Organizing an Effective Group Coaching

Many coaches who’ve been in the business of one-on-one coaching for a while quickly find themselves eager to try their hand at group coaching, and for good reason.

As a coach, group coaching allows you to expand your reach and help more people in less time.

For your clients, it provides an opportunity to connect with others pursuing similar goals and learn from the experiences of like-minded people.

So, if you’ve been thinking about making the move to group coaching, why wait?

In this blog post, we’ll explore a range of impactful techniques developed by expert coaches around the world, which you can use to craft insightful and engaging group sessions for your clients today.

How to Coach in Groups: Tips

Whether you’re working with individuals or in groups, some coaching skills will stay the same. For instance, the ability to stay focused on a client’s goals, maintain flexibility, and practice active listening are critical skills that remain central in any coaching context (Britton, 2009).

Nonetheless, group coaching is its beast, with its own set of critical skills and competencies that a coach must master. Here are three that are arguably among the most important:

1. Ensuring confidentiality
   While important in a one-on-one coaching relationship, communicating expectations about confidentiality is especially critical for all group coaching work. In short, group members should be made aware that “What’s said within the group, stays within the group” (Britton, 2009, p. 73).
2. Crafting opportunities for collaboration
   Effective group coaches are skilled at tapping into the group’s wisdom to drive discussion rather than driving the conversation themselves. Therefore, be intentional about structuring group activities to facilitate peer-to-peer interaction, such as by breaking out into small groups of two to five (Britton, 2009).
3. Combating groupthink with clever questions
   Any form of group discussion, particularly in the context of executive and professional coaching, is vulnerable to a phenomenon known as groupthink. Groupthink refers to “the tendency for cohesive groups to become so concerned about group solidarity that they fail to critically and realistically evaluate their decisions and antecedent assumptions” (Park, 1990, p. 229).

Group coaching seems “en vogue” — it seems that every year, we have a new kid on the block: Working out Loud, Mastermind Groups, Action Learning, Reflecting Teams, Thinking Circles, etc. These are all wonderful models who are all very similar and have a lot of overlap between them. You can do 2 things now: book a two-day workshop on each of them and pay megabucks, or continue reading for our “hot tips” to designing your very own group coaching model.

I probably design my group coaching model for every group coaching job I take, and I even modify the model in partnership with the group as we are working together.

Step 1:

Define the outcome this group is looking for.

• Share best practices
• get regular help from people in a similar situation
• think things through
• move forward and have accountability partners
• reflect on cases / critical instances in their work
• increase the overall performance of the group
• learn coaching skills by participating in the group

Step 2:

Define basic parameters:

• length, duration, and frequency of the group coaching (e.g. every 4 weeks for 3 hours for 6 months), and number of participants
• facilitator engagement: with or without facilitator / start with the facilitator and move to self-organization
• the input of other participants/questions of other participants or a mix thereof
• accountability and tracking progress
• documentation

Step 3:

Design a process that will work (ok, easier said than done) and refine it as you are going along.

Options for the process are:

• Check-in on progress in plenary
• Deciding on the topics/issues that are going to be discussed
• Presentation of the issue by the “case donor” with or without a facilitator
• Goal setting or identification of the question of the “case donor” with or without a facilitator
• Clarification of questions by the group with or without help from the facilitator
• Coaching of the “case donor” by the group or by the facilitator as the group watches
• Group gives a round of appreciation to the “case donor” (what impresses me….)
• Idea collection or brainstorming by the group (verbally or written)
• “Case donor” defines next steps/experiments / what they would like to be held accountable for next time
• Check-out: each person expresses what they learned and what they would like to experiment with
• Documentation: Each person documents themselves or they keep a file of their progress somewhere
• At any point in the process, the “case donor” can be asked to turn their back to the group so as to not react or switch off their video (in zoom)

Here is an example — I will walk you through the steps.

Step 1: What is the group about?

A group of 6 emerging leaders has formed to learn to lead their first team. They would like to support each other and also practice their coaching skills while doing so.

Step 2: What are the options?

Length and duration: The first 100 days as a new leader are most important — so let’s give this group duration of 6 months. They need time to practice and gain experiences between sessions and are busy people — ok, so meeting every 4 weeks sounds good. They are 6 people, and everybody probably has questions to discuss, so 6 times 40 minutes or so, let’s make that a half-day / 4-hour meeting. If that turns out too much or too little, we can adapt.

