The following is a conversation between Christy Uffelman, Founder & CEO of EDGE Leadership, and Author of PEER Revolution: Group Coaching that Ignites the Power of People, and Denver Frederick, the Host of The Business of Giving.


Denver: The world is changing. Now is the time for an innovative, collaborative learning approach to help people discover what they need to know and when they need to know it in a way that seamlessly maximizes and magnifies human potential. One of the most exciting ways of doing this and one that is gaining popularity fast is peer group coaching.

And here to walk us through it is one of the foremost experts on the topic; she is Christy Uffelman, the founder and CEO of EDGE Leadership, and the author of PEER Revolution: Group Coaching that Ignites the Power of People. Welcome to The Business of Giving, Christy.

Christy Uffelman, Founder & CEO of EDGE Leadership, and Author of PEER Revolution: Group Coaching that Ignites the Power of People

Christy: Thank you for having me, Denver. And hello, everyone. I’m grateful to be here with you.

Denver: You know, most people, Christy, I think they’re familiar with coaching, but they’re familiar with it as the one-on-one kind, you know, whether it be a peer-to-peer or a coach with a client. But they’re not that familiar with group coaching. What is the peer coaching group model?

Christy: So, the first thing that I would say, I’ve been in coaching now for more than 20 years, and when I first became a certified coach, the concept of group coaching was there, but the concept looked a little bit like a wheel and a spoke.

So, the traditional thought process around group coaching was you would have one coach and a tight-knit group of six, maybe max eight, sometimes four people. And think about it as if the spotlight was on the coach and that coach was holding the space… in coaching, we call that “the container,” holding the container for all six of those people. And all six of those people were looking to the coach to coach them one-on-one in a group setting.

Denver: Got it.

Christy: That’s what it used to be. What I trademarked in 2014, and what I’ve been doing for the last 10 years with EDGE Leadership is turning group coaching inside out. My thought process was: What if the whole of the responsibility wasn’t on the coach? And how could we teach people… operations leaders… to become coaches themselves to coach one another?

And in that way, you exponentially increase your results because we start at 24 people in a cohort, and we’ve had as many as a thousand. So, you could have hundreds and hundreds of people coaching one another, where the coach simply holds the container for the group to coach one another.

Denver: Now, that’s a multiplier effect. No question about it. You know, in reading your book, it was pretty obvious that at the heart of it is curating connection and belonging.

Christy: Amen, Denver.

“And so, as leaders inside our organizations, we have a responsibility to not just create, you know, old-school… we used to call them “safe spaces”; now, we call them “brave spaces,” where people feel that they can show up bravely as themselves, where people feel like they can show up imperfectly and have hard conversations. All of that really matters when we’re talking about belonging.”

Denver: And that is such a big thing right now, and particularly since the pandemic. Provide us with a brief overview of what you mean by that and what it entails.

Christy: So, when you think about connection and belonging, belonging is that I can show up as me, that I don’t have to code-switch, that I don’t have to be something that I’m not. So, for someone like me, that’s super important around the concept of authenticity, for someone who is a woman of color, that concept where I just used that language of code-switching… or someone in the LGBTQ community, super important.

You know, and as a white cis-het woman, I don’t think as often about things like that; that’s part of my privilege, but it happens all the time for those around us. It happens all the time for folks on our teams, in our organizations, in our families, where they cannot show up as who they are authentically because it’s not safe.

And so, as leaders inside our organizations, we have a responsibility to not just create, you know, old-school… we used to call them “safe spaces”; now, we call them “brave spaces,” where people feel that they can show up bravely as themselves, where people feel like they can show up imperfectly and have hard conversations. All of that really matters when we’re talking about belonging.

And we can’t ever talk about belonging without also talking about inclusion because when I feel like I belong, I’m truly included. Now, the trouble that most leaders have right now is we’re not talking about belonging and inclusion. We’re talking about diversity. And that is a whole ‘nother word that is also important, but that’s not what my book is about.

My book is about: how do we intentionally curate the space, whether that’s in-person or hybrid or virtually, where people feel like they can authentically show up as themselves.

Denver: Yeah. And, you know, the funny part about that is that diversity is important for innovation, but if you can’t show up as who you are, you blunt the benefits of that diversity because it all gets homogenized, and people don’t really speak about what’s on their mind, so they can’t be authentic.

You know, your book, PEER Revolution, that PEER is in all caps. What do the letters stand for?

