Group Coaching Is Not “Team Coaching With Strangers”
Group Coaching Is Not “Team Coaching With Strangers”: Why This Distinction Matters More Than You Think
Group coaching is often treated as “team coaching with strangers”, a variation on a theme, but not fundamentally its own discipline. Yet when coaches blur the lines between group and team coaching, they also blur standards, ethics and competence. That might sound abstract, but it has real consequences for client safety, programme quality and the credibility of coaching.
At The Group Coaching Academy, what is seen repeatedly is that when coaches truly understand the distinctive nature of group coaching, everything changes: how they contract, how they hold space, how they understand power and inclusion, and how they design for learning and transformation.
Different purpose, different system
In team coaching, people already share an organisational goal, history and power structure. They sit inside the same system, whether that is a leadership team, a project group or a cross‑functional squad. The coach is stepping into that living system with a clear mandate: enhance collaboration, alignment and performance around shared objectives.
In group coaching, the “system” is very different. Participants may never have met before. They are held together not by a boss, a business plan or a KPI dashboard, but by a shared theme, developmental focus or question:
“How do I lead more courageously?”
“How do I navigate transition?”
“How do I sustain myself as I support others?”.
With each person is pursuing their own growth, inside a temporary, co-created learning field.
That difference sounds simple. It is not. It shifts the coach’s responsibilities in profound ways.
Two priorities, held at once
For the group coach, the work is always double:
Support each individual’s learning and development.
Nurture a psychologically safe, inclusive group where people learn with and from one another.
In a team, the coach can often lean into the existing web of relationships. The history is already there: shared projects, conflicts, loyalties, informal hierarchies. In a group, the coach often begins from relational neutrality. People arrive with no shared story, no organisational context and no idea how it will feel to be fully seen in front of strangers.
This is where group coaching becomes both powerful and demanding. The coach must:
Establish psychological safety from the very first moment, without relying on an organisational container.
Work explicitly with inclusion, positionally and lived experience – knowing that participants may bring very different social locations, identities and expectations.
Hold the tension between “this is your personal journey” and “we are in this together”.
Done well, the group becomes a place where difference is not bypassed but honoured, and where participants discover that witnessing and being witnessed can be as transformative as being coached directly.
Why “borrowing” competencies is not enough
Many coaches enter group work with strong one‑to‑one or team coaching backgrounds. They assume that their existing skills will “stretch” to fit groups. Often they do, but only up to a point.
Group coaching requires its own set of distinctive competencies, including:
Advanced understanding of group dynamics in a context where people may be strangers.
The ability to design and facilitate sessions that balance individual needs with a shared agenda.
Sophisticated contracting: with individuals, with the whole group, and with any commissioning organisation.
Holding ethical complexity: confidentiality, boundaries, psychological safety in a multi‑client space.
Without these, it is easy to under-estimate the emotional, relational and ethical intensity of having multiple clients in the room at once. What can look from the outside like “a nice small cohort programme” is, in reality, a complex, living system that needs thoughtful, skilled stewardship.
This is why there is advocacy for group coaching to have its own competency framework, rather than being treated as a subset of team or 1:1 coaching. Not to create unnecessary distinction for the sake of it, but to protect clients, enable coaches to do their best work and honour the unique potential of this way of working.
A different contribution to organisations and practice
When group coaching is treated as distinct, its contribution also becomes clearer.
For organisations, it can increase accessibility, inclusivity and scalability – inviting diverse voices into a shared developmental space, beyond hierarchy and politics.
For independent practitioners, it can create sustainable business models that do not compromise depth or ethics.
For clients, it offers the rare experience of doing inner work in community, without the constraints of internal power dynamics.
Those are not side benefits of “team coaching with strangers”. They are the heart of what group coaching can be.
Over to you
When you think about your own practice:
What feels genuinely distinct about how you show up in group coaching, compared with team coaching?
Where might you still be unconsciously importing team‑coaching assumptions into your work with groups?
What would change if you treated group coaching as a discipline in its own right – with its own stance, competencies and ethics?
The conversation about standards in group coaching is still in its early stages. The more clearly this distinction is named, the more courageously it can be practised.
If you are curious about how this shows up in training, the Group Coaching Academy’s Foundations Programme is designed specifically around a group coaching competency framework and hands‑on practice in real groups.