Growing A Workplace Group Coaching Programs – with Dom & Priscilla, Group Coaching HQ

In this episode of the HR business marketing podcast, A Better HR Business, Ben speaks with Dominique Mas, Owner and CEO, and Priscilla Lavoie, Head of Marketing at Group Coaching HQ, a company leading the way in bringing human-centric group coaching programs to organizations worldwide.

Group Coaching HQ equips coaches and organizations with the expertise, training, and support needed to lead the future of coaching through impactful, scalable group coaching programs.

The organization provides world-class training, ICF-approved group coaching certification, and practical resources that enable coaches to design and facilitate transformational group coaching experiences with confidence, credibility, and measurable impact.

As a pioneer in the group coaching movement, Group Coaching HQ goes beyond teaching group coaching. It helps shape the future of the profession by empowering coaches to become leaders in an evolving coaching landscape.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Fresh insights on how group coaching builds connection and boosts client engagement
• The role of AI and human-centered approaches in attracting and retaining workplace consulting clients
• What top-performing consulting firms are doing to win clients and prove ROI with group coaching offerings

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About The ‘A Better HR Business’ Podcast

In my HR marketing podcast, I talk with different HR consultants and HR tech companies from around the world to learn about what they do and how they keep their businesses healthy and moving in the right direction.

If you have questions you want to ask me about growing an HR consultancy or marketing for HR tech companies, just let me know or visit the HR marketing services page.

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Enjoy the show!

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Episode Transcript

Episode 316: How To Attract HR Consulting Clients With Group Coaching Programs – with Dom & Priscilla from Group Coaching HQ

Ben [00:00:28]:
Hello everyone. Thanks for joining me again. Great to have you along. And I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation with Dom and Priscilla from a very cool company called Group Coaching HQ. As the name may give away, Group Coaching HQ is the leader in group coaching for organizations. So they partner with HR, talent, L&D, and internal coaches to design, launch, and scale high-impact group coaching programs to strengthen leaders, increase connection, and expand access to coaching across the organization. I’ve used it in different guises in my career, and I think it’s such a powerful thing, but I think it’s underused. So I’m really keen to learn about how the business is growing, how it’s spreading this powerful group coaching concept into organizations.

But firstly, Priscilla and Dom, thank you very much for joining me today. Great to have you here. Dom, let me start with you. Can you tell us what is Group Coaching HQ and what does it do?

Dom [00:01:20]:
Yeah, absolutely. Our work combines strategic consulting, we work with internal coaches. We also deliver group coaching. The idea is to scale coaching, to also keep the human in coaching and create really strong connection in the organization. We know that there are so many great AI bots, AI coaches out there right now, but where they’re missing the mark is connecting people who are literally more and more isolated because of AI. So we found that combinations of AI coaching, one-on-one coaching, and/or group coaching tends to bring people together and reinforce engagement, which also leads to retention. So we have an accredited group coaching certification program that we bring internal coaches through.

They then become accredited by the ICF. And we also really help companies through the consulting piece I mentioned to build their own group coaching programs internally using their own coaches. So we help to create the program, think about whether they should or should not, or whether they want or do not want to include content, how they’re going to measure ROI and impact of the program, whether it’s an add-on to something that already exists. within the organization. So perhaps they already have a leadership development program and we add the group coaching piece to it. I’ll add one more thing, which is what is group coaching? Because often we—

Ben [00:02:59]:
I was just gonna ask, yeah, the difference.

Dom C [00:03:01]:
A lot of people think of group coaching as a mentoring space or a space where people come in to give advice or where a coach comes in with a bunch of content that they’re gonna deliver. That’s not it. So when we think about group coaching, it’s really a space where a group of people who are usually connected by a shared context. So this might be a group of first-time people leaders who get together, usually groups of 6 to 8, and they bring real-life challenges to the group. There, they get to name their challenge, realize first of all that they’re not alone.

