Over the last two decades, coaching in organizations has become common and more so after the pandemic as companies and people adapt to the changing work environment. Increasingly organizational teams, human resource personnel, and external coaches are working together to support employee development.
Group coaching brings together leaders from across the company for collaborating and supporting one another. It enhances team bonding, brings in accountability, and improves awareness in the decision-making process.
What is group coaching?
Also known as peer coaching brings a group of people together to work towards a particular goal or purpose. Group coaching programs adopt a collaborative approach where the coach encourages discussions. Additionally, structured activities are conducted to bring across various perspectives, knowledge, and insight for encouraging growth and learning and complicated problem-solving.
An important objective of group coaching is to assist people to discover alternative viewpoints, building trusting relationships driven by shared experiences, and providing an opportunity to give and receive positive feedback.
Why group coaching?
The best group coaching programs are beneficial in unlocking collective and individual challenges and directing the teams to find helpful solutions. These programs offer teams the opportunity to:
- Improve conflict resolution
- Share wisdom amongst the participants
- Enhanced emotional intelligence
- Work towards common objectives as a part of a structured program
- Develop trust and support amongst the team members
- Increase awareness of psychodynamic processes
Benefits to the organizations
Group coaching stimulates constructive changes and brings an entrepreneurial outlook. Some of the advantages for companies include:
- Improving processes, products, and services
- Positively impacting the bottom line
- Increasing team functioning and mentality
- Optimizing goal achievements at all levels within the company
- Integrating professional development and performance
- Encouraging peer collaboration and consultation
- Fostering the culture of continued learning
- Developing leadership and management capabilities
- Accelerating and building learning capacity and sharing intelligence across all levels of employees
- Breaking down the silo mentality among various departments
Benefits to the participants
Group coaching is also beneficial to the participants in the following ways:
- Driving individual responsibility to learn and personal development
- Promoting systems and strategic thinking
- Decreasing dependency on experts
- Building proficiency in reframing, reflection, problem-solving, planning, and time management skills
- Enhancing personal versatility and adaptability and bringing effective responses to changes
- Increasing dexterity in presentation skills and communication
- Maximizing leadership assessments via comprehensive surveys
- Balancing inquiry and advocacy
- Teaching techniques for navigating organizational politics
- Gaining more understanding of the issues, motivations, and intentions of different stakeholders thereby promoting deeper and more trusting relationships
- Inspiring creative thinking
- Improving interpersonal skills, such as listening, questioning, and feedback
- Developing emotional intelligence
How to determine if group coaching is effective?
Like individual coaching, leadership group coaching training programs hold every participant responsible to come up with a unique solution and taking action on the same. Often, people are more likely to follow up on their own ideas thereby improving efficiency and productivity.
Group coaching should not be a one-off program but an ongoing process that becomes more effective over a period of time. The coach sets certain parameters and engages in the discovery process of the group. People from across the organization discuss shared challenges and issues and work towards finding possible solutions to overcome these.
People within the group tap into each other’s wisdom to gain different perspectives and engage in open communication in a safe environment, which may not have been available before the training program. An experienced coach encourages and facilities such communication to develop a trusting and collaborative environment.
Although the objective of the training is to bring about certain changes within the individuals, group coaching additionally puts in place interpersonal and rapport-developing abilities among the participants. These often strengthen the organizational leaders and empower the people to be more collaborative, open communication lines, and bring in an internal transformation in the organizational culture.
From skill development to boosting employee engagement, there are several benefits of group coaching for companies and their people. It may be the must-have to take your organization to the next level.