Christy: I’d be happy to tell you that. At some point, circle me back around to the concept of innovation and vulnerability, because I have a few things I’d love to share on that.

Denver: Okey, dokey.

Christy: So, PEER. You know, when I first came up with the model of peer-to-peer mentoring, and then from there, I went to peer-to-peer coaching, two different things, but both of them have this acronym of PEER, and they both involve it.

So, P stands for partnership. It’s the idea that it’s not all about me. Instead, it’s about me in partnership with another. We show up together as partners, contributing to one another as much as we are allowing ourselves, and giving ourselves permission to be contributed to while we are holding one another accountable.

The first E is experience. It unfolds based on, and when I say it, I mean the peer mentoring or coaching circle, it unfolds based on my individual outcomes as a whole person, personal or professional. So, some peer groups are about growing the professional. And so, it could be an intact team underneath a leader or multiple teams underneath a managing director, for example.

Or it could also be, you could leverage peer technology as in your Girl Scout troop. I was a Girl Scout leader for many years. I’ve leveraged it in my personal life around parents of transgender kids. It’s based on where you want to grow as a person as well as… because it is a group coaching experience, the outcomes of the group as a whole.

So, again, going back to: I’m a leader of an intact team. Yes, it’s about where my people each want to grow this year, but it’s also about where I want to take my folks and what are the metrics of success that we’re measuring and our productivity and the results we want to deliver for the company. So, partnership, experience.

Second E, exposure. This is about practicing vulnerability and embracing new ideas and innovation through mentoring and coaching. It’s about exposure to innovation, and contributing to and being contributed to around this infinite flow of knowledge. We think that our knowledge is just what I as an individual can come up with when I’m lying awake at night with my challenges. But when we give ourselves permission, Denver, to be vulnerable with one another, we open ourselves up to ideas from other people around our challenges.

And then, the last word, R, reflection. As a coach, super passionate about the R, I’m just going to say. You know, reflection is vital for people to look at how we are currently showing up, how we are getting in our own way, and what we’re going to choose to do differently. It’s creating this space of learning and growth.

Denver: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. No learning without reflection, but we are so busy, and we like to perceive ourselves as being so busy– onto the next thing. We never take that pause and reflect, and therefore we continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.

You mentioned a moment ago something about the container, and I know you can’t have group coaching without that container. Tell listeners what you mean by a container.

Christy: So, container is a term in the coaching world, and you may often hear folks talk about, “Oh, well, you need to build a container.” The best way to describe what a container is is to identify the absence of it.

So, harken back, 1997, 2003, and traditional corporate training classes. Imagine you have an instructor in front of the room; they’re standing in front of a podium; they’re PowerPointing you to death. You’ve got a binder in front of you; that is called Training. And for years and years and years, that’s how we looked at adult development in the workplace.

And if you think about it, training is what we do with dogs. It really truly is. And, I say, that in my career trajectory, I started out in medical equipment sales with Johnson & Johnson years and years ago, right out of college, I fell in love quite accidentally with this concept of adult development because I was a part of a great mentoring program at J&J, where good sales reps mentored new hires; good division managers mentored good sales reps, all the way up through that experience.

And so, I was a part of lots of training classes with lots of big companies in my 20s, and what they miss is a focus on… not the information, the data. My job as a trainer is to teach you something that you don’t know, and what they miss is knowledge. So, if you think about innovation or data as a lot of dots on a grid, information is here and it’s here, and it’s here.

And that information is different based on my purview as an individual, my perspective, my worldview, where I’ve come from in my life. That’s what I can see. I can see my dot, and I can see the dots around me. When we have a container, what that does is it connects the dots. And now, that information becomes knowledge because we have pathways or conduits.

So, a container is, and I don’t refer to it… I used to refer to it as a safe space, but I have since, as I have been on my anti-racist journey, I have learned the language around a brave space instead. And so, it is about intentionally constructing a brave space where people can practice vulnerability and share their real-life personal and professional challenges.

So, what I mean by that, again, going back to what a container is not in a typical training class, we used to role-play. Do you remember how we would do that? Here’s some information. Now, pretend with somebody else and apply it. And this concept of peer mentoring is all around… guess what: you have challenges right now that you are lying awake at night thinking about.

So, let’s apply this knowledge to a real-life challenge, a challenge where you have written a story that one of your colleagues at work is sabotaging you. All right, let’s apply that knowledge to that situation. Or your partnership at home with your spouse isn’t where it was pre-pandemic times, and it’s impacting your level of fulfillment and happiness in life.

