What is Group Coaching?
Group Coaching offers a vibrant interchange of ideas, information, and feedback that can stimulate reflection, learning, and purposeful action in your organization.
Coaching helps organizations and their leaders thrive in today’s complex, uncertain, and rapidly changing business environment. If you’re a senior leader in charge of leadership development, organizational learning, or managing change, you’re probably already aware of the impact coaching can make in your organization, and you may even oversee a coaching program staffed by either internal or external coaches. Yet for many organizations the costs associated with large-scale coaching interventions are prohibitive. Maybe you’d like to provide coaching for more leaders and managers in your organization, but the costs of providing one-on-one coaching for all of them is just too high. Enter Group Coaching!
Group coaching involves the application of coaching principles (such as active listening, meaningful questioning, designing actions, and managing accountability) to small groups or teams. While Team Coaching has become common in many organizations, Peer Group Coaching (or Cohort Coaching) is just beginning to catch on. Peer Group Coaching (PGC) is conducted in small groups of four to seven peer colleagues. Group members meet across multiple sessions so that their experiences, relationships, and learning can unfold and evolve over time.
Like team coaching, the groups are usually facilitated by a skilled professional. However, unlike team coaching, group members usually share no affiliation outside of the coaching group itself. They are unlikely to work together and, in some cases, may work for entirely different business units or companies. Group members come together to engage a coach in service of individual learning and goals that can be personal and/or organizational in nature.
The small-group format lowers the per capita cost of coaching, but it doesn’t reduce the value that individual group members receive from participating in PGC. In fact, the group format enhances the value of the coaching. Members of a peer coaching group benefit from a rich exchange of experiences, perspectives, and ideas. They receive support and encouragement from their peers, as well as meaningful feedback that can challenge their thinking and lead them to develop new behaviors. As group members come to realize that they share similar challenges, they also learn vicariously through observing each other's successes and failures.
To find out more about how Peer Group Coaching can benefit you or your business, check out Verve Sessions, our Peer Group Coaching program for entrepreneurs and business owners.
For more information on Peer Group Coaching (PGC), download this white paper Erek co-authored with Ken Giglio over at Mindful Leadership. In the paper, they explain what PGC is, how it works, and why your organization needs it. Some of these factors include the cost-effectiveness of group work, the power of group learning, the impact of group work on organizational communication, and the psychological benefits associated with group membership.