Group Coaching Vs. Teaching and Training

Spoiler alert - at Group Coaching HQ, coaching always wins!

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At Group Coaching HQ, we focus solely on group coaching. This means no agenda, no slides, no curriculum… Imagine walking into a coaching session with a 1:1 client and saying: “Today, we’re talking about boundaries. I’m going to teach you how to set boundaries, and then I’ll guide us through a conversation about it.”

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We got chills just from writing this!

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Coaching is not about teaching. Coaching is about partnering with the client to determine what THEY want to accomplish in the session. It’s the same in group coaching, only we partner with the group instead of an individual.

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Don’t get us wrong. We are not claiming there is no place for other types of facilitation. We are saying a coaching session should remain a coaching session, and as group coaches we must help our group members understand what this means, in the same way we would a 1:1 client.

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A question that often comes up is “How can I fully be in coaching mode when I have a curriculum to get through?”

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Here are some thoughts to help you decide what might work for your own group(s):

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1. What is the purpose for the group?

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Is it purely a coaching group, or are you offering training with important frameworks/concepts that group members must learn?

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This will impact how you approach sessions. We strongly suggest having at least some sessions focused on group coaching only wherever possible. This means you educating your group members AND creating clear expectations through contracting.

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2. Time Management in Group Coaching Sessions

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If your sessions are on the shorter side and you must get through a curriculum, could you share the content in advance so the time you have together can be spent on reflection and coaching on the topic?

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Caveat: How much will actually get done outside of the session varies greatly from participant to participant… How will you set expectations clearly, and from the start? You might create a norm around coming to sessions prepared.

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3. Value of Shared Experiences in Group Coaching

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While many clients want to understand what they are working through intellectually, we know that growth truly happens when we connect to content emotionally. What better way to connect than sharing experiences and digging into each others’ stories through coaching?

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This is how we function at Group Coaching HQ. We give all resources to participants at the start of the course and use our valuable time together to share ideas, stories, resources. This is an important tenet of andragogy or adult learning theory: Let the learning be self-directed.

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4. Enhancing Group Coaching Frameworks

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Your group members are most probably very smart people. Can you spend a very short time with a framework, sharing maybe one tip, then use the connection time to offer role-playing, simulations etc. and end by coaching through the debrief process? We like encouraging trainees to decide how fast to move participants towards the coaching process according to the make up of the room. If you have a lot of engineers that are process-driven, you’ll want to give them processing time. If you work with a bunch of creatives, chaos is where they'll thrive!

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To conclude, while we believe group coaching is the key to creating transformation, we also understand that sometimes, there is content to get through. The question is, how do you engage members with this content?

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To learn more about the why of coaching vs. teaching, stay tuned for our next blog post, about creating agency in each member of the group and how that relates to adult learning theory.

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