And you know you have a missing conversation with them, but you don’t quite know how to begin. How do we talk about that? When we can give ourselves permission to bring our full selves into the workplace because there is a brave space and a container that the leader has built for us… gosh, that’s where, my grandma would say, we start cooking with oil.

“Coaching is different where mentoring is an unequal power relationship; coaching is an equal power relationship.

And coaches don’t give advice. Coaches don’t tell you what to do. Great coaches ask questions that help you critically think through the challenge that you’re facing, and you come up with your own solutions. That’s what I love about coaching.”

Denver: There you go. Yeah. You know, I think of a metaphor sometimes about communication, and it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear. And when I think about all those training programs that I used to go to, you look back on them and it was really what the presenter was giving us. It was a curriculum, with no interest as to whether we were going to absorb or act on any of it. They had themselves a great curriculum.

So, let’s talk about one-on-one coaching, and let’s talk about this peer group coaching model. What are the benefits of the latter compared to the former?

Christy: So, for me, when I talk about one-on-one coaching, and what I will say in the coaching industry, and I’ve been in coaching now for nearly 25 years, so I’ve made this my life’s work: one-on-one coaching is still the gold standard. It will always be the gold standard because there is nothing like the relationship that is co-created between a great coach and a coachee who is ready to transform their lives. It’s still one of my favorite things to do without a doubt.

I have had the privilege of having multiple coaches over the course of my career, who have continually called me forth to be my best self, both personally and professionally. And I think that’s really important for us as leaders and as coaches, whether we’re internal coaches… which I spent seven years in the construction industry as an in-house coach, or whether we’re external coaches and we have our own practice, and we parachute into our clients.

It’s really important for us to always be in the space of our own development. You work with a coach to remember what it feels like to be in that uncomfortable position of change. Because as coaches, that’s our job to curate that space of growth for our clients. And here’s the thing about comfort zones– nothing ever grows there. So, it’s our job to get our clients to be uncomfortable.

So, that said, you will never hear me ever disparage one-on-one coaching because I think it is really important. The reason I wrote the book during the pandemic was because… in the last 10 years that I have founded EDGE Leadership and been doing this work, working with Fortune 500 companies to create peer-mentoring circles and peer-coaching circles inside their organizations, what I’ve learned is that we’ve accumulated some amazing best practices. 

We’ve had 10,000 leaders go through our group coaching experiences over the last 10 years. And it felt inauthentic and selfish to not share that with the world. Up until 2020, we had a team of six coaches, and we were going out and delivering these models inside the biggest of the big companies, and then the pandemic hit.

And I could see from my point of view here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that we had a crisis of connection and belonging. And our programming since 2013 has always been hybrid, so 75% of our group coaching experiences were virtual over this crazy platform called Zoom, that I found in 2013. And I tried out BlueJeans, I tried out Citrix and WebEx, and I’m like, Zoom, I love this. Let’s do it.

And I had a heck of a time trying to convince organizations that you could curate connection and belonging virtually. You know, we still had the biggest of the big companies coming back and saying, “All right, it’s a nine-month group coaching experience for our high potentials. Well, we want four of the sessions in-person.”

And I’m like: you don’t really need to fly everybody in and pay for all of this, but all right, let’s do three, let’s try three in-person. But I share all of that, circling back around, because what we’ve learned in that experience is that, going back to that idea of one-on-one coaching versus group coaching, the coach comes in, has an experience with the cohort of people, and then the coach leads.

When you intentionally curate group coaching where people are coaching one another, where people are mentoring their peers, then you have this space of development and innovation that is happening in the in-between. So, if we have two-hour, one-hour group coaching experiences, we have two days, we have six months, we have nine months, for me, the magic is in the in-between.

It’s not in the actual sessions that the coach is a part of, or in the case of if you, as a leader, are reading the book and you want to deploy peer-coaching circles on your team or in your organization, it’s not about you. It’s about what you create that they can connect with in the in-between when they are following up on each other’s requests for support, when they’re checking in around each other’s challenges, when they’re contributing to one another.

Denver: Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned best practices before. Give us one.

Christy: Oh gosh, let me think a minute. A best practice around peer coaching?

Denver: Yeah.

Christy: So, the first best practice that I would say is: be clear about the difference between coaching and mentoring because they often get confused, and then you can also throw in that role of an advocate or a sponsor. So, oftentimes, I think it’s really important to have clarity around what those three roles are and how we can be them for one another as peers.