Facilitator engagement: Since the emerging leaders do not have a lot of experience in facilitation, it is probably best if a facilitator is present for the first couple of meetings until they have gotten the hang of it.

The participants want to learn coaching skills and they want help with their first leadership assignment and the unfamiliar territory they are experiencing. So probably it is a good idea to include some coaching of the “case donor” by the group facilitated and helped by the facilitator.

As they are in a development process together, they will want to have some kind of record of the sessions that they can access afterward: so a joint folder or a “leadership wiki” that they co-create is probably great. Also, it looks like they might benefit from some tracking and joint accountability to make the most out of this process.

Step 3: Design the process

For this group of emerging leaders, we will find a nice snappy name, e.g. “Leader’s Bootcamp” (or whatever fits their culture)

Here we go:

• 1) Welcome
• 2) Check-In and progress made: every leader speaks shortly about what they have learned between sessions and the “case donors” of the last session report on what they experimented with.
• 3) Deciding on the topics/issues that are going to be discussed: Every leader who has a topic presents their issue and the others vote on which issues (maybe 3-4 per session) will be discussed. One of the people whose case is not being discussed will be the record keeper.
• 4) Presentation of the issue by the “case donor”, the facilitator helps the leader to come up with good questions and a great coaching goal (thereby demonstrating coaching skills).
• 5) Clarification questions by the group with help from the facilitator (initially as they might not have a lot of experience with what is a clarification question and what is advice — e.g. “have you tried….” is not a clarification question).
• 6) Coaching of the “case donor” by the group with the facilitator helping the group come up with even better coaching questions (e.g. Group member: “Have you tried…” Facilitator: “How could you rephrase that into a more open question?” Group member: “What have you already tried?”
• 7) Group gives a round of appreciation to the “case donor”. This would be good to create trust and safety.
• 8) “Case donor” defines next steps/experiments / what they would like to be held accountable for next time (I would not ask the group to brainstorm as the first thing people need to do to learn how to coach is tame the advice-monster).
• 9) Repeat with the other topics.
• 10) Check-out: each person expresses what they learned and what they would like to experiment with.
• 11) The record keeper updates the progress log or wiki.

Top 3 Techniques Used by Group Coaches

Besides requiring unique skills and competencies, group coaching also involves different coaching techniques than one-to-one coaching.

For instance, unlike in one-on-one coaching, there is a need to integrate the different perspectives and experiences of group members to make each group member feel listened to and understood.

Here are just three techniques that many group coaches note as being particularly helpful:

• An express sincere belief in those you are coaching

As a group coach, you must check your cynicism and frustration at the door before commencing any group session. Instead, communicate an authentic belief in your group and its capabilities.

For instance, you might express this belief by positioning yourself as an ally in helping the group uncover the knowledge or answers that you know they already possess, rather than as the group’s ‘guide’ (Britton, 2013).

• Brainstorming

The foundational technique of brainstorming has broad applicability in a group coaching context. To brainstorm, simply provide your group members with a question or prompt, invite them to offer responses, and write them down.

Brainstorming, in this context, can be helpful for everything from establishing a coaching focus and anticipating opportunities or challenges to determining a plan of action (Britton, 2013).

• The Delphi technique

Commonly used in professional contexts and as an alternative to brainstorming, the Delphi technique helps groups systematically arrive at a consensus.

In short, the process begins with a facilitator defining a particular problem, and then throughout multiple rounds, group members provide their views on the issue anonymously. The group then undergoes a process of systematically identifying commonalities across these viewpoints (Hsu & Sandford, 2007).

Ideas and Topics for Your Sessions

The themes of group coaching can often be similar to those in one-on-one coaching. However, some topics particularly lend themselves to a group context.

For instance, group coaching is particularly effective in an organizational context when there are opportunities to involve participants at different levels of the organization. This is because involving a diversity of corporate members generates commitment to decisions, as group members feel they have been involved in arriving at those decisions (Locke & Schweiger, 1979).

In this context, the topics for a participative group coaching session might include an idea-generation session surrounding a new product or service, or a session forming part of an appreciative inquiry approach, centered on making better use of a firm’s existing strengths.

