Creating Peer Support Groups (CAL126, S6, E20)

Welcome to Changing Academic Life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick, and this is a podcast series where academics and others share their stories, provide ideas, and provoke discussions about what we can do individually and collectively to change academic life for the better. Collegiality, community building and peer support are some of the themes that we've heard a lot about this season. And this was a particular focus too in the last episode with Johan Stadlbauer from the University of Graz, and Johanna talked a lot about the peer mentoring group programs that they have in place there. You might also have noticed from our discussion that there are different forms of peer support groups. But would you know what sort of peer support group you'd be interested in? Or if you were in research development or you just wanted to help set up a peer support group in your own institution, would you know what sort of things to think about or how to make it happen? What I thought I would do in this solo episode is to walk through some of the aspects of peer support groups that you might think about if you are making a decision around what sort of group and who's going to participate and how you're gonna run it, and so on. So the first thing to think about is why, what might be the purpose of a peer group? It could be as simple as just about mutual support and sharing experiences, feeling like you're not the only one going through something or sense checking with others, and that's just really about generating deeper connections and a sense of belonging and being seen in. You could also use a peer group as a space for reflection and learning. And this might be as part of a reflective practice. And in learning, developing, building skills in a collegial environment. You could also have a peer group that's much more focused on seeking expert advice from others and focused on problem solving. And you could have a peer group more for accountability purposes to hold yourself to commitments that you've made or to keep you on track with tasks. I'm sure there are others that you can think of as well. The key point is though, being clear about your why and what role the group's going to serve is really important for thinking about who will be part of it and what sort of format or structure might work best for that. So then it's useful to think about and what might be the focus of the group. And this will also particularly point to then who would participate in the group, or who you might invite, or who you might put out a call for to participate in such a group. For example, for the collegial development circles that Johanne Stadlbauer has run at University of Graz, their call for participation states a possible focus on issues around career steps with in or beyond academia and also on work and life balance related topics. So you could imagine them bringing together a group of people interested in those topics. And they'd be fairly open, wouldn't they, for who could participate. It could be more targeted. For example, it could be around particularly early career support or for people who are all on a tenure track path. Or it could be for people who are all immediately post-tenure and going through that post-tenure funk and redefining who they are and what they want to do. Or it could be for people who are in later career path late career support as they start to think about what their legacy might be and how they might transition to their next phase of life. An issue I'm familiar with. And it could be about navigating promotion processes more generally. You could have a peer group that's focused particularly on people in leadership roles. It could be people who are heads of departments or heads of groups, or could be project leaders. And it could also be focused, for example, on supervision. And indeed Johanna talked about their supervisors network that runs as a peer support group. So thinking about what might be the particular focus and then who you would get together is really important. The next thing to think about is then how many people would be part of a group, and this is where you can find a lot of variations. So in Johanna's call for the Collegial Development program for 2025, and I'll put a link to this on the webpage. They say that a group can consist of up to 15 participants drawing, from interdisciplinary and mixed gender areas. For many other forms of peer groups, though the ideal is often talked about more in terms of about four to six to eight people, and usually no more than eight people and no fewer than four. Four is maybe even a bit too low, I think in case you have people who occasionally can't attend or who drop out. 'Cause you really do need some critical mass in the group to make it work. So you may want to think about what's a sweet spot number for your group. I'd probably suggest that six is a good number to aim for if you can, but of course you can make any number work with some thought and care for how you engage people in the group. So there's no fixed rule on this. The next thing to think about is how often you're going to meet at what frequency and what sort of commitment people are expected to make. So again, using the Graz program as an example, they were looking for a commitment of a year. In other programs, it might be a commitment of, say, six sessions that you'll meet for, and that could be over a semester, for example. How often to meet? Usually a monthly cycle is a common frequency that you'll find. And then there's also thinking about what level of commitment you want people to make. Do you want people to commit to coming to all of the sessions as a priority so that you can build up trust and deepen connections over time? Or are you happy for people to drop in and out? My own advice would be, ideally, as committed as people can be to attend, although we know that things can always come up. So you could also decide that you just meet ad hoc, whenever people decide they want to meet or when someone has something in particular they want to discuss. So no a priori commitments to how often or how many times you're going to meet. So