We all have heard, as leaders and experts in our fields, how we can mentor, how we can advocate and create opportunity. But as peers, I think the distinction between the three of them is really important.

So, what I would share is, the first is this concept of a peer mentor. We often think of mentors as someone who is older than us. That is not necessarily the case. I am being mentored right now by a 23-year-old on TikTok.

Denver: Sure, yeah. Reverse Mentoring is big these days, yeah.

Christy: Right. But in my mind, I don’t even call it “reverse mentoring” because that plays into that bias that your mentor needs to be older than you.  A mentor is someone who simply has more domain knowledge than me.

So, for example, you have more domain knowledge of the best practices of how to build and sustain an amazing not-for-profit organization. I don’t have that same lived experience. So, if I wanted to do that, it would behoove me to find a Denver in my life and ask for best practices. I have domain knowledge around this concept of group coaching, right? So, it doesn’t matter what our ages are, it doesn’t matter, our age. What matters is our domain knowledge.

So, as a leader, as a person in your organization, you know, we have to first identify where our skills gaps are, because when we identify our skills gaps through the lens of: what are the goals that I want to achieve, where I want to take my career, what I want to do next, then we can say: All right, these are my gaps in order through the lens of here’s where I want to go, and how can I find someone who can help me build out that knowledge.

So, we often think of mentors only in the professional sense, but we also need them in our personal lives. I am a brand new empty-nester. I have been plugging into my peer mentors who are a little farther along on that journey.

What worked for you? How did you let go of your kid? When did you stop texting them every day for proof of life? How did you reengage back with your partner when you’ve allowed your relationship to become a child-centric marriage? All of that means that I need knowledge that I don’t have, and when I can plug into people– I’ve-been-there, done-that people, who are a little farther along the journey– I get mentoring. That’s mentoring.

Coaching is a little bit different. So, think of mentoring as an unequal power relationship. The power is in the mentor to share knowledge with the mentee, and most mentors aren’t looking for anything in exchange. Most mentors, can you think about it, Denver, who you are mentoring right now?

We mentor because people have mentored us. We mentor because we want to give back. We want to see someone succeed. If I’m being really honest and authentic, I mentor because it makes me feel competent. It makes me feel confident to feel like I have knowledge to give. Coaching is different. Where mentoring is an unequal power relationship, coaching is an equal power relationship.

And coaches don’t give advice. Coaches don’t tell you what to do. Great coaches ask questions that help you critically think through the challenge that you’re facing, and you come up with your own solutions. That’s what I love about coaching. And I have been teaching it now for 18 years; coaching is an incredibly teachable skill.

It is something that anyone can learn how to do. I’ve built an entire company teaching operations leaders how to become coaches. I’ve taught coal miners how to become coaches 800 feet below the earth’s surface in a coal mine; engineers, you name it. Anyone can learn how to coach someone else, but that’s the distinction.

Peer mentoring is about advice-sharing. Peer coaching is about asking thoughtful questions and companioning someone on their own journey. So, coaching involves a level of empathy that mentoring necessarily doesn’t lean into. And then you’ve got this third, because you asked me about that best practice: you’ve got mentor; you’ve got coach. It’s also really important for us as peers to be advocates for one another.

So, advocates, we also often think about: it’s very similar to a mentor in that it’s an unequal power relationship. And instead of an advocate, also known as a sponsor, those words are interchangeable, instead of where a mentor shares knowledge, an advocate or a sponsor shares opportunity.

So, for us, when we think about the concept of peer advocacy, this is where we’re in a meeting, or we’re in a conversation, and we hear an opportunity that we know is aligned with one of our peer’s goals in their career or to achieve their results, or something they’re being held accountable for by their boss.

And it’s where we give them the opportunity to plug in, and we say, you know, if you and I were talking, and I’d be like, “You know what, Denver? I really hear that you’re struggling with that. Do you know who could help? Let me introduce you to Shanice Taylor because she has great depth and expertise. Here are some of the results I’ve seen. Would you like me to make that connection?” That’s an example of peer advocacy in action.

Denver: Cool. You know, for organizations that have done the peer group coaching model, how do they measure success? How do they take a look at that and say: Hey, this seems to be working. What have you observed? What are the metrics that they have used?

Christy: So, I’ll give you two answers to that, one from my experience as a group coach for a company bringing us in. And then I’m also going to share what I have heard and learned since I published the book last year from folks who have read the book and are doing it on their own without hiring EDGE Leadership to come in.

