Before we get into this week’s newsletter: You might be interested in my Confident Career Coach System course, which is an NCDA approved professional development course that provides 10 CEU’s. 

Everyone is trying to do more with less.

In higher education, career teams are serving hundreds of students per coach. In workforce development, the number of people who need support keeps growing while staffing and budgets stay the same. And in private practice, there are only so many individual sessions you can fit into a week.

So group coaching feels like the obvious answer.

Get five or ten people into a room, teach what you already teach, and help more people in less time.

Sounds simple, right?

That’s pretty much how I approached it when I started group coaching 20 years ago.

Spoiler: That is not how group coaching works.

Let’s say you run a group resume session.

One participant is a new graduate who has no idea how to talk about their experience.

Another has worked in the same field for 15 years.

Another is changing careers and can’t figure out which parts of their background still matter.

They all need resume help but they don’t necessarily need the same help, and this is where a lot of career coaches get stuck.

You start working through each person’s resume individually because you want everyone to receive useful feedback. But while you’re coaching one person, everyone else is sitting there staring into space.

Now you’re essentially running five individual coaching sessions while four people wait for their turn.

So maybe you swing in the other direction.

You give everyone broad advice about keywords, formatting, and accomplishment statements.

It applies to the whole room. It also risks feeling so general that nobody knows what to do with it.

I’ve done both.

I learned how to group coach by group coaching, which is probably the hardest way to learn. It wasn’t until I started teaching career development that I realized there were actual systems for this.

I remember thinking, “Oh my gosh. This would have been helpful five years ago when I was muddling my way through these sessions.”

In an individual session, you can follow one client wherever they need to go.

In a group, you have to pay attention to what is happening for everyone in the room.

Group coaching requires coaching skills, plus facilitation, time management, conflict resolution, and a pretty good read on group dynamics.

The goal is to make each person feel like they are having an individual experience in the middle of a group experience.

That starts with changing the question you ask yourself.

Instead of:

“How do I give every person individual advice?”

Try:

“How can everyone use this conversation to work on their own situation?”

You might teach one resume principle, show how it applies to three different career stages, and then have participants apply it to their own resume.

Now everyone is working at the same time. They’re also learning from the other people in the room.

A good group gives people the chance to look around and realize, “Oh, I’m not the only one struggling with this.”

I’m curious about your experience with this because it’s a topic I’m thinking about teaching more deeply.

Heather

The Coach for Career Coaches