that could also be an option rather than it being more of an upfront set of commitment. The next thing to think about is what sort of format do you want to have? And there can be a whole spectrum here from quite a structured format to a very freeform, open, conversational format. Again, it's up to you to decide, and that would really go to what might be the why that could influence what sort of format works best. When I walk through some of the examples later on, you'll see two different ideas for more structured formats, and also I'll give some examples of more unstructured formats. The next thing to think about, and this will definitely depend on the format that you've chosen, is what sort of roles need to be played. In the more structured format there's always someone who plays a facilitator role. Now this can be a trained facilitator or it could just be someone from the group who steps up and plays that role for that group meeting. If people are unfamiliar with having more structured formats, someone who is a trained facilitator can be useful in the beginning to bring people up to speed and then the people in the group can take it on. And again, what Graz have done is have their training sessions for people about how to run these sorts of groups. So whichever way you go, there'll be a facilitator role. There's the role of the person who brings the issue to the group to be discussed, and that can be decided in advance or on the day. And then there's everyone else in the group who plays the role of the group members. Some models also designate a note taker to capture ideas that come up when it gets to the discussion point. I think there are also some critical ingredients regardless of format and structure. I think it would go without saying that a commitment to confidentiality is really key if people are gonna share honestly. I think there also needs to be a commitment to show up as your real self, not as your idealized CV version. And that's, having good and bad days. Someone who doesn't know it all, someone prepared to be a learner because that's what we are, aren't we? We're all learners and we're all humans. And I think it's also important to recognize that we're all different. And so what might seem like a trivial challenge for you might be a big challenge for someone else, or to realize that a solution that worked for you might not work for others. So that takes both some humility and some sensitivity, and a commitment to no judgment and not imposing your own view or values on others. I think participation in peer groups, peer support groups also requires a commitment to develop good listening skills. And this isn't just listening to the words that are said, but how it's said, body language and so on. It's listening to what's not said. It's listening to your own reactions. Because whether you're asking good questions or giving good advice and we'll talk about that soon, you can't ask good questions or give good advice unless you have really deeply listened to the person and understand what's going on for them and where they're coming from. And here too, curiosity can really be a key superpower to develop in support of good listening. They were just some key aspects to think about. Now to help bring it to life a bit more. I'm going to walk through a more detailed process for a couple of the different approaches here. I'm going to start off with more structured formats and then talk about more, so a couple of informal formats. With the more structured formats, these can tend to fall into one of two broad categories. One category of approaches tends to take more of a coaching type approach. So it's much more of that supportive listening, asking good questions. The other style, the other approach tends to take more of a mentoring, consulting expert advice type of approach. So let's start with action learning sets as an example of how a coaching type approach might play out. An action learning set is usually defined as a small group of people, usually of about four to six people, who have contracted together to meet about five or six times at some sort of regular frequency. Normally once a month, as I said. The focus of a set is creating a space for a person to bring a real situation or challenge, and then facilitating a process that enables them to think through that with the support of peers and to eventually get to trying out some new ideas at the end. So it's very much a supported, reflective learning approach. It is based on the assumption that we learn best by reflecting on our own experiences and being challenged to think outside of the box, if you like, and to expand our ideas and explore options and experiment with just trying different things. It is also based on the assumption that the person themself is the expert in their own domain, in their own context, in their own problem area, and that they can be really resourceful in solving that. The cycle of meetings normally starts off with a trained facilitator because it is quite a structured process and it does require some skills to facilitate well. And then over time, as I said, this is an example of whereas the group gets to know the process, the facilitator, the trained facilitator can step back and maybe even step out of the group. And then different people will take on the role as the group decide. So then how to run a meeting or it's called a set then. Normally these sessions will last for about an hour and a half. An hour maybe, but I think an hour and a half is better. People will come to the group. And there's usually a check-in round just checking in how everyone's going. There might be reporting back if someone had committed to some actions last time. So just checking back in, that accountability piece. Then there's a round where people are invited to say what problem or issue they could bring to the group. And then there's a process facilitated by the facilitator to decide which one or ones they might focus on that day. So it's up to the group to decide whether you have, say, two cases per session, or use the whole session on one case or have three cases, whatever. It's up to you. Often a case, typical case could be given about 20 to 30 