Most of the time, everyone in the group is facing the same type of issue, but also they get coached on it, meaning they get asked questions both by the coach and their peers. Our philosophy of it is that the coach is no longer the only coach in the room. Instead, every leader who is part of this group gets to practice asking powerful questions, listening deeply, actively, mirroring what they’re hearing.

It’s a wonderful way to not only develop of course, as a leader, because you’re working through your challenges, but also you’re developing outstanding communication skills that you’re using in the group and then taking outside back to your teams. It’s an expansion, if you like, or a scaling of one-on-one coaching where the coach might be the only coach in the room.

Ben [00:04:30]:
Oh, fantastic. One of my favorite ever HR projects or L&D projects was in a business that was underperforming. And there had been some redundancies, things like that. So it’s about cost cutting and improving efficiencies across different locations. Yeah, we got together different groups of not first-time, but certainly frontline leaders, you know, the supervisory level in different locations, took them away offsite, the classic thing. But the amount of learning and co-coaching or cross-coaching, group coaching that people were doing just from every topic, whether it be I’ve got someone who’s difficult in my group through to I know we’re supposed to be cutting costs, but I don’t know where to start. So you had people sharing ideas and stuff like that. So that really helped because you had this driving force in the organization pushing cost efficiencies and things like that.

So Priscilla, let me ask you, that’s an example of where group coaching was utilized for efficiency and cost cutting to help turn a business around. What have you seen, or how have you seen businesses use group coaching?

Priscilla [00:05:27]:
Well, I think for pure connection as well. So Dom was saying how AI has affected the world of coaching and learning and development. I think one of the biggest ripple effects has been an increase in loneliness. These AI-focused programs are really great in terms of scale, but in terms of depth, they really don’t cut it as much aș individual coaching or group coaching would on a personal level. So I think group coaching really helps with connecting people across the organization who, might not have an opportunity to speak with one another on a daily basis or even weekly or monthly basis ever. In that sense, pure connection is really strengthened through group coaching.

Ben [00:06:06]:
Yeah, that’s a great point. I did a program run by Google a few years back and we were paired up with people, but we’re all in different locations, but it was an intense program. And then afterwards it goes to a group coaching model. It was a great way to connect people and then keep them connected and keep that coaching going on. So yeah, I really liked that. Dom, how does the Group Coaching HQ actually work?

Dom [00:06:25]:
So it depends on where they’re at in their group coaching journey. It might be that they have internal coaches already. Who are not qualified or trained to do group coaching. So in that case, we might offer either to have them join our external certification program, so we train them externally, or if they have enough coaches in their organization, we might offer a specific cohort for their coaches that we can then customize to their needs and their type of coaching they do in the organization.

It might be that the company just wants to offload the whole thing. And so then we can go in and create group coaching programs in partnership with them and have some of our coaches actually lead the group coaching sessions, in which case we handle everything from start to finish and work with them to decide what they want to measure, how they want to measure it, what sort of content they might want to include if they want to include content or if they want to keep it as pure group coaching where the content comes from the room and the people in the room. It might be that they simply need some support to make sure that their program is cohesive and coherent. In that case, we might do a little bit of consulting and support them in creating the infrastructure for the program.

What we tend to do is really speak to someone, ask them a lot of questions, really try to understand what they’re trying to achieve with the group coaching program. For us and for anyone who works in L&D, that’s the number one piece, is understanding what are you trying to do, what are you trying to solve by using this methodology, because perhaps group coaching is not the right fit for what you’re trying to solve.

And so our first step is always, let’s try to really understand what you’re trying to do and see whether group coaching is the right methodology or the right way to go about solving this problem? And if it is, then we can partner and decid how do we want to do this? And what are the services that will help you best?

Ben [00:08:36]:
In my view, group coaching is underutilized across organizations. So what is the current status?

Dom [00:08:41]:
We did a study at the end of 2025, walking into 2026, and a few things really seem to define the landscape from our findings. About 60% of the organizations that filled out our study are actually currently implementing group coaching in one way or another. That’s really interesting. And another 20% was planning to offer it at some point. That was a really interesting point to us. The other pieces were leadership development is where it’s mostly used. But I will say I have also seen it used to support, for example, parents returning to the workplace. I worked with a company that offered a group coaching program for women leaders specifically to support their growth and to support their career development.

