The CoachAccountable Blog

Master CoachAccountable and become the best dang coach you can be. Also, news.

Archive for Groups

Group Activity Digests

One of the most powerful things about CoachAccountable Groups is they allow you to foster a real sense of community among your group members.  Among other ways, this happens via messages and comments posted by members of the group.

If you’ve got an active community wherein the conversation is lively among participants, it’s great to keep the conversation going by way of notifications: group members can opt to get emailed anytime there’s a new message posted.  This allows them not only to stay aware like in a group chat, but also the convenience of replying right from their email to comment back (and have that comment, in turn, go out to other group members).

But sometimes, sometimes, the group is too big and the conversation gets a little too lively.  You don’t want to overwhelm anyone’s email inbox, yet members outright unsubscribing from those notifications poses its own problems to participation.

Happily, there’s now a middle road that nicely accommodates this situation: Group Activity Digests.

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What’s the Difference Between Companies and Groups?

With the release of CoachAccountable Companies, you may be wondering when and why you’d use Companies versus Groups. Let’s discuss the differences!

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Group Whiteboards

Whiteboards are a great place to keep a living document – perhaps an evolving business plan, a 5-year outlook, or a list of suggested reading materials. Until now, you’ve been able to keep your own Whiteboards, collaborate with an individual client on them, and share them via Courses.

Now the members of a Group can collaborate on a Whiteboard. Let’s take a look.

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Group Action Projects

Action Projects are great for grouping related Actions together (and gamifying the results). But what about in Groups, where a larger project may be broken down into Actions for various people on the team to complete?

You can now also create Action Projects for a Group. Assign the parts of a project to the people who will actually do those items, and see the entire project move along. Some coaches have let us know this feature has allowed them to drop task sharing software like Asana and Trello.

Here’s how to set up a Group Action Project.

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3 Places to Put Extra Client Details

We often hear questions like:

  • I coach two different types of clients. How can I quickly filter by type?
  • Where can I see extra client information, like a birthday or spouse’s name?
  • Can I add ‘tags’ to clients?

The great news is that CoachAccountable already has several spots to put extra client details (and filter by those criteria).

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Create More Community With Group Profile Descriptions

CoachAccountable Groups empower you to create a community of your coachees – or, Groups can be secret so that only you, the coach, knows who’s linked together. You can use Groups to send assignments or files to multiple participants at once, keep engagement going even when you’re not there, track progress, and even put Groups through your Courses.

Groups have various privacy settings, including what clients are/aren’t allowed to participate in, and you can now enable personal profiles in Group directories.

Let’s set them up!

» Continue reading “Create More Community With Group Profile Descriptions”

Share Your CoachAccountable File Library With a Group

Thanks to Brian Icenhower’s team for inspiring this new development for our online coaching tool!

You already had the ability to share a file with multiple people at once, but now you can share multiple files with multiple people at once, as well as share multiple files with a single person at once.

This can come in handy if, say, as part of onboarding a client you want to share all your files at the same time with her. Another use case might be if you have a Group that needs to be updated with your entire Library, and you want to skip the step of adding them to a Course that delivers all your documents (which would also require adding any new files to the Course).

Here’s how.

-Create a Group and add the appropriate members.

-From the Group Stream, click “+ File.”

-Select “Actually I want to share multiple files from my Library.”

-Use Shift and/or Ctrl keys to select as necessary.

To keep the Group up to date, you’ll just need to do the following:

1. When you add new clients, add them as members of the Group.
2. When you add new Library files, share them with all members of the Group.

And that’s it!


Sound like a good solution for managing your files and your people? Try CoachAccountable for free with a 30-day trial.

Why Group Metrics Are Awesome

I wrote earlier about why Metrics are awesome.  Now I’m going to go into the more nuanced version of why Metrics are so powerful when used as part of group coaching.

In other words, why Group Metrics are awesome.

Group Metrics are when you’ve got a coaching group in which all members (or some, you can have individuals sit excluded as appropriate) are working at the same Metric.  Examples include:

  • A group fitness program in which members are each tracking their weight and or daily exercise.
  • A sales team in which all members are pulling towards an office-wide sales goal.
  • A real estate team concerned with tracking performance measures such as number of appointments, showings, and touch points.

In each of these cases, individuals each have their own numbers to report for a given Metric, which in turn contribute to the collective performance of the group.  That group performance is calculated as either the sum or the average of all of the individuals.

A CoachAccountable Group Metric enables you to manage that this detailed tracking gets done, see overall performance as it unfolds, and optionally enable the group participants themselves a transparent view into group performance, or even the individual performance of other group members.

Let’s look at a few examples in turn, to examine the ways by which this can enrich group coaching and foster higher engagement & performance.

» Continue reading “Why Group Metrics Are Awesome”

Keeping Group Members up on everyone’s progress, or not

As a platform for making details and happenings within a coaching relationship clearly documented for all interested parties, CoachAccountable excels.  The same is true when it comes to its handling of Group coaching.

In fact, perhaps too much so.

A nutritional and weight loss program of well over 100 participants has, as part of the program, the whole Group participating in a Group Metric to track weight over the span of the program.  By default, Group Metrics make visible to all group members not only the Group’s aggregate numbers (be it averages or totals), but the specific, individual numbers as well.

In a weight loss program that large one can well imagine the potential problems with THAT much detailed information on display for the whole group.

» Continue reading “Keeping Group Members up on everyone’s progress, or not”

Group Courses

Courses allow a coach to define a timeline of assignments, materials, and communications to be given to a given course participant over a span of days, weeks, or months.

Groups allow a coach to put 2 or more coaching clients together and allow them to jointly participate in Group Actions, Group Metrics, and Group Worksheets, wherein each group member does their thing which counts towards the overall progress of the group (for example Group Metrics, wherein each person reports their number which contributes to the overall Group Metric, computed as either the sum or average of individual performance).

These two tools for structuring sophisticated coaching programs used to be completely separate: Courses could be taken only by individual clients and their progress and results were kept completely separate, and there was no such thing as a Group going through a Course all together with shared results.

With Group Courses these structures for program delivery can be combined: Groups of coaching clients can embark together on the same course, and all items of the course will be delivered as group items.  Say Day 1 of a course entails an Action assignment to call on five prospects.  Members of a group taking that course would each have that assignment, and could all see the overall progress of everyone in the group, i.e. who is done and who is not.

» Continue reading “Group Courses”