minutes. But there'll be some sort of round anyway where all of the potential issues to be discussed are put on the table and there's the decision process about which one or ones will be discussed. So the next step is the person who has the case or has the problem situation, presents that to the group as precisely and as concisely as they can, and. They try to draw out the key thing that they want to think through in this process. Note the language here of the key thing they want to think through or think about rather than the key thing they want to ask advice about or talk about. Then there's a short phase where the rest of the group can ask clarifying questions. So this isn't giving advice or starting to dig into anything. It's just much more if they don't understand the exact problem. It just helps ensure that everyone's on the same page. And then once everyone is clear that they understand what the problem is that the person is bringing and what about it they want to focus on to think about, then the rest of the group members move into a coaching style process, and this is where the group members play the role of thinking partners. They are thinking partners with the person who's brought the problem and their role is to ask good, open questions that encourage the person to think through their issues. And note, this shouldn't be advice couched as a question, have you thought of doing X my favorite solution? But rather it'd be something much more of the options that you've thought about so far, which ones are standing out for you most, or what do you feel most uncomfortable about, or what you feel most challenged by? Or can you give an example of something or what else matters for you on these issues? And we can have a whole other session on different types of questions and good questions, good thinking questions, but that can be for another time. So the role of the facilitator here is just to keep an eye on the question flow just to check that they're all still kept quite open. So they might ask someone to reframe a question if they thought it was too closed or leading. And the key thing about this approach too is that the person who has brought the case is also totally free to say that's an interesting question, but I don't think it's going to help me so much now and invite another question. So they don't have to answer a question, just because it's been asked. Or think through a question. So they can really take control over what they want to think through, what's useful for them at that time. So then at some point, depending on what time you've decided to allocate to discuss the case, the facilitator will move to close the open question part and then invite the case presenter to review what they've heard, talk about what connected, and to start to get to some decision about what action they might take as a result. And then as a final move, the whole group in closing will reflect on what they think was useful about the process. Now, note, this isn't about the content of what was discussed, but the process of how the group worked together to facilitate that thinking process. Were there particular styles of questions that seemed particularly helpful and so on. So it becomes a mutual learning as well about the process. So that's the broad structure of an action learning set. It can be particularly useful say for, say, leadership development or reflective academic practice and problem solving ,solving research challenges and so on. It's very much about putting the focus on the person with the problem or the issue, and it's about helping to build their problem solving capacity. And there's the added value, I think, of the focus on action and accountability that comes with it. And for the other people, I think it's really great practice at developing really strong listening skills and how to be a good supportive thinking partner. If I think about it, how often have we been to courses or been offered courses about how to speak or how to give a presentation, but are we ever offered courses about how to listen? And yet listening is a great skill and in developing this skill here, you can also take that skill back and apply it to all sorts of different relationships you have, especially in some leadership or supervisory situation. Or just informal peer discussions. And it's interesting to reflect on how it's actually not an easy role to be a good thinking partner and to listen well because we are really primed to be the experts and be the problem solvers and jump in for people. But this often isn't the most helpful thing we can do for them. And there's a whole lot of research supporting the value of such a coaching like mindset in helping people develop. To be honest, I also clearly have a particular bias towards this model as a trained coach and also a trained action learning set facilitator. So moving on to another example, this is also of a more structured approach, but this time it's taking more of the expert oriented, mentoring, consulting type of approach. And this is what Johanna talked about last week in the Graz Collegial Development Program and the model that they work with. Johanna also talked about a German model called Kollegiale Fallberatung, which literally translates to collegial case advice. I will provide a link to this model and it's a lovely webpage that has a good description of the process and the steps. If you're not a German speaker, you could do a translation on the page and it sets out the steps very nicely. Johanna also talked about a similar French Canadian model, There's also a model called Descriptive Consultancy. And again, I'll put a link to Descriptive Consultancy on the webpage. And that link also points to a nicely elaborated set of steps that you could follow. And Johanna talked about the Balint Group model, although that's used within, as she said, a psychotherapy context, but also more generally for professional client relationships and exploring the emotional aspects of that. So while all of these different models that I've just named have a slightly different flavor and slightly different interpretation in their process steps, in general, they all have a very similar sort of