How to Choose Between 1-1 and Group Coaching
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
So you think you want a change. There’s something you want to be different in your life. Perhaps your CEO friend got her own executive coach. Perhaps you’ve been wondering if there’s something you can do to work on some of your growth feedback. Perhaps you’d like to be a better leader and figure out the secrets that everyone else seems to know.
Most of my clients have never worked with a coach before. They’re typically in the technology and/or creative fields given my design background. People seek out coaching because they want something to be different in their lives. The first time I hired a coach was to address feedback that I’d received on my assertive communication style (backstory and more on selecting a 1–1 coach). And in the last ten years I’ve never been without a coach. I’m currently working 1–1 with a book coach and a somatic relationship coach, focusing on the two areas of my life that I’m most looking to be different.
When I worked at Facebook, I had my first experience of group coaching. Nine women had been nominated to be part of a women’s technical leadership program and we were supported by three coaches. We created visions for our career and discussed many things including our inner critics, imposter syndrome, and experiences of gaslighting. Hearing these common experiences made me feel that I wasn’t freakishly alone.
In the past two years, I’ve been in a seven-month long group program to help build my business and a coach certification group to practice coaching skills. I’ve run countless groups around topics ranging from negotiation to mental fitness to overall leadership. And I’ve also coached teams of two to three co-founders together.
1–1 coaching is somewhat straightforward to understand. Similar to a therapist or mentor relationship, there is one client to one coach. I work with my clients for a minimum of a six month period. For the high achievers I work with, it takes this longer period of time to run experiments around their behavior change. If it were easy and straightforward, they’d already have figured it out on their own.
Group coaching, on the other hand, has a large variety of sizes and formats. These are some of the common ones I’ve seen:
Synchronous small groups (2–8-ish)
These groups meet in a live zoom session (or in person) over a set period of time. It could be ongoing coaching (as with my co-founder coaching), for a short period (6–12 weeks) or a longer period (3–12 months) of time to work through a series of skills. There is an easy camaraderie to these groups from the continued relationship over time that develops between a small number of people.
Synchronous or Asynchronous midsize groups (9–40-ish)
When the group size gets larger, coaches often mix live sessions with self-paced video or audio learning. Not everybody gets the chance to speak or be coached, yet everyone learns from the teacher and the student who’s on the hot seat.
Asynchronous large groups (50+)
As the group size gets even larger, it starts to resemble more of a webinar or lecture setting with self-paced learning. The coaching continues asynchronously via online social networks such as Facebook Groups or other startups such as Mighty Networks.
If you’re curious about what type of coaching might be right for you, consider the following five aspects:
1. Coaching Focus
So you think you want a change. What do you want to be different in your work or life over the coming months and years? The 1–1 clients I work with typically look for support around:
Developing their own unique leadership presence. This can stem from critical feedback they’ve received, or the impetus of a promotion / new job that triggers a desire to level-up.
Career transitions. Clients may be actively interviewing or seeking support to explore a career switch, for example from marketing into product or from a large corporation into going independent.
Feelings of stuckness and wanting a change. Coming in with this focus requires an investigative dance to explore where this stuckness comes from and to define visions for what’s next.
Clients typically seek out a group program to learn or develop more specific skills within a time-bound period. These skills could include any possible topic including negotiation, building a business, improving sales techniques, building a personal brand, create a business social media presence, developing confidence, or learning how to lead through influencing.
If there’s a specific skill that you’re interested in learning or developing, a group program may be a good match. If it’s more ambiguous and continually changing, then a 1–1 coach can co-create the focus with you over a period of time giving you much more individual attention and depth.
2. Communication Style
Coaching works best when you’ve able to be deeply vulnerable and willing to look at things from multiple perspectives. Everyone finds it easier to share in a 1–1 setting. Consider how open you’d be to sharing in a larger group setting.
For others, it may be exhausting to always have to come up with a 1–1 coaching topic and to have the focus be laser-pointed on you and your growth. It may be refreshing to listen and learn from how other people in the group are approaching their own growth.
3. Learning Style
In 1–1 coaching, most of the learning comes from your own insight, supported by the observations and challenges of the coach. In group coaching, the coach will likely have a loose learning curriculum. The learning comes from absorbing the curriculum, finding your own practice within it, and also learning from everyone else’s experience of the material.
Some of us learn best through live engagement with a 1–1 or group coach. Others prefer to go at our own pace with videos / audio / exercises to complete on our own and check in with the coach. Group coaching is likely to have a more structured curriculum with independent learning.
4. Accountability
Both forms of coaching help to create accountability for change. A 1–1 coach can design whatever unique accountability will work for you. With an group, you know that there are peers absorbing the materials and exercises at the same pace, and this group accountability encourages the actions and homework.
5. Investment
The time investment will vary depending on the nature of the 1–1 and group coaching. However, the financial investment is much greater for 1–1 coaching. 1–1 coaching is typically between a 3x to 10x greater financial cost than group coaching.
Bottom-Line
So you think you want a change… that’s wonderful. You can lead your own change with support from many sources including books, online classes, group coaching and 1–1 coaching. For the coaching options, consider all the facets of how you set yourself up for the best growth including your coaching focus, communication style, learning style, need for accountability, and willingness to invest.