Coaching Activities for Teams and Groups

A coaching activity is an exercise with set steps that helps a team, a group or one person see something that ordinary conversation keeps hidden, and it ends with a decision or a commitment. Here are eight: four team coaching activities, two for coaching groups and two for one-to-one sessions, each with its goal, group size, timing, materials, steps and debrief questions.

If you read our piece on team coaching examples with step-by-step exercises, you won't find the same ones here. The catalogue of diagnostic instruments (Belbin, SBI, the trust barometer) is in team coaching tools.

What separates a coaching activity from a team game?

How it ends. A game is over when the timer goes off. A coaching activity is over when the team or the person has decided to do something differently, so each one comes with debrief questions. Skip that part and the exercise may have been fun, but it wasn't coaching.

And you don't hand out the answer: you keep time, ask the questions and make sure everyone gets heard.

Which team coaching activities work?

The first four are for teams that work together every day; the fifth and sixth are for groups; the last two are for one-to-one sessions.

1. Premortem

Goal: find out why a project could fail while there is still time to change the plan.
People: 4 to 12. Time: 45 minutes. Materials: sticky notes and a wall or whiteboard.

Psychologist Gary Klein described the technique in Harvard Business Review in 2007. You treat the failure as a fact and explain it, because "what could go wrong?" only gets polite answers.

1. The project owner sums it up in two minutes: what will be done and by when.
2. Set the scene: "It's [end date]. The project failed. Why?"
3. Seven minutes of silence: everyone writes their reasons, one per note.
4. Go round the room: each person reads out one reason and sticks it up. Keep going round until the notes run out. That way the boss doesn't own the list. To me, this rule is half the exercise.
5. Cluster similar notes and have people vote for the three most likely causes.
6. For each one, agree a preventive action with an owner and a date.

Debrief questions: "Which reason was hard to write down?", "What do we change in the plan, starting tomorrow?"

2. 1-2-4-All

Goal: collect ideas from the whole team, including the people who rarely speak.
People: 4 or more, no upper limit. Time: about 15 minutes. Materials: paper and pens.

It is one of the Liberating Structures developed by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless, formats designed to get everyone involved.

1. Ask one concrete question: "What stops us from delivering on time?"
2. 1 minute: everyone thinks and writes alone.
3. 2 minutes: in pairs, they share and build on each other's ideas.
4. 5 minutes: two pairs join up, compare notes and keep what repeats or surprises them most.
5. 7 minutes: each group of four shares one idea with the whole team. You write them where everyone can see.

Debrief questions: "Which idea came up in more than one group?", "Which one do we try first?"

3. Personal maps

Goal: help team members know each other as people. It helps in remote or new teams, where people only know each other's job titles.
People: 4 to 10. Time: 45 to 60 minutes. Materials: large sheets and coloured markers, or a digital whiteboard.

It is a Management 3.0 practice, from Jurgen Appelo's approach to management, and it builds on mind maps.

1. Each person writes their name in the middle of the sheet.
2. Around it they draw branches: home, education, work, hobbies, family, friends, goals and values.
3. Ten minutes to fill in whatever they want to share. Nobody has to fill every branch.
4. Taking turns, each person walks the group through their map in three minutes. The others get one question each.

Debrief questions: "What did you learn about someone you work with every day?", "What changes in how you'd ask them for something?"

4. Spectrum line

Goal: see where everyone stands on a topic, without speeches.
People: 6 to 20. Time: 20 to 30 minutes. Materials: tape on the floor, with "strongly agree" at one end and "strongly disagree" at the other.

1. Prepare three or four statements about the team, such as "We know what our priority is this quarter."
2. Read the first one. Everyone stands on the line where their view puts them.
3. Ten seconds of silence to take in the shape of the line.
4. Ask someone at each end and someone in the middle: "What do you see from where you are?" Nobody defends their spot, they only explain it.
5. Repeat with the others.

Nobody is anonymous here. With a team that is afraid to speak up, start with the anonymous safety check in our team coaching examples. If the same few people always carry the team, Belbin team roles help you put a name to that split.

Debrief questions: "Which statement divided us most?", "What do we need to talk about to close the gap?"

Which group coaching activities work?

