Why Group Coaching is a Must-Have for Your Organization

Group coaching is a powerful and effective coaching approach for working with people to improve their personal strengths, self-efficacy, leadership qualities, team-building skills, personal well-being, and more.

Coaching in organizations has become increasingly common over the last couple of decades (and even more so in the last couple of years), with human resources, organizational development teams, and external coaches to support the individual development of employees.

By adding group coaching into the mix, leaders come together from across the organization to collaborate and support one another. It offers the ability to strengthen team bonds, build accountability, and improve awareness of the decisions made within a broader structure.

Why group coaching?

Group coaching helps to unlock both individual and collective challenges, directing the team to beneficial solutions. According to a report in Positive Psychology, group coaching offers an opportunity for teams to experience:

• Shared wisdom of the group
• Working toward common goals as part of a structured, step-by-step program
• Fixed timings that are easier to manage and plan around
• Positive effect of social facilitation 
• Increased awareness of psychodynamic processes within a group
• Development of support and trust within the group
• Improved conflict resolution
• Heightened emotional intelligence
• More affordable value

In a group coaching setting (AceUp prefers to keep these groups small and limits them in most cases to eight participants), there are many perspectives to draw from, all providing feedback and new ideas to find solutions.

Additionally, when people from an organization receive coaching together, it creates a model for building trust. Each participant can then take these behaviors back to their individual teams and create a culture of trust within that team.

What are some of the benefits?

In addition to allowing the opportunity for people to come together and develop a network that might not have existed before, group coaching benefits can also include:

• Development of coaching and leadership skills
• Increased organizational and systemic awareness
• Creation of high-performing teams
• Improved knowledge transfer
• Increased commitment and accountability
• Enhanced capacity to develop and improve the system, services, and processes
• Better team functioning, maturity, and capability
• Sharing of knowledge within and among teams, and across levels and generations of employees
• Fostering a culture of learning and a growth mindset
• Encouraging collaboration and the breaking down of “silos” in the organization 

Additionally, group coaching, as with individual coaching, holds the participants accountable to come up with their own solutions and take action on them. When people come up with their own ideas, they are more likely to follow through with them. In addition, publicly committing to taking one coaching-related action greatly increases the likelihood of progressing toward their goal.

How will we see results?

Group coaching is not a one-off, but a process that takes effect over time. The coach will set parameters and engage the discovery process of the group. Individuals across an organization will be able to discuss shared challenges and find potential solutions to those challenges.

Your employees tap into the wisdom of other people in the organization and have conversations they might not have been able to have before. The coach or coaches will help encourage and facilitate these conversations.

While the aim of coaching is typically to affect change in individuals, group coaching has the additional benefit of handling group-based dynamics by putting in place interpersonal and rapport-building skills. These dynamics will strengthen your leaders and empower your employees to collaborate, open the lines of communication, and transform your culture from within.