Introducing group reflections for coaches and group leaders

I have been working hard to bring some amazing new features designed with coaches and group leaders in mind. There are many types of “groups” that can benefit from the structured, effective reflections that My Reflections provides; from organised groups with a facilitator such as support groups to coach/therapist/counsellor patient relationships such as life coaches, social workers or therapists.

Consider the below use cases and how they could increase the engagement between yourself and your group/team members while adding value and structure to your existing processes and tools;

1. You are the facilitator of a support group and distribute an article to your group that is thought-provoking and addressing a specific need or focus that the group has for the day or week: the group members receive this reflection on their feed, reflect on, rate and provide highlights/lowlights concerning how it influenced or impacted them
2. You are a life coach for people dealing with anxiety and distribute regular motivational images with a “challenge” for your clients: your clients see these and action your challenge, providing you with feedback on their progress and outcomes
3. You are a specialist football coach for teens wanting to be goalkeepers and distribute a weekly reaction development workout requesting their times and results: your clients complete the provided form with their results while reflecting on how they feel they could improve in the future
4. You are a social worker with a structured plan for dealing with trauma and distribute regular survey’s to your clients to better gauge their progress: your clients complete the surveys and provide reflection insights into their progress
5. You are a mentor with a mentee and you want them to reflect on a report that you have prepared on their professional development plan progress: your mentee reads the report and reflects on its contents and their progress to date

As you can see, these use cases cover a variety of “leader/follower” relationships and I hope that it is the inspiration for you to consider how you could make use of group reflections!

So let’s jump in and talk about some of the unique mechanics of group reflections inside the My Reflections platform!

Group types

Groups can either be open or hierarchical/closed;

Open groups

Team member and group reflections are visible to all group members providing deeper learnings and insights where there is value in other peoples opinions and insights in shaping your own reflection for the activity

As well as sharing reflection information, open groups also have social engagement features such as hearts and comments so that your group can join the conversation as part of their reflection process.

Further, when looking at their group reflections feed, team members will be able to see each other’s answers as well as a consolidated view of group highlights and lowlights. Group leaders can also quickly determine who has completed their reflection and who has not.

This configuration is especially useful for teams with shared accountability and support groups that benefit from shared experiences and reflections.

Hierarchical/closed groups

The visibility of team member and group reflections are only visible to the group leader and social engagement features are disabled. In this configuration, groups are a collection of “clients” that should not have visibility of one another, especially useful in counsellor, mentor or personal/life coach engagements.

Reflection Sources

Reflections that are captured for a group come in two forms; self-reflections that are associated with a “group tag” and group reflections distributed by group leaders which we will discuss in more details below.

Group Reflections & Attachments

As mentioned above, group reflections are initiated by group leaders and distributed to all group members. They will appear in each member’s feed and will be shown as “not rated” and will support a member completing and provide highlights and lowlights to the group.

Group reflections also support attachments which are a means of sharing or requesting information from group members.

Share Data

Use attachments to share context for your group members to reflect on. This can be any of the below types of attachments.

These attachments can be used to present useful information, results from team activities, performance data or even motivational images and videos for your group members to reflect upon and learn from.

Request Data

Alternatively, you can provoke thought or capture results from your group members by requesting data. This could be completing a survey, providing a video (of a workout or stretches etc) or cards where people provide data that can then be used by the group leader or group (in open groups) to understand the progress of its members.

A healthy combination of sharing and requesting can lead to positive user engagement while keeping your group members focused on their self-reflection and self-improvement!

Group reports

Group reports provide insights into the overall health of your group, their reflection habits, and their engagement as well as insights into trends comparing reflections and averages across members, weekdays, reflection types and tags.

Leaders can use this to quickly identify group member engagement and use this information to determine the best types of group reflections that should be published.

Historical report data is always available to view trends over time and to be used in discussions with group members.

The vision I have for group reflections is that leaders can better guide and facilitate personal and professional development through shared reflections and accountability. Leaders will be able to connect with their group members on an unparalleled level and where appropriate lean on social induction to encourage positive change across the group; learning from each other’s experiences. Leaders will have access to a framework with which they can use self-reflection as a tool to truly change the lives of their group members: using My Reflections.

There is a lot in this post so let’s summarise, My Reflections can now be used to;

• Allow group/team members to share their reflections with a leader or the group
• Allow leaders to distribute content & attachments for their group/team members to rate and reflect upon
• Allow leaders to request data and encourage reflection from their group/team members that may indicate progress towards a shared or common goal
• Provide leaders with visibility and trends across all of the above through easy to read reporting tools

Let me know what you think, and if you’re a leader do not hesitate to reach out to learn more about how to start using My Reflections with your group members!