Looking beyond an organizational context, coaches working in broader fields, such as wellness or life coaching, might find the following topics particularly well suited to a group coaching model (adapted from Inspire Shift, n.d.):

• Impactful communication
• Networking
• Relationship building
• Branding/marketing
• Conversational skills
• Health and lifestyle change
• Mindfulness
• Parenting

You’ll notice that several of these topics center around interpersonal themes or involve the way a person engages with or presents themselves to others. This is because conducting sessions on interpersonal topics in a group enables members to receive feedback about how they are perceived by their fellow group members and apply their learnings in a practical setting.

10 Questions to Ask Your Clients

Effective group coaches will leverage powerful questions to overcome blocks and help get group members to consider all aspects of a session’s theme.

Here are some examples that can help prompt your group members’ thinking, clarify group members’ objectives, and shed light on aspects of the learning process itself (Britton, 2009):

• What is motivating each of us to be here today?
• Which teaching/learning styles do each of you prefer?
• What aspects of today’s topic have we not spoken about yet (i.e., what might we have failed to consider)?
• What has been a key insight you’ve taken away from today’s session?
• What’s one thing you’ll do differently following this session?

One trick put forward by Jennifer Britton (2013) in her book From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching is to pose questions that intentionally cater to the diverse sensory styles of the group.

The purpose of phrasing your questions in this way is that you can tap into the preferred sensory styles of group members. These styles may be visual, auditory, or kinesthetic (Gilakjani, 2012).

While perhaps seeming trivial at face value, the right phrasing may elicit a response from a group member who was previously reserved.

Here are some examples (adapted from Britton, 2013):

• What feeling do you get as you read this passage?
• How do you imagine that situation looking?
• How does that decision sound to you?
• What would an ideal situation look like?
• How do you feel about what [peer] just said?

2 Best Group Coaching Activities and Exercises

Exercises and activities are a fundamental component of group coaching and workshops.

They are an opportunity for your clients to deepen their learning, reflect, and help connect theoretical principles to their experience of the real world, making them more memorable (Britton, 2009).

To that end, here are two exercises you can use in your group coaching sessions, both of which are adapted from tools commonly used in one-on-one coaching.

The Wheel of Life (Adapted)

The Wheel of Life is a staple in many coaches’ toolkits. This simple tool allows clients to assess their satisfaction with the different domains of their life, including their health, family, and financial situation.

To adapt the Wheel of Life for use in a group setting, try swapping out the labels of each wedge with those that apply to the focus of your group. For instance, if you’re running group coaching sessions with managers, you could replace these labels with different leadership competencies, such as emotional intelligence and strategic planning.

Alternatively, if you are running sessions on the theme of career coaching, you could include competencies related to professional development, such as resume writing and interviewing (Britton, 2009).

Note that in a group setting, it’s typically best to invite clients to complete the wheel as pre-work leading up to the group session. You might then ask everyone to repeat the exercise as the coaching sessions progress, allowing clients to assess their growth and improvement over time.

For a customizable tool for the job, consider adapting the pre-prepared Wheel of Life activity, available via Quenza’s Expansion Library.

Metaphors

Metaphors are powerful tools for clarifying abstract ideas to clients via likeness or analogy. Likewise, they are versatile and can be woven throughout almost all the work you do.

To leverage metaphors, try inviting clients to draw, build, or design a representation of their leadership, wellness, or startup journey (whatever the coaching focus may be). Doing this can be particularly powerful in the context of organizational group coaching, where participants must arrive at a shared mental model, such as a brand image or operational procedures (McCusker, 2020).

Alternatively, you might wish to use metaphors to drive the instructional, lecture-based components of your group coaching sessions. For some inspiration, look at the activities listed under the ‘Metaphor’ tag of Quenza’s Expansion Library. Particularly appropriate for a group coaching context are the Scoreboard Metaphor and the Chessboard Metaphor.

Organizing Your Session: 2 Useful Templates

It is essential to have a concrete plan in advance of your coaching sessions. This is especially true when conducting sessions with groups, as having a plan decreases the risk that your group will stray from its goals or go off on tangents.

Here are two useful session templates you can use across a range of group coaching contexts to help your clients achieve their goals. Both are particularly useful for tapping into the power of metaphor.

A Value Tattoo

The Value Tattoo Activity will give your group members the chance to delve into their values and creatively explore what provides meaning in their lives.

