Despite considerable organisational development research and practice suggesting that interventions in organisations should also be targeted at the group level, most organisational coaching is dyadic (one-to-one) and few models of group coaching have been developed. In Part I of this paper we present an introductory overview of group coaching and compare it to other group-based interventions. We distinguish between the goal-focused nature of group coaching and the process-orientation of group facilitation, and posit that group coaching has important but under-used potential as a means of creating goal-focused change in organisational contexts. In Part II of this paper we address practice issues and we present a practical model of GROUP (Goal, Reality, Options, Understanding others, Perform) coaching that integrates the well-known GROW (Goal, Reality, Options, Way forward) coaching framework with Scharma's U process for group dialogue, double loop learning and other theoretically-grounded practices. From a practitioner's perspective, we draw on the extant literature, we compare group coaching to other team and group-based interventions. Although precisely distinguishing between different group-based change modalities is difficult, we argue that group coaching is a more goal directed process than group facilitation, and that group coaching has important but under-used potential as a means of creating change in organizational contexts.
Citation:
Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice Volume 3, 2010 - Issue 1