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Ideas for Leaders #234
Group Coaching: The ‘X-Factor’
Explained
Key Concept
Group coaching can be a catalyst for both individual and organizational
change. Its ‘active ingredients’, however, are not commonly understood.
Greater awareness of why and when group coaching works can help
maximise its benefits. Anecdotal evidence and research suggest effective
sessions share a number of key characteristics.
Idea Summary
Group coaching is known to help break down barriers to communication, build
trust and solve specific and practical problems in organizations. An
interpersonal learning process, it can create the impetus for change. Its
effects can be explained by psychology and psychodynamics.
Good coaches use the ‘clinical paradigm’ as a conceptual framework for
group sessions. They recognise that people are products, not just of their
genetic inheritance, but also of their experiences, and will often re-activate in
current relationships and situations behaviours and attitudes ‘learned’ from
relationships and situations in the past. Through careful facilitation, they
identify negative or destructive thoughts, feelings and behaviours and
outdated perceptions of the self.
Much like group therapy, group coaching helps people examine and reflect on
their own behaviour, the behaviour of others and the inter-relationship
between the two. It holds up a mirror that lets people see things more clearly
and helps provides the motivation for change.
This is the general context. What are the specific processes that underly
group coaching? What is the X-factor it provides? And how do its effects differ
from those of one-to-one coaching?
Research and experience suggest successful interventions have certain
characteristics in common. These can be summarised as ten points:
1. Coaches construct a safe, ‘transitional space’ for participants, where they have
permission to talk about issues they never had the opportunity to confront before and can
explore their feelings and challenges without the fear of judgment or rejection.
2. Coaches are sensitive to ‘cloud’ issues — those matters of ‘unfinished business’ that drift
or float between participants and, potentially, create hostility and antipathy.
3. Coaches and group members encourage emotional catharsis but they also ‘contain’ it
by helping an individual understand better why certain ‘psychological wounds’ have been so
troublesome. (The catharsis, in other words, does not take place for its own sake but is a
means to an end.)
4. Participants listen to others and begin to feel that they are not alone in experiencing
Authors
Kets de Vries, Manfred F. R.
Institutions
INSEAD
Source
INSEAD Working Paper
Idea conceived
May 2012
Idea posted
October 2013
DOI number
Subject
Change Management
Team Building and Teamwork
Coaching
Executive Development
Mentoring
Psychology
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problems. This brings a great sense of relief, opening up the possibility of discussing new
ways of dealing with things.
5. Coaches use the clinical paradigm to allow participants to reflect in ways that lead to a
willingness to experiment with new approaches and create new hope for the future. Is that the
only way? Is that behaviour still effective now?
6. Participants make presentations to the group that offer the opportunity for vicarious
learning, the possibility for retaining and replicating effective behaviours observed in others.
7. Certain members of the group become role models for certain types of effective
behaviours and therefore a force for change.
8. Participants become a real community, members of a tribe that has gone through the same
emotional experience. (Bound together socially, they become emotionally and psychologically
motivated to change.)
9. The coach knows when to ‘hang back’ and when to intervene to reduce anxiety by offering
advice.
10. Members don’t simply point out others’ dysfunctional character patterns; they offer to
help them and suggest alternative approaches to problems. (A kind of virtuous circle of
enlightened self-interest develops in which members work on their own and each others’
problems.)
These psychodynamic processes create tipping points for change.
Business Application
Group coaching can help companies address specific problems — ranging
from how to integrate a newly acquired business or a new IT system to how to
make meetings more productive.
More generally, it can foster the trust needed for effective collaboration and
lay the foundations for real information exchange in organizations, creating
networks, cutting across silos and breaking down barriers to communication.
It should not, however, be seen as a ‘quick win’. It will need to be preceded by
‘ground work’ and followed by further intervention from the coach and further
investment from group members.
Assessments of participants by organizations for leadership competencies,
and feedback from colleagues and family and friends, will help ‘jump-start’ the
process. Post-session conference calls with coaches, follow-up sessions to
re-examine action plans, and peer coaching from another member of the
group will help keep people on track and maintain momentum.
Further Reading
The Group Coaching Conundrum. Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries. INSEAD Working Paper
(May 2012).
Coach and Couch: The Psychology of Making Better Leaders. Manfred F. R. Kets de
Vries, Konstantin Korotov & Elizabeth Florent-Treacy. INSEAD Business Press (2007).
The Coaching Kaleidoscope: Insights from the Inside. Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries,
Laura Guillén & Konstantin Korotov. INSEAD Business Press (2010).
Tricky Coaching: Difficult Cases in Leadership Coaching. Konstantin Korotov, Manfred
Kets de Vries, Andreas Bernhardt & Elizabeth Florent-Treacy. INSEAD Business Press
(2011).
The Hedgehog Effect: The Secrets of Building High Performing Teams. Manfred Kets de
Vries. John Wiley & Sons (2011).
Further Relevant Resources
Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries’s profile at INSEAD
INSEAD Executive Education profile at IEDP
© Copyright IEDP Ideas for Leaders 2013
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