Group Leadership Coaching: The Secret to Building Cohesive Resilience
In today's post-COVID world, you and your leadership team are experiencing more challenges leading than ever before. Whether you’re navigating uncertainty and change, managing remote and hybrid teams, or trying to meet your teams’ demands for growth and support, you’re expected to deliver concrete results and develop a thriving, capable culture with every action.
But how can you, as a leader, achieve and surpass a level of excellence when your role comes with so many simultaneous demands and responsibilities?
The key is cohesive resilience. When leaders are aligned in purpose and performance, the load becomes lighter and more attainable for everyone. Consider geese migrating for winter -- have you ever wondered why they travel in groups shaped like the letter 'V'? It’s because this coordinated approach significantly reduces the journey's strain on each bird in the formation. The front goose cuts through air and wind resistance, reducing drag on the other geese so they can follow more easily. When one goose needs a break from being at the front, another in the group trades places with them, sharing the load.
In this way, the geese are able to achieve much more together than they could apart. In fact, scientists found that 25 geese flying in formation can go roughly 70% farther than one goose using the same amount of energy. This is the impact a group can have when its members come together to function smoothly as one collaborative, resilient team.
When your leaders aren't strong together, they can miscommunicate, cause internal friction, and otherwise thwart productivity and peace. Learning how to lead together is rarely intuitive or straightforward, but it is essential. Group leadership coaching offers a solution by creating a collaborative, supportive space for your leaders to build their skills together, helping them grow into a more cohesive, purposeful, and transformative team.
What Are the Benefits of Group Leadership Coaching?
Group leadership coaching is a collective development experience designed to uplift and nourish an organization’s top leaders, ensuring they grow both individually and as an aligned unit. This process enhances each leader’s individual capacity while catalyzing stronger collaboration and shared purpose across the leadership team, ultimately driving better organizational outcomes.
Here’s why group coaching might be the right choice for your leadership team:
Strategic Focus: Group coaching helps your team move beyond day-to-day distractions, enabling them to focus on long-term strategic goals that drive meaningful impact. With the guidance of a coach, leaders learn to prioritize and delegate better so their time is spent on what truly matters.
Collective Accountability: Leaders are more likely to remain committed to their personal and team goals when in a group setting, where they can challenge, encourage, and push one another.
Resilience: With the rise of remote and virtual work, leaders are challenged to connect with and guide increasingly diverse teams. The modern workplace is a melting pot of different generations and backgrounds, each with distinct values, expectations, and communication styles that may not mesh well together without some assistance.
Group leadership coaching builds meaningful connections amongst the team, resulting in a tolerant and supportive workplace. Leaders are better equipped to respond to one another with grace, empathy, and understanding, even across generational lines. This contributes to more cohesive and enduring leadership teams.Higher Goal Attainment: Group coaching equips leaders with transformative skills and habits that can then cascade throughout the organization. As top leaders model these behaviors and practices, they inspire and inform those around them, promoting a culture of excellence that encourages leadership development at every level -- allowing for thorough, lasting organizational change.
In today’s remote work era, connection can feel like a commodity, but it’s an essential component of any successful team. Group leadership coaching builds working relationships that thrive on trust and shared purpose, creating cohesive resilience that drives organizational success.
When Should You Consider Group Leadership Coaching?
Group coaching can help your leadership team navigate or overcome:
New Leadership Integration: Leadership dynamics and performance can be disrupted by the introduction of someone new to the leadership team – even if they’re a familiar face who’s just been promoted. Limit potential risks and ensure a smoother transition for all by enrolling your leaders in group coaching to mitigate friction, encourage relationship building, and help the team embrace their new norm.
Low Morale or Stagnation: If your leaders are showing signs of boredom, frustration, or a lack of motivation – such as declining performance, increasing absences, or reduced engagement – group coaching can help renew their energy, drive, creativity, and focus.
