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.

So in response to the most understandable concerns this brought about, I’ve added settings for Group items to make it entirely up to the coach how much information is appropriate to share among all group members.  Here’s the new setting, which applies to Group Metrics, Group Actions, and Group Worksheets:

How much should group members see of a given group item? It’s up to you.

These four options bear a little elaboration.  From most secretive to most open:

• Totally hidden as a Group Item means that, as far as your group members are concerned, the Group Item doesn’t exist.  The item will appear as just an individual assignment with no ties to the group. This forgoes any group comment thread about it.
• Visible as a Group Item but hide group performance means they’ll see it as a Group Item, can have a group conversation about it, but not see the overall result: for Metrics that means no aggregate graph will be visible, for Actions and Worksheets that means they’ll have no idea of the overall level of completion of the assignment among their fellow group members.  You as coach get to see aggregate performance, of course, but they won’t.
• Visible including aggregate performance means group members will see, for example, how many other group members have completed the assignment and how many have not, and among those completions how many were on time and how many were late.
• Visible including aggregate and individual performance offers a level of complete transparency.  With Actions, everyone knows who’s done it and when did they get it done.  With Worksheets, all members can read the completed worksheets as submitted by all other group members.  And again, with Metrics, everyone can see the exact reported numbers of everyone else.

The last level is so very open it often works wonders for group collaboration when appropriate, and indeed in some instances is simply not appropriate.  Total transparency is often quite nice for smaller, more intimate coaching groups, but as CoachAccountable is employed for increasingly large and sophisticated programs it is a very good thing that the level of transparency among group members can be reeled back to just the right level.

Here’s an example of what a Group Action looks like at each of the visibility settings:

Fully visible including group and individual performance:

Visible including group performance:

Visible but no performance info:

And not that anyone really needs to see a diagram illustrating the “hidden” setting, for grins here’s an artist’s rendition:

Yep. Intentionally.

For total flexibility, this visibility setting can be set by the Group coach on a per-item basis, and can be updated at any time as well.  Here’s to keeping group members informed of their fellow member’s participation at just the right amount!