Team Coaching: What is the group imago?

We're talking about team coaching. We talked about group imago. It is the mental image of what a group is, or should be like, that you carry with you from other experiences and things you missed, probably in your family of origin.

There's a theory about how group imago develops. Eric Berne ran psychotherapy groups, he was a psychiatrist. His idea of group imago was always a little tilted through his experience as someone who ran psychiatric groups. Nonetheless, it's relevant for team coaching.

A group imago is something we carry inside at an unconscious level. As a team coach it is pretty hard to see what's going on unconsciously, unless you look at the effects of behavior. Or if you bring in exercises which are non verbal. If you ask people to draw, if you use family constellations, if you do exercises around, “How was your family?” and “How do you want this ‘family’ to be?”.