• Session objective
  To help clients identify their values via the symbol of a tattoo.
• Materials
  The Value Tattoo Activity on the client’s Quenza account.
• Verbal introduction
  Introduce the session by defining values as the “principles and fundamental convictions which act as general guides to behavior… the standards by which particular actions are judged to be good or desirable” (Halstead & Taylor, 2000, p. 169). Explain that in this session, you will invite everybody to explore their values by designing a tattoo for themselves.
• Mini-lecture
  Explore the benefits of living congruently with our values by being intentional about our behaviors and short-/long-term goal setting. Highlight that while acting in congruence with our values may not always be easy or comfortable (e.g., we may risk disappointing others), behaving in ways that are incongruent with our values will often come back to bite us, making us feel uncomfortable in the long term.

Following this explanation, you might present examples of hypothetical scenarios in which a character must choose between acting in ways that are congruent versus incongruent with held values.

• Activity
  Allow participants 20 minutes to complete the Value Tattoo Activity on their smartphone. Alternatively, you might bring art materials along to your session and invite participants to design their tattoos on paper. Invite group members to share their tattoos and the values they represent with the group.

The Acceptance or Avoidance Route Metaphor

The Acceptance or Avoidance Route Metaphor allows your group of clients to explore how fear might be unnecessarily preventing them from living their ideal life.

• Session objective
  To help clients understand that fear needn’t block goal achievement and that they can choose to take action despite fear.
• Materials
  The Acceptance or Avoidance Route Metaphor activity on the client’s Quenza account.
• Verbal introduction
  Introduce the session by presenting participants with an image featuring a route leading to a mountain in the distance. On the path to the mountain is a sign indicating danger and a traveler who has stopped at the sign. Explain that the route leading to the mountain represents a valued direction for the traveler—the life they want. However, the sign represents the fear of this person, which risks preventing them from continuing in this valued direction.
• Mini-lecture
  Introduce the idea that fear need not stop us from pursuing our goals. Proceed with a discussion of the Growth Zone and how pursuing healthy challenges despite fear can have many benefits. For instance, we may successfully reach our objective and achieve our goals, strengthening self-efficacy. And even if we fail, it’s a chance to practice bouncing back, and strengthening our resilience.
• Activity
  Allow participants 10 minutes to complete the Acceptance or Avoidance Route activity on their smartphone, considering one ‘route’ that they have previously or are currently afraid to travel. Invite group members to share their reflections about the exercise.

Online Group Coaching: Best Software & Platform

Many coaches running group sessions are getting creative with their session structure and turning to online resources.

Doing so enables us to remain emotionally connected even when physically apart.

Thankfully, there are many useful online platforms to facilitate this kind of group work remotely. For an in-depth breakdown of different online coaching tools, be sure to check out our dedicated post.

Throughout this post, we’ve looked at several templates available through the platform Quenza, which is gaining increasing popularity among coaches and other helping professionals around the world.

Cuenca is a comprehensive platform that allows coaches to customize and design digital psychoeducation activities, reflections, and more.

Coaches using the platform can enjoy the flexibility of creating their materials from scratch or saving time by selecting from an ever-growing library of pre-made activities that coaches worldwide love.

Coaches can then assign these activities to their clients, who complete them using their Apple or Android devices.

Quenza’s pre-loaded activities, metaphors, and lessons include a range of illustrative graphics. Coaches looking to run group coaching online can pair the platform with a group video conferencing tool, share their screen, and give lessons with beautiful accompanying visuals. Then, the coach can walk through the exercises with group members together, making for a memorable and engaging session.

The main benefits of group coaching

Now, it is time to take a look at the main benefits of group coaching. First of all, let’s take a look at how coachees will benefit from group coaching.

