaching. Dr. Wageman is Director at ReThink Health and an Associate in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. She specializes in the field of Organizational Behavior, studying and teaching the design and leadership of task performing teams. Professor Wageman studies the conditions under which teams are able to accomplish collective purposes and to grow in capability over time. Her work with teams places a particular emphasis on self-governing teams, especially those with complex problem-solving and social change purposes. Her current work focuses on enabling the development of collaborative leadership capacity, especially that of multi-stakeholder groups working to transform regional health systems. With Richard Hackman and Erin Lehman, she designed the Team Diagnostic Survey, an instrument that assesses the effectiveness of teams and that is used both for scholarly research and to guide effective leadership of teams. Selected publications include: “Creating Great Leadership Teams for Complex Problems,” “The changing ecology of teams: New directions for teams research,” with Heidi Gardner and Mark Mortensen, “Senior Leadership Teams: What it Takes to Make Them Great,” with Debra A. Nunes, James Burruss, and Richard Hackman; “Asking the Right Questions about Leadership,” American Psychologist; “As the twig is bent: The effects of shared values on emergent interdependence in teams” with Fred Gordon, Organization Science; “A theory of team coaching,” with Hackman, Academy of Management Review; “Team Diagnostic Survey: Development of an Instrument,” with Hackman and Lehman, Journal of Applied Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Wageman received her Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Joint Doctoral Program in Organizational Behavior in 1993. She received her BA in Psychology from Columbia University in 1987, and returned there to join the faculty of the Graduate School of Business, making her the first female alum of Columbia College to join Columbia’s faculty. She joined the faculty of the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in 2000, and returned to Harvard in 2006. She joined ReThink Health, an Initiative of the Fannie E. Rippel Foundation, as its Director of Research in 2009.

In this episode of The Team Coaching Zone Podcast, Dr. Wageman shares her journey into becoming a leading scholar in the area of teams and team coaching. She also provides an overview of a number of her books and articles that will be of particular interest to team coaches. Additional themes covered in the episode include: the key factors that contribute to team effectiveness; the role of compelling purpose, task requirements, and structure in teams; the different types and timing of team coaching interventions; the leader as team coach vs. using external team coaches; the Team Diagnostic Survey; leadership teams; multi-stakeholder teams, stewardship teams and more. She also shares some reflections on her mentor and colleague the late Dr. Richard Hackman. Finally Dr. Wageman discusses her recent work creating systemic change in regional healthcare systems through her work as a Director at ReThink Health--an initiative of the Fannie E. Rippel Foundation.

This episode is a priceless opportunity for team coaches to learn from a world-class scholar, a leading researcher and an early pioneer in the field of team coaching. It is an episode you will surely not want to miss!