I often hear of people creating mastermind groups for the general public, from small business owners to those who want personal development support.

But have you thought about creating a mastermind group inside an organization for its members, employees, or participants?

Here are five creative ways to add mastermind groups to corporations and organizations:

1. Start a mastermind group in your local Chamber of Commerce or professional association chapter. It offers real add-on value for the members and can help with recruitment and retention for the membership organization. Learn more about it in my blog post about Chamber and professional organization mastermind groups here.
2. Bring mastermind groups to corporations where you’re already doing consulting, coaching, or training. It’s the perfect complement to one-on-one coaching of leaders, or as implementation support after you’ve conducted a training program or finished a key project with your client’s company. If you work at a Small Business Development Center or incubator, it’s a great fit, too.
3. Create a mastermind group within your leadership development program. Many corporations have development programs for new, existing, or high-potential leaders. A mastermind group allows those leaders to share best practices and overcome challenges quickly, a real boost for the corporation and for the leaders themselves.
4. Design a mastermind group for people in the same corporate role but in different parts of the world. Do you have bank branch managers who do the same job, but are physically distant from each other? Or a sales team that spans the globe? You can improve problem-solving and raise creativity by bringing employees together in a mastermind group around a topic they share.
5. Offer a mastermind group when you’re applying to speak at a conference. After attendees have spent several days listening to speakers and learning new ideas, they need a place where they can discuss the ideas and create a solid action plan for using what they learned at the conference. Otherwise, those ideas just get put on a shelf for “someday” implementation. You can run this mastermind group on the last day of the conference, or the following week.

I hope these ideas have got your creative brain going! Mastermind groups are not just for small business owners anymore.