approach. And as Johanna describes in their latest call for participation, these approaches are generally based on, to quote this call, "the assumption that each of the group members has an advantage of knowledge, skills, and experience in a specific domain that they can make accessible to the others." So what are the steps in this more structured advising, consulting process? They have a similar setup phase to what we discussed for action learning sets. There's the check-in and usually an update from the last session. Then there's a process of deciding what roles people will take on. There's usually the facilitator role, the person who's presenting the case, maybe a note taker, and then the rest of the group take on the role of consultant or expert or advisor or mentor, whatever language works for you. You can hear how that's quite different to the coaching type model where the other members play the role of thinking partner. Then the person who's coming with the case again will present their case and this time they talk about, presenting the key question or challenge they want input on. And again, note the change of language here versus the action learning set approach where we asked, the key thing that people wanted to think about. So this might seem like a trivial difference, but it's actually a really important one 'cause it points to who's doing the thinking work. In the peer mentor approach here, it's the group members. As Johanna explained, once the person has presented the case and everyone is clear on it, then the presenter sits back and stays silent and they just listen to the rest of the group who then walk through the case and talk about it, brainstorm ideas, offer their advice, offer their suggestions, and so on. And then again, at some point the facilitator closes the discussion, brings it back to the person who presented the case to pull out what was new or useful or what ideas they're considering, and eventually moving to what solution they want to take forward, what they might act on. And again, there's an accountability thing built in where they can report back the next time. So two Structured methods quite different in the role of the person who brings the case and the role of the rest of the members of the group. In the action learning sets, the person is the thinker and the group members of the thinking partners. In the more of the consulting style, the person is the case presenter and the rest of the group are the experts, advisors, consultants. And then there are many examples of more informal peer support groups and you can probably already think of lots of these. So they're not so structured and not being so structured, they're not gonna have such a strong notion of roles, nor of a strong notion of how the conversation should flow. So some examples. You could think about writing groups, the shut up and write groups that are becoming increasingly popular as one form of peer support group focused on committing to a writing practice and the accountability for showing up and the accountability for working on what you said you're gonna work on in that session. And yes, of course there may be a couple of simple roles there, like facilitator there, who's keeping an eye on the time or the person who's brought the cookies, the cookie bringer. You could also think of an informal peer support group where a group of you decide to be critical friends for one another around a particular role. For example, you might decide that you all will take a turn where your other group members will sit in on your lectures, a couple of your lectures, and then you might get together to discuss what worked well and what could be improved. And, repeat that for all of the group members. So that could be something like a critical friends group. And there's another lovely example of an informal peer support group in a book that I would highly recommend, and the book is called The No Club. Putting a stop to Women's Dead End work by Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lisa Westerland, and Laurie Weingart, and I'll put a link to that on the webpage as well. And they connected together because they were realizing that they was spending so much time on what call non-promotable tasks, service tasks in their faculties that they were not having time to do the research that they wanted to do. So I'm just going to read from page six on the version of the book that I have about them setting up this club, this peer support group. "During the dreariest time in Pittsburgh winter in 2010, we kicked off our inaugural, I just can't say no club. Meeting at a cozy restaurant where we could get a meal and $10 bottles of wine. Really. We went around the table sharing or actually confessing. We each described the things we had agreed to when we were asked. This turned out to be a lengthy list for all of us and then contrasted that with what we had said no to, and these were very short lists. We asked one another for advice on how to say no since we found it so hard to do. Wanting to get a better handle on our workload, we knew the extra support from the group would help. So we agreed to meet every few weeks. We left the meeting feeling unburdened and exhilarated. None of us realized what a transformative experience this would become for each of us". So in summing up, I hope that you can find ways to connect with peers and have transformative experiences as well. In this short episode, what I've tried to do is walk through some of the things to think about, like why you want to get together as a peer group or what people would want to get out of it as a peer group, and then what might be the particular focus which also points to who might be part of it. And then we talked about how many should ideally form a group and deciding how often you want to meet, what sort of frequency, and if there's gonna be some sort of minimum period of commitment, or whether it's going to be some more informal group ad hoc group. And then thinking about what sort of format you wanted to have, whether it was more structured or unstructured, and depending on the format, what sort of roles need to be played. And then the process of how your meeting together