So lots of different ways, but it seems that leadership development is really where it’s mostly used by organizations. And your example earlier actually fits perfectly into what we found as well, which is about 66% of the existing programs are for new managers. What we found is that seems to be where there’s more of a need really to bring people together because a lot of them are starting remote. They haven’t created that network yet of peers, even sometimes of mentors that you would in organizations in the past. New managers seem to be the entry point. What we found in terms of implementation is that it’s not skepticism about value. It seems that it’s very clear that the value of group coaching, they understand what it can bring. The other two pieces were people wanted proven templates, if you like.

So they wanted to know that this formula works, which is interesting to me because every organization is different. Depending on the goal of the program, the structure of it is going to be different. And then ROI, they want to know like, what’s the ROI? Everybody needs to be able to make the business case. So everyone needs to be able to say: this is how much money it’s going to save us, or this is how much cost it’s going to avoid. Those were the things that were important.

Ben [00:10:57]:
That’s really interesting about what you’re saying about the fears or the hesitations. We know it’s good, we think it would work, but are the people trained properly? Yes, I’ve got someone who can hold a group session or run a presentation, but it’s very different to facilitating and managing ongoing group coaching.

Dom [00:11:10]:
Oh, certainly.

Ben [00:11:11]:
And then also there’s probably differences in locations. So for instance, I was in the States where every manager was kind of showing off, we did this, we’re awesome. And then someone else said, nah, but we are even better. We’re awesome at this. And then in a different location, different country, actually, the people in the group were saying, oh, I made this mistake and here’s what I learned. And everyone was sharing that and learning together. No one was judging. So it’s interesting.

You’ve got different contexts, seniorities. I think it takes professionalism and expertise to run group coaching properly.

Dom [00:11:41]:
And also because I’ve run groups where I had all these personalities together in the same room.

Before we actually run a program, we always say it’s important to have an orientation where participants learn how to be, if you like, in the group together. So they understand how to ask questions. They understand what the group is about. And so we kind of level set before the program begins, but still it’s really cool. I love it to have all these different types of people together. And the goal is that they all get to that learning piece.

Ben [00:12:21]:
The question, maybe it’s a tricky question, but the classic thing about coaching or completely different, I know about counseling, it’s about what’s said in the room stays in the room and it’s all private and stuff like that. You know, with the evolution of data collection and AI, I think there probably are insights that are business related that are not personal or private that over time you could see trends about our best leaders do certain things which produce even better results. Is there a way of capturing that data through group coaching?

Dom [00:12:47]:
Yeah, it’s a really hot topic. Several things to consider. So one is Do you want to record the conversations or not? And that’s such a big question. Interestingly, most of the organizations that we work with do not want to record because they want safety in place. And so what tends to happen is that the data is recorded through self-reported questionnaires that happen after each session.

So we’ll ask the participants: What challenges did you work on during this session? What was impactful for you? What solution are you going to implement? So we ask this sort of question and then we extract the data from there.

And another case might be that the participants and organization are okay with an AI being in the room making notes, and then that’s translated anonymously, of course, into larger themes.

But I think the key, whatever the decision, is to create what we call this data governance protocol, where before we start the program, the participants, the sponsors of the program, the participants’ managers, everyone knows exactly who has access to what data. And it’s signed and it’s given to all the stakeholders that are going to be a part of this program. So that there’s that psychological safety established right from the start. Because if you don’t do that and people are asking themselves, well, if I say this, how is this gonna be used? And so we can’t have a well-functioning group if there isn’t psychological safety and trust in the room.

