Alison Dunlop July 2 2024
Featured

Thematic Group Coaching to Support Individuals with a Common Issue

Group coaching offers a powerful platform for individuals to gain insight, support, and accountability as they work towards accomplishing both their professional and personal goals.

The collective wisdom that is experienced in group coaching sessions serves those who are engaged in the process to live more purposeful and fulfilling lives and careers. We have seen first-hand, the benefits of group coaching to support individuals with a range of themes, including diversity, equality, and inclusion, navigating organisational change, and individual role transitions.

Transitioning to a new role can be tough terrain to navigate in any organisation, with many leaders reporting organisational support during such times tends to be lacking. In particular, research suggests that successful transitions require individuals to overcome four key challenges, all of which coaching can contribute greatly towards: a mind-set shift (i.e. greater understanding of how the new role requires different ways of thinking), interference from organisational politics, confidence in the new role, and self-awareness. Many organisations
are switching onto the importance of injecting this extra support, in the form of coaching, to individuals who are transitioning. Undertaken in a group coaching format, individuals benefit hugely, from sharing challenges, hearing others’ experiences and perspectives on key transition barriers and enablers.

Other examples include, group coaching to support individuals with low self-esteem a lack of confidence and uncertainty about themselves, where individuals benefit particularly from having a safe space to trust one another in so that they feel less alone as they navigate through a challenging journey.

Group coaching offers the space for individuals to express themselves without any judgement, explore their strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvement. When this is prioritised as a collective experience, individuals find it much more enjoyable, relatable, and rewarding to hold space for others. Group coaching allows those who participate to experience a supportive environment where there is collective empowerment, the promotion of self-awareness and a stable foundation for all to discuss their experiences and any obstacles that might be holding them back.

It is important to emphasise that through this experience of group coaching, benefits are particularly strong when individuals are brought together from diverse backgrounds and levels of society, as this enriches the quality of the group coaching sessions. By having people come together and share their stories, experiences, thoughts and opinions on certain subject matters, the group coaching sessions pave the way for valuable insights to be shared. The diversity of a group enhances the quality of discussions, expands the learning processes and when an environment has been fostered which calls for individuals to share freely, new, and innovative approaches are explored which others within the group may not have considered on their own.

The key to effective group coaching is to recognise and ensure that it is not simply a discussion, but instead an engaged and goal-orientated dialogue. The word dialogue stems from the Greek words 'dai' and 'logos', with dai meaning ‘through’ and logos meaning ‘word’ or ‘meaning’. So dialogue can be understood as a flow of meaning, a conversation in which people think together, being genuinely open to new perspectives and different ways of doing things.

To find out more, why not download our brand new eBook 'The Collective Advantage: Group Coaching Solutions for Organisational Success'. 

Group_Coaching_eBook_CTA

 

Subscribe to insights from our blog here:

Would you like to know more?

How would you like to start a conversation?