WHAT WILL YOU LEARN IN GROUP AND TEAM COACHING?

Soon we will be doing Group & Team Coaching, it will be the first time since the pandemic for me. As we have been promoting the training, people are asking, “What will I learn in this training?” “What will I be able to take away from the training?”

Well, a lot of things. First and foremost, you will learn how groups work both informationally and experientially. Our focus will start with the dynamics inside of the individuals of the group and then the dynamics which make up the group itself. This makes any and every group full of dynamic energy, an energy the group coach has to manage.

As a participant, you will experience being in different group 15 times over the four days. That is a lot! Over and over you will experience all sorts of group dynamics first hand and experientially. You will experience how to achieve group objectives, how to design outcomes, solve group problems, plan group activities, deal with conflict in a group, and much more.

Now while Group and Team Coaching is already a major area in the field of Coaching, and while everything that I see indicates that it is going to become a bigger and bigger area in the coming years, most groups do not work all that well. And some groups do not work very well at all! That’s why there has begun to be a big demand for it. There’s lots of reasons for that. Perhaps the most obvious is that most groups in organizations are not run effectively and in a humanistic way. Consequently organizations waste so much of the potential that groups could provide. There’s still far too much rugged individualism, too little skill in being a good team player, and too much ineffective leadership in the groups. Boards are like that. Senior management teams are like that. And they need help. What will you learn? How groups are not effective, what causes that, and what to do to make them effective.

You will also make an amazing discovery in distinguishing how Group and Team Coaching is so different from individual coaching. The presence of group dynamics introduces many new factors that a coach doesn’t have to deal with in individual coaching. As a coach, you will often be coaching the group itself how to coach itself, how to learn how its functioning, and how to step up to more effectiveness.

In Group & Team Coaching You will learning that there are additional “Conversations” in a group to the first seven conversations that we identify in individual coaching. There is the Rounds conversation, the Meta conversation, Collective Learning, Problem-Solving, Mediation, Productive Conflict, etc. The details of these conversations are in the book on Group and Team Coaching and the conversations that we practice in the training.

You will also learn that about the need to distinguish different kinds of groups. That is, all grops are not the same. There are intact versus ad hoc groups, groups with leaders versus groups in which the coach will lead, work groups versus learning or study groups, etc.

And most importantly, you will learn about the skills which are required for coaching a group and/or a team. In setting up the feedback form for this level, I kept the basic format that Meta- Coaches are already familiar with. And to them, there are now some new sub-skills inside of them. One difference in group coaching is that we start with Framing. There is then Group Support, Group Listening, Group Questioning, Group Feedback, and Group State Induction. Three additional skills that we focus are: Group Functioning, Group Leadership / Governance; and Group Closure.

Groups that are managed well can become teams and that’s yet another learning, how that works and what’s required. You will learn about the Trust Spiral and how to build trust between yourself and the group, and between the members of the group. There’s a lot to learn, a lot of experiential practices to develop the skills, and then two days to see someone one stage take a group and a group problem and coach that group to a resolution. That live demonstration is the peak of the training because that is where the rubber hits the road. Can the person who steps up to do that—can that person coach that group? All I can say is, Come and see!