Ben [00:14:31]:
No, but also I like the fact that you got the option of the group questionnaires. Everyone does provide data afterwards because It’s good for collecting data and insights and ideas and stuff, but equally it avoids the power of the pen. If one person is in charge of taking notes, then it’s their viewpoint on what happened and what didn’t happen and what was said and what was not said. And so you can miss stuff. And also it’s one person’s perspective on what’s important and what’s not. So that’s very interesting. Priscilla, let me ask you, with the underutilization of group coaching itself, what are you doing to sort of grow the size of the pie? Maybe you could share some thoughts on that.

Priscilla [00:15:01]:
Yeah, so I’ve been with Group Coaching HQ for about 3 years now. So we’ve tried a lot of different things. What we’ve discussed a lot about AI and how that’s changing the world of coaching and L&D. It’s also changing the world of marketing so much. So the big AI boom happened amidst my time at Group Coaching HQ. So that’s also changed things with us. I would say overall, as a result of AI, the marketing that has worked best for us has been the most human and trust-based approaches. So things like events, we’ve done masterminds, we’ve done demos, speaking engagements at events. At the end of the day, people want to work with people they have interacted with, not just, you know, clicked on an ad for. So I think having that face time is really important. Thought leadership has also worked really well for us and for increasing the size of the pie, as you mentioned, giving insights to our audiences on the world of group coaching and the benefits for organizations. Things like our landscape study really helped with that. I would say also on, you know, the human note, founder visibility. So Dom is really the face of our organization. That’s really helped with referrals, warm introductions, and just putting a face on the organization that helps people trust more than ever. I think founder visibility is also quite important.

Ben [00:16:23]:
So much good stuff in there. But yeah, the founder visibility thing. I’ve known lots of businesses where it’s all about the corporate structure. We’re a business and so we don’t want to do that because that’s not what businesses do. So I think it’s really smart for any business where it does raise the profile. In fact, I had the Franklin Covey company, you know, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, that company on, and they actually have a little structure with— they’ve got about 7 or 12 executives and they’ve built little mini thought leadership empires around each person. They produce books, the videos, they all had their own little podcast series, stuff like that. But it’s a whole system where it’s just around some personalities.

It’s a fascinating approach as opposed to the cold corporate thing. Now we know this from LinkedIn where if a company posts something, it might get some likes or whatever, but if the CEO founder posts it, very different reactions. And absolutely, you’ve listed a lot of different things and yet the personal touch stuff, the masterminds, events, speaking, stuff like that. How do you choose from all of that? Because it’s so hard, right?

Priscilla [00:17:19]:
I mean, we try a lot, we try and fail sometimes, but that’s how you learn. That’s how you figure out what is working and, and what’s not. We do a lot of analytical tracking as well. So we’re very data-driven. Every month we do a pretty comprehensive report of everything that we’ve tried in marketing and we try to figure out what’s working, what’s not, what we should do differently, what we should be trying. I think without tracking, you’re working quite aimlessly. So being data-driven is super important.

Ben [00:17:47]:
And then just sort of last piece on that is what would be your advice to others in the broad, let’s call HR workplace-related business side of things in terms of marketing growth?

Priscilla [00:17:56]:
I think some of the tried and true marketing strategies or tactics still apply, you know, to every business. I would say get really clear about your product-market fit, narrow your focus as much as possible to sharpen your approach, sharpen your messaging, try everything. You have to be able to reach your audiences wherever they are. So multi-touch, multi-channel approaches need to be the way to go. You want to meet your buyer at the journey step that they’re in as well. We work very much with the buyer journey stages. So awareness, consideration, decision. At the awareness stage, we might be talking about what is group coaching for those who are not so familiar and trying to support with more educational type pieces.

At the consideration stage, we might be helping a buyer understand the ROI of working with us. At the decision stage, we might be helping with a tailored proposal for internal buy-in, really supporting your buyer, your audience with what they need at each stage of the buyer’s journey is really crucial. And then being everywhere they are with the right message at the right time is also important.