might play out in a session. And I walked through a couple of structured examples. Looking at both an approach that takes more of a coaching model where the members of the group help the case person as thinking partners or whether it's more of an expert consulting, mentoring approach where the members of the group, discuss the case on behalf of the person and come up with solutions. And then we talked about some sort of more informal unstructured approaches where people are just getting a commitment to get together in more of a mutual support type of style. You'll find some links on the webpage that actually elaborate some of these more structured processes. And I think in closing I'd just say, do whatever works best for you. Despite my personal bias here for more of a coaching approach, there's no right or wrong way. And of course, it just depends what works best for you and what works for the why of why you're meeting together. What works for the person and the issue that they're bringing and what works for the group. So if you've not done this before, you could start off just trying to follow one of the structured descriptions as it's laid out. And these often also provide suggested timings as well. And then as you become more comfortable with it, you could start to adapt it. And I could imagine combining aspects of different approaches. For example, you could start off with more of a coaching approach, from the position as the person being the expert in their own problem. So you start off with more of that, helping them think through and prompted by good questions from the group as thinking partners. And then you could decide to have a phase, for example, where you might move into an advice phase. So all of those things that everyone's been sitting on, and the person who brought the case might say, I now I would be interested to hear what advice you might suggest, or what options I could think about that I hadn't thought about. So you're doing a bit of a mix of both the coaching and the expert consulting. Or you could have just a more open structure and the person who's presenting the case is the one who also takes ownership of saying what would be most useful for me right now? Because you know that for some particular sort of cases, you could imagine that I don't have a lot of expertise, for example, in whatever this new challenge is that I'm taking on. So at this new phase, I'm really interested in hearing what other people have done, what have they found works what would be the pitfalls I should be looking out for. So I might want more of an advice consulting model there. But if it's something where, I don't know, it's a particularly complex leadership challenge with the group or with particular people where I understand, the dynamics and a lot of the interpersonal issues, and I'm not gonna be able to explain all of those complexities to the whole group. It may be much more useful just to have thinking type questions. Because if people move into advice mode, they may start going down rabbit holes or be making assumptions or not understand exactly how what they're saying doesn't fit the situation that you're bringing. So you could leave it up to the person bringing the case to say what would be useful for them right now, whether it's advice and hearing other people's experiences or getting good thinking questions and so on. Whatever you decide to do, it's just a useful reminder. We never do academia alone. We build on the work of others. We work in social contexts. We're all often dealing with similar sorts of issues, and we all have enormous expertise that we can bring to each other and that we can share. And just knowing as well that there are other people who have similar experiences can be so important to feeling like we are not alone. So I encourage you to think about what might be ways that you can connect with peers and what might be some supportive structures that you can put in place to set up peer support groups, whether they're more in the coaching model or more in the mentoring consulting model, or more informal model. And you could also think about what other things that you need right now. But it also could be what could I do? What are the problems and needs that I'm hearing about in my context and what could be useful to set up for them now? So have a think about it. Connect, support. We can do this together. And finally, just as a reminder, you can find links to some descriptions of action learning sets, the Graz call for participation in their collegial development program, the Kollegiale Beratung in six phases, the descriptive consultancy, and the Balint method. And they all will walk through, some steps for how you might actually run the session with suggested timings, as I said, many of them. I'll also have a link to the book called The No Club. And on their webpage they have, what they call No Club Guidance, which gives you some questions that you might think about if you do come together for that sort of peer support group. And you might be interested in listening to some of the podcasts that have previously been released here. There's one with Michael Bungay Stanier on the Power of Curiosity and taming your Advice Monster. There's another follow up I did after talking with Michael about asking good questions, empowering good people, and there's a two part series with Oscar Trimboli on being better listeners and on how to listen deeply. So all of those might be nice compliments if you are thinking of actually trying to set up and run a peer support program. And I'd love to hear what you do if you decide to do anything and how it goes. And feel free to reach out if I can help in any way in supporting that. You can find the summary notes, a transcript and related links for this podcast on www.changingacademiclife.com. You can also subscribe to Changing Academic Life on iTunes, Spotify, and I'm really hoping that we can widen the conversation about how we can do academia differently. And you can contribute to this by rating the podcast and also giving feedback. And if something connected with you, please consider sharing this podcast with your colleagues. Together we can make change happen.