• Team working skills. Even though everyone has their goals, they share similar ideas and work in a program to achieve their goals; doing activities in groups, etc., will positively affect and develop everyone’s team working skills.
• Develops a sense of support and increases the trust factor. Think of using an internal company blog to ensure smooth communication between the members and thoughtful exchange of experience and knowledge among the others. While working in groups, individuals open up faster, they understand that they are supported. When they see someone else’s progress, they start to believe in themselves even more, which automatically contributes to their success.
• Contributes to emotional intelligence development. Usually, the biggest struggle of people that causes issues in work, dating, or day-to-day life is lack of emotional intelligence. Group coaching can help coachees a lot in this sense. Because they will develop a stronger sense of themselves, learn to work with others, and show empathy.
• An incredible opportunity to share experience, wisdom, and general knowledge
• Higher performance

What benefits, though, are there for the coach? Here they are:

• Time-saving. Instead of handling 3-4 individuals separately, spending approximately 90 minutes on each, you can organize a group and spend roughly around 2 hours with them.
• Higher income, which is also predictable. A full-time coach mostly does not have a stable income; you can know appropriate numbers, though. With group coaching, it is easier to estimate income levels. Plus, because you train multiple people at the same time, you will spend less time and still earn more money.
• Easier to schedule. You will be amazed and positively surprised by how easy it is to schedule and manage groups rather than individuals.

The difference between group coaching and team coaching

People often confuse group coaching and team coaching. However, those two have completely different purposes.

The main difference between these two is simple:

• Group coaching is individual-centric and helps individuals (although in groups) still achieve their own goals. It helps them to enhance certain skills and professional performance.
• Team coaching is mostly implemented within companies, and it aims to develop individuals’ communication and collaboration skills so that they work as teams more efficiently.

For group coaching, team-working skills are not in the first position of importance; they rather come as a benefit; meanwhile, for team coaching, team-workings skills are a vital aspect and one of the main purposes of such kind of coaching.

Top 5 techniques for group coaching

Besides certain skill sets that coaches need to host successful and effective sessions, there are also a variety of techniques they can implement. Let’s take a look at what techniques can be implemented for group coaching. Here are the Top 5.

Visual Motivational techniques

Visual Motivation Tecqhues proved to be extremely efficient, and they keep most people on track, encouraging them to continue moving towards their goals. Visual motivation technique includes exercises and activities directed to visualization of goals, results, etc.

This technique works as it clarifies the intentions for the goal and is a powerful motivation push for the coachee. Part of the exercises for this technique is vision boards, quotations, and stars. The vision board is one of the most popular methods; you need to put everything you want to have in there, that can be money, friends, love, cars, anything, depending on the needs and wants of the coachee. It is vital to concentrate throughout the exercise and ensure that clients are in a focused state.

The stars method is for daily motivation; for any achievement they have, you can encourage them to put a star on their calendar. And quotations that motivate and inspire clients could be printed and put somewhere where they’ll casually see them.

Exercises for Mindfulness

Another technique that can work well in groups is the implementation of various mindfulness exercises so that individuals can focus on themselves as well throughout the process. A popular example of such exercise is guided meditation.

Exercises for practicing Gratitude

Also, it is vital to explain gratitude’s effectiveness and importance to coachees. Any life coaching or life-transformation aimed training mentions and suggests a few activities and daily exercises designed towards gratitude. You can always want to grow, and you will always grow; that is only natural; however, remember to be grateful for where you are now as well. Be grateful to yourself, to the people supporting you, to the Universe.

Sincere Belief

As a coach, you must leave all your anger and personal issues outside the session. When you enter the online/offline session with positivity on your mind, it will become one of the crucial, fundamental components of a successful session. As a coach, people are going to trust you, so ensure to deliver the promise and provide effective training. One of the techniques to use is to show sincere belief in your coachees. Express your thoughts, tell them that you believe in them in multiple ways, and keep motivating them.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is one of the most amazing techniques you can use in a group coaching session. Ask coachees questions and listen to their ideas, thoughts, etc.; it will help to build up trust and find out more information about each individual to make the further program even more efficient.

However, it is not just about the techniques; you also have to choose the right coaching style for the group. You can read our article on the “11 Coaching Styles: Detailed Definition, Examples, And More” to find out more about the style and choose the best one for you & your clients.

A Take-Home Message

For many one-on-one coaches, the move to coaching groups feels like a natural next step.

Indeed, while there are more variables to account for in a group coaching session, such as participants’ unique personalities, goals, and learning styles, the pay-off for both the coach and their clients is almost certainly worth the work.

We hope this post has inspired you with a range of useful questions, techniques, and lesson plans that you can use to craft informative and energizing group sessions. And if you’ve used any of these tips and tricks yourself, be sure to let us know in the comments – we’d love to hear from you.