Ben [00:19:04]:
And that’s really smart. I love the stages and especially at the end, the decision-making stage where you’re helping them get the internal buy-in because a lot of consultancies and HR tech companies, they might say we have a free this or a free that or an audit or whatever. They forget that there’s a reputational cost for the HR or L&D leader inside an organization. If they bring something in, they purchase a system, a software, a program, it’s on their shoulders for this thing to fail or succeed. And they look like an idiot if it doesn’t work. So it’s more than just the nuts and bolts of a system. It’s the support that they get both in convincing, then implementing. So I know that that’s what Group Coaching HQ is really good at.

So Dom, to wrap up with the whole bell curve or 80/20 rule, there are certain problems or situations, use cases that might be used more often for Group Coaching HQ. I’m curious, would it be the frontline leader, first-time leader thing, or is it something else that brings people in? Because then I’d be saying to you as a follow-up question, if people are interested in working with you, what should they be doing next?

Dom [00:20:03]:
I think I mentioned earlier, one of the number one uses is really first-time people leaders. And I would add in connection with some sort of leadership development content. So they’ll get some sort of concept explained to them, and then they’ll go out and try it out and then come back to the group coaching session and say, that didn’t work so well. Or let’s say it’s about delegation, which we all are given great advice on how to delegate. And then they come to group coaching session and they’re like, well, I still can’t do it. And we dig into it and they realize that actually it’s a question of trust. Do I trust the people I’m trying to delegate to? And if I don’t, I will not delegate. So, it’s really that first-time people manager that tends to be the best use case for group coaching.

The second one is actually the level above, which is the director level, because it gets lonelier and lonelier the further you get to the top. It tends to be a space where people do not necessarily connect with others in different departments, for example, and they don’t get an opportunity to hear, well, how is this department doing it, and how can I use what they’re doing in my situation? So it also brings about innovation. Usually in those groups, we tend to see less content because they’ve been through the content at the previous level of leadership. And so what they need more is the connection and the thinking together.

Those two, I would say, are the biggest ones. And if people want to operate group coaching programs, whether it’s with us or within their own organization, I would say: train your coaches, make sure that they understand what group coaching is. And then of course contact us and we can help you do that. And also back to the why, identify what it is that you want group coaching for and identify whether it is the right intervention at the right time for the right people and for the right reasons. And if you can do that, then you can run a successful program.

But if anyone wants to work with us, I think the best way is to contact us. Our website is super easy, www.groupcoachinghq.com. And reach out to us and we’ll be happy to connect and support you with whatever we can.

Ben [00:22:28]:
You know, you hear about best practice, but I used to talk a lot about current best practice because it’s constantly evolving. And so if you have a group coaching situation, as you said, Dom, it’s not about training. Here’s the information, now use the information and off you go. Group coaching means you’re all learning of each other and then current best practice will change. So someone will actually develop and be able to share that across an organization. So for a CEO, for a C-suite thinking about group coaching, the benefits are huge because you’re constantly improving. To Priscilla’s point, you’re binding the employee groups, so you’re improving your retention, your motivational factors, all the good stuff. So I would think better business results, better employee engagement and motivation, et cetera. Could you remind everyone of the website, please, Dom?

Dom [00:23:08]:
It’s easy: www.groupcoachinghq.com.

Ben [00:23:11]:
Easy peasy. And they can find the state of Group Coaching in Organizations in 2026, the report there somewhere?

Dom[00:23:18]:
At the moment, there is a banner. You cannot miss it. We also have an Insights page. If you click on that and you can do a search, and if you type in landscape study, you’ll find it as well as other materials, lots of other ideas, ways to build programs, ways to prove ROI. So lots of tools that can be used there. I believe we have a link to our ROI calculator for organizations. So lots of different tools that are on that Insights page, thanks to Priscilla.

Ben [00:23:49]:
Well, Dom, Priscilla, thank you both so much for sharing your insights, advice, and also just sharing about what Group Coaching HQ is and does and has coming down the line. So thank you both again.

Dom [00:23:59]:
Thank you so much for having us.

Topics covered: how to attract consulting clients, HR consultants, marketing for HR consultants, running a workplace consulting business, LinkedIn for consultants

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