Increasing Demands for Support: Younger generations are seeking more value and opportunities from their jobs than the generations before. If you’re feeling the pressure, leadership coaching can be a meaningful hiring incentive or retention-boosting job perk, and it’s a solution that’s easy to scale as your organization evolves.
Strategic Shifts: Significant organizational changes like mergers, policy shifts, or cultural transformations require a unified approach. With group coaching, your leadership team will be strategically aligned, functionally optimized, and ultimately prepared to lead these changes effectively, together.
Operational Overwhelm: When a leader’s energy is constantly consumed by daily minutiae rather than meaning or mission, it can be overwhelming and disheartening. A leadership coach can help each member of your team hone their prioritization and delegation skills, as well as learn to trust each other to share the workload.
7 Tips to Help You Secure Resources for Leadership Coaching
In an economy where many organizations’ resources are already strained, finding room in the budget for leadership coaching can seem daunting. However, the right program will optimize your leadership team’s performance to be more efficient, collaborative, productive, and effective – benefits that will be felt throughout your entire organization.
Here are tips to secure the necessary resources:
Reallocate Funds: Leadership coaching benefits multiple areas like professional development, recruitment, and operational strategy. By reallocating underutilized funds from these areas, you can minimize budget impact.
Explore External Funding Options: Grants, partnerships, and sponsorships may be available to help cover coaching costs, depending on your industry and organization. Check with industry associations, government programs, and local committees to find resources.
Build Internal Buy-In: Rally your colleagues and stakeholders to support the idea of leadership coaching. Widespread enthusiasm will make your proposal more compelling when seeking budget approval.
Provide Concrete Data: When appealing for budgetary approval, use statistics and case studies to build your argument. If you’ve already been through leadership coaching yourself, create a thoughtful case study on how it has benefited your work. Visuals can help emphasize key data points and results.
Align With Immediate Needs: Conduct a skills audit to evaluate the current leadership capabilities within your team, identifying gaps that interfere with performance, growth, or goals. Describe exactly how group coaching will address these areas and contribute to pressing organizational goals, such as increasing productivity, improving employee retention, or driving innovation.
Emphasize Long-Term Benefits: A cost-benefit analysis can help justify the expense to higher-ups and other decision-makers. Often, leadership coaching enables powerful changes that lead to real savings or value for the organization. Beyond tightening operations and improving company culture, group coaching demonstrates your organization’s commitment to cultivating ethical leadership and valuable experiences for team members, helping to attract talent in a competitive market where jobseekers have high expectations.
Propose a Pilot Program: Suggest a pilot program to demonstrate the effectiveness of leadership coaching on a smaller scale. This reduces risk and allows for measurable results before committing to a full investment. Have one or two leaders go through the training first, and compile a detailed report on their experience and results. Choose metrics to help assess the program’s impact on the individual(s) – such as productivity, reliability, and engagement – and project the value to your organization if these results and benefits were extended to the rest of the team.
Not sure leadership coaching can fit in your organization’s budget? At It’s the Impact, the Pay Impact Forward program helps offset coaching costs for promising leaders who need it. Submit an application or learn how to support an applicant.
Building Stronger Leaders. Transforming Teams
Investing in a group leadership coaching program is more than just a business decision; it offers a powerful and scalable solution as leaders increasingly seek more support and value in their roles. By nurturing authenticity, collaboration, and genuine connection, The Changemaker program from It’s the Impact helps your leadership morph into a true team with the capacity to reach goals that previously felt unattainable.
Are you interested in providing the support your leaders crave and deserve? Do you want to see your leadership team thriving as a whole and as individuals through cohesive resilience, with marked improvements in performance? The Changemaker is a nine-month program designed to generate lasting impact through deep, transformative support and guidance, ensuring your team doesn’t face challenges alone. Schedule a call to discover everything The Changemaker can do for your organization, and explore informative articles, downloadable workbooks, and more on our resources page.