So, you know, our work as an organization is focused on, how do I want to say this, we work with leaders, teams and EBRGs, so employee business resource groups, inside of large organizations to build peer mentoring and coaching circles, inside companies, or sometimes across industries, to drive promotion and mobility and retention, and their goal is to build a sustainable, diverse talent pipeline.

So, we are often brought in through the lens of high potential leadership development programs, and companies have very specific metrics that they are looking for– usually mobility, retention, engagement– those are the big drivers. We’re the company that companies will call when they’ve hired an organization, and they recognize they have a problem.

“We’re bleeding our female talent at the senior manager level,” for example. Or, “We have zero non-white individuals, you know, at the executive level. What can we be doing differently. We know we need to do something, but we don’t know how to fix it.”  So, those are the metrics that companies hire us for.

What has been super fun is since I published the book, companies and individuals finding me on social media and sharing their stories of how they’ve applied it. And, if you recall, this is why I wrote the book.

So, the book is kind of like… my husband’s name is Kevin, and he teased me, it was like my tell-all book, because it was during the pandemic, and I’m like: We have found a key, not the key, but we have found a key to the kingdom of curating connection and belonging. And it, a hundred percent, works in virtual settings.

How do I share this with the rest of the world? Let’s put out the model. Let’s put out the best practices. Let’s include a reflection guide, because every chapter in the book says: All right, how do you take what you just learned and apply it in your situation? And what I’ve found that has been so beautiful is some organizations have taken it around onboarding and said: We want to apply it for: we’ve brought on all these people remotely during the pandemic, we’ve never met in person.  “How do we create the space for peer mentoring because we need that piece of sharing best practices and learning from people who are a little farther along in the journey?” I’ve been with the company eight months, I’ve been with the company two years. Both of those perspectives are super helpful to me as a new hire.

And so, the metrics that those organizations have been using that I’ve seen are first of all retention: Are you keeping your people one year out?  is a big one, but they’re also looking at the productivity and the goals that each new hire is being held accountable to with their managers.

Are they hitting their goals, and what does that look like? We’ve also talked with leaders who have brought it in around simply knowledge transfer. So, if you think about knowledge transfer inside an organization, what I mean by that, there’s horizontal knowledge transfer, and then there’s a vertical knowledge transfer.

Denver: Right.

Christy: Horizontal knowledge transfer, the best way that I can use to describe it is think about the concept of a labyrinth, Denver. And, you know, I’m moving through the labyrinth, and I come up against certain barriers and obstacles that through my own resourcefulness and tenacity, I climb up over and I get to the other side.

What I don’t realize is that I have other peers in the organization facing the same obstacles, and they, too, are solving it on their own. And here’s what we know about a labyrinth, no one successfully navigates it alone. Here’s the other thing that we know about a labyrinth: there are certain barriers and obstacles that I, as a woman, would face in a male-dominated industry that you as a white man wouldn’t.

And there are additional barriers and obstacles that women of color face, that the LGBTQ plus community face, that a cis het woman like me simply won’t face. And how do we create an intentional space to curate horizontal knowledge transfer, whether that’s across an EBRG in an organization, whether that’s across different departments or regions for a large not-for-profit, for example?

You know, how do we curate that connection? The other piece, and there’s a whole chapter in the book on this, that is also important is this concept of vertical knowledge transfer. And I feel like I really want to share with you what that is because I think that’s another great best practice when you ask me about what are some best practices about this model. Peer learning has an inherent limitation. We don’t know what we don’t know.

Denver: That’s right.

Christy: Imagine. Go back to the labyrinth, right? We’re locking arms, we’re moving through and we’re like, okay, here we’re going through… dead end. Keep going straight. And then somebody pokes their head out of a corner that looks like a dead end to me, but it’s actually a corner. And they say, “Yo, over here, come this way.”  And so, we all come.

Those are the leaders that we would traditionally think of as mentors. They’re people who are farther along on the journey. They’ve been through this part of the labyrinth. We also… it’s so important in our organizations to tap into that vertical knowledge transfer, where we find the people that are a little farther ahead to share their best practices and lessons learned and advice with the group.

So, inside an organization, here’s what that could look like. It’s like taking someone in your senior leadership level. So, if you’re in a large not-for-profit, that’s your C-suite. If you’re in a smaller not-for-profit, that’s the director. Maybe it’s also tapping into your board. You know, I sit on several boards, and I have absolutely been tapped to share best practices with some of the staff members at times.

