Brief History of the Program
The Coughlin Company began to offer Leadership Development Group Coaching Programs in 2017. Since then individuals from over 35 companies across the United States and Canada have participated in these 6-month, highly interactive programs. The first four Leadership Development Group Coaching Programs were offered to people in the same company or the same industry.
Starting in September 2020 our Leadership Development Group Coaching Program was offered to leaders in for-profit and nonprofit organizations of all sizes anywhere in the world. In Round One, we had 20 participants from 14 different organizations including Anheuser-Busch, Stryker Neurovascular, Traffix, Medicine Shoppe, and privately owned companies in wealth management, commercial real estate, and residential real estate. We limit the maximum number of people in the program to 20 leaders at a time. We meet in small discussion groups of at most 6 people with Dan Coughlin serving as the facilitator/guide in all of them.
Insights from Dan Coughlin
- I love diving into the Thinking Exercises and then listening to the conversations in the small group discussions. There are a total of 10 Group Coaching sessions for each participant. You will have 4-5 Thinking Exercises to do before each session, and then we will discuss your thoughts. Periodically I will step in with a thought or suggestion, but most of it is the participants sharing what came out of doing the Thinking Exercises.
- I really enjoy the small group atmosphere. This gives everyone lots of opportunities to share their ideas, provide insights from their experiences, and ask relevant questions.
- There are two parts to every session.
The first part is where people share their answers to the Thinking Exercises. There is a lot of meat in terms of practical, relevant content.
The second part is where each participant can ask any question he or she wants to ask of the rest of the group. After each question we go around the group and each person has an opportunity to share his or her thoughts with the person. This generates some fascinating conversations and insights.
In this way, the Group Coaching Program combines learning useful content and discussing open questions. - Over the years I’ve learned that time-spaced learning is the most effective way to really learn an idea. Time-spaced learning is where you learn a few ideas, try them out, reflect on what happened, identify what you learned, decide what you will keep the same and what you will do differently the next time, and then try them out again.By spacing out our sessions by two weeks, you get the opportunity to learn a few things, try them out, reflect on what you did, make some adjustments, and then try them out again.Two weeks later, you will learn something new in the next session. This is a much more effective way to learn than to try to cram all of the content from this program into two full days of meetings.
- By opening this Leadership Development Group Coaching Program up to people beyond just one company or industry, it allows you to share ideas with people from outside of your industry and who work in both for-profit and nonprofit organizations. It’s exciting to hear the various experiences, perspectives, and insights from people in a wide range of industries and from large, medium, and small organizations.
- Having the sessions on Zoom videoconferencing is like a magic box where people from anywhere in the world come together to support one another in becoming more effective leaders, and then they go back out into the world to make their own unique difference.
- There are no long lectures. I explain the ideas in the pre-work assignment. When the small group meeting begins, we move quickly into the participants sharing their answers to the various Thinking Exercises, which is followed by discussions of what was shared.
- The reason there is no fee at the beginning is because I do not want anyone to feel that they did not get the value they paid for or paid more than they or their organization could reasonably afford. The payment comes at the end of the program when each participant has a better idea of the value he or she received from this program and what he or she can reasonably afford to pay.
- This program is long enough, 6 months, to make a significant impact on the participants, but it also has a clear starting point and ending point. It does not go on forever. I think this helps us to stay focused as we work through the 10 sessions.
- The 2 one-on-one coaching sessions on Zoom with me help each participant to connect the ideas in the program to his or her own unique leadership situation.
- The opportunity for you to ask me questions on email allows me to give you advice in a real-time manner as situations are happening in your work environment.
- There are no trains, planes, automobiles, or hotel rooms. Because the entire program with all of its small group discussions and individual coaching sessions is done through Zoom videoconferencing, you can join from the comfort of your home or office.
- Perhaps my favorite aspect of this Leadership Development Group Coaching Program is that it is a great example of what I call The Total Team Concept, which says that every member of a team benefits when every member does his or her best to help every other member to the best of his or her ability.