In a coaching group, people don't share a team or a goal, as in a cohort of middle managers from different companies. You want them to help each other without the session turning into a round of advice.

5. Troika Consulting

Goal: give each participant ideas on a challenge of their own, and practise listening without defending.
People: groups of three. Time: 30 to 35 minutes. Materials: three chairs per group, no table.

This one also comes from Liberating Structures, where it is called Troika Consulting.

1. Five minutes for each person to think about their challenge and the help they need.
2. In each trio, one person takes the client role and explains their challenge in one or two minutes.
3. The other two ask clarifying questions, with no solutions, for one or two minutes.
4. The client turns their back and listens while the other two discuss the challenge for four or five minutes.
5. The client turns round and shares, in one or two minutes, what was useful.
6. Swap roles until all three have been the client.

Turning around has a purpose. With their back to the others, the client can't argue or pull faces, so they stop preparing a defence and listen.

Debrief questions: "Which idea will you try this week?", "What was it like not to answer back?"

6. Lean Coffee

Goal: let the group set the agenda and talk first about what matters most to them.
People: 4 to 12. Time: 45 to 60 minutes. Materials: sticky notes and three columns: to discuss, discussing, discussed.

The format started in Seattle in 2009, when Jim Benson and Jeremy Lightsmith wanted a group with no committees or speakers, according to the official Lean Coffee site.

1. Everyone writes the topics they want to discuss, one per note.
2. Each person introduces their topics in a sentence or two and puts them under "to discuss".
3. Everyone has two votes, marked as dots on the notes. Both can go on the same topic.
4. Sort the notes by votes. The top topic moves to "discussing".
5. Set a timer (many groups use five to eight minutes). When it goes off, the group decides with a thumbs vote whether to keep going or move on.

It fits as a follow-up session in a group programme. If you design those journeys, see how group coaching programmes work with sign-up through a single link.

Debrief questions: "What are you taking away from a topic that wasn't yours?", "Which topic carries over to next time?"

Which one-to-one coaching exercises can you use in a session?

With a single client, the activity helps them step out of the story they have been telling themselves for weeks.

7. Scaling question

Goal: measure where the client is against their goal and find the next small step.
People: 1. Time: 10 to 15 minutes. Materials: none, or a 0-10 line drawn on paper.

It comes from the solution-focused brief therapy of Steve de Shazer, Insoo Kim Berg and colleagues, in Milwaukee from the late 1970s, according to the Institute for Solution-Focused Therapy explains.

1. Agree the ends of the scale with the client: 10 is the goal achieved; 0 is the worst point.
2. Ask: "Where are you today?"
3. Ask about what already works: "Why a 4 and not a 2?" That is where unseen resources show up.
4. Ask about one point only: "What would a 5 look like?", "What would you notice?"
5. Agree an action that brings that point closer this week.

To score several areas at once, the wheel of life uses the same logic across eight areas.

Debrief questions: "What does your number tell you?", "How will you know next week that you moved up a point?"

8. Best possible self

Goal: connect the client with a future that motivates them when they arrive drained. It is the closest thing here to a motivational coaching exercise.
People: 1. Time: 25 to 30 minutes. Materials: paper and pen.

It comes from a study by psychologist Laura King published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2001. Her 81 students wrote for 20 minutes a day on four consecutive days. Writing about the best possible self was linked to higher subjective well-being and, five months later, to fewer health centre visits than in the control group. It is a small study with university students. I take it as a reasonable lead for use in a session.

1. Ask the client to picture their life in a few years, with everything that depends on them having gone well.
2. Fifteen minutes of non-stop writing, in the present tense: "I get up and…"
3. Have them underline the three sentences that move them most.
4. Talk about what they underlined: which value shows up, what is there that they don't have today.
5. Turn one sentence into a goal with a date.

Debrief questions: "Which part of that future is already in your week?", "What would you do differently tomorrow if you believed it?"

What mistakes should you avoid when running an activity?

• Picking the activity before the goal. First, what the team needs today; then, the exercise.
• Cutting the debrief. It is the first thing to go when time runs short, and it is what turns the exercise into coaching.
• Not writing down what was decided. An agreement nobody wrote down with an owner and a date is gone before the next meeting.

Frequently asked questions