So, it’s thinking about, I call them your “been there, done that leaders,” who are a little farther along in whatever content is relevant to the peer group. So, you know, we talk about everybody is on their individual, personal and professional journey. And then as leaders, it’s our responsibility to also identify what are the outcomes I want for my whole team.

You know, for 2023, I want to work on collaboration. For 2023, I want to work on inclusion and belonging. I want my people to feel like they belong, even though we come from vastly different backgrounds and experiences and race and ethnicity and across the gender spectrum, because it is a spectrum, not a binary, right? You know, all of these things.

And if that’s our outcome, then how do we find, what I call guest mentors. Those leaders that are at a different level, who are super passionate about that particular topic, who can come and share their best practices with the whole group. So, instead of one-on-one mentoring, your leaders, those guest mentors, are sharing their best practices in a facilitated dialogue with the entire team or peer group that the team or peer group shares their outcomes, their questions.

You prep the guest mentors ahead of time, and you facilitate as the team leader or as the coach, whatever the role is that you’re playing, a conversation where I, as a guest mentor, get to share my experiences, but then I’m also getting feedback and perspective from the cohort at large, which I apply in my own life to do better… which it’s an amazing feedback loop to watch, truly.

“I believe that in order to grow the leader, we need to grow the person. And take this concept of leadership development and turn it inside out.”

“…it’s that concept of : Forget the gray-haired consultant standing at the podium PowerPointing you to death. And instead, it is about creating a fabric with your peers around our whole lives, because who we are is how we lead.”

Denver: I bet it is. Well, learning certainly is a 360 exercise that comes in all different places, in all different forms and shapes. Let me close with this. There’s so much going on right now in terms of the world that you’re in, but what do you see as the future of coaching, and particularly the future trends of peer group coaching?

Christy: So, I pride myself on being on the leading edge. I was talking about group coaching. I started my first company at 27 years old. It was called Red Zebra. And I was talking about group coaching before anyone other than coaches knew what existed.

So, I believe that in order to grow the leader, we need to grow the person. And take this concept of leadership development, and turn it inside out. And that’s a Kevin Cashman quote, by the way. Don’t quote me on that one.

Leadership development needs to be turned inside out to grow the person, to grow the leader. So, what I see as the future of group coaching is we’re going to see more personal development finding its way into the corporate world, whereas before, we were so focused on the external behaviors of: you need to show up with empathy.

You need to show up embracing diversity. You need to curate connection and belonging. Well, guess what? Those are really big words. That if we don’t transform the person who is doing the actions, it is forever going to be inauthentic.

You know, I was privileged to be selected by Dr. Brene Brown, who’s an amazing thought leader in my space, in 2018, to be one of the 50 coaches globally that she selected to be her inaugural pilot group of taking her work on connection and belonging out of the social workspace and bringing it into organizations.

And what I have learned in that journey from her is that we have to start with the person. People are people are people. And so, what I think we’re going to see more of in this space is more conversations around how I manage my life, how I’m showing up in my personal life, and translating that into the workspace.

So, it’s that concept of: Forget the gray-haired consultant standing at the podium PowerPointing you to death. And instead, it is about creating a fabric with your peers around our whole lives, because who we are is how we lead.

Denver: Yeah. And absolutely. And you know, I think, getting back to your comment on Zoom, we have seen the person probably more now in the last three years than we’ve ever seen before.

And it’s amazing how many leaders that I talk to sometimes said: This organization has to change, and they’ll tick off about 10 things, but never will it be what I need to change, what I need to do to change. And it’s going to start there because if you don’t change, this organization’s not going to change.

Christy: No, and especially in the work that you and your listeners do, like your mission is to change the world, and we need to change ourselves first because when we change our perspective: Once we see, we cannot unsee; and that’s how we change the world.

Denver: Absolutely. The book again is called PEER Revolution: Group Coaching that Ignites the Power of People. This is not a trend that’s going to go away. It’s only going to grow and grow and grow. So, pick it up and be a part of it. I want to thank you, Christy, for being here today. It was a real delight to have you on the show.

Christy: Thank you. It was my honor.


Denver Frederick, Host of The Business of Giving serves as a Trusted Advisor and Executive Coach to Nonprofit Leaders. His Book, The Business of Giving: New Best Practices for Nonprofit and Philanthropic Leaders in an Uncertain World, is available now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

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