When Your Mastermind Group Flounders
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What to Do When Your Mastermind Group Flounders

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By Karyn Greenstreet

Members often join a mastermind group with high energy and high expectations. Several months into it, you can find your group flagging and floundering. People show up late or don’t come at all. People don’t participate. Energy levels are low and new ideas don’t really meet the needs of the members.

Why does this happen? Four reasons:

1. You’re not meeting often enough.

Too much time between meetings causes people to disconnect, both from the group and from their own goals. Consider meeting more often, or if that’s not possible, create an online message forum where people can connect with each other between meetings. Also consider short, check-in teleconferences or video conferences between meetings, where people can talk about their work towards goals, challenges they’re having with those tasks, and any help they may need along the way.

2. There’s not enough interaction.

Mastermind group meetings are about more than just the individual Hot Seats. Creating space in each meeting for group discussion and group exercises, as well as casual networking time, allows for fuller interaction among members. Consider inviting people to come a bit early for coffee or a meal together. Encourage members to reach out to each other between meetings.

3. Members are playing it safe or being lazy.

Mastermind groups are formed to help people create success in their personal and professional lives. Members state their goals and what actions/tasks they’ll take between meetings to accomplish those goals. Some members may state goals that are too easy, and other members may limit their participation in the Hot Seat discussions to topics that are below-par. Encourage your members to challenge themselves AND each other. Growth is the keyword.

4. People begin to self-sabotage when asked to make major changes.

You’ve seen this a million times. A mastermind group member sets an important goal for himself, and just as he’s beginning to near the finish line, the whole project falls apart. It’s common for people who have set big goals for themselves to self-sabotage their own success for many reasons. As the mastermind group facilitator, your job is to remind people of the goals they set and WHY they set them. It’s also your job to encourage all the members to support each other as they set off to achieve their life’s dream.

Keeping your mastermind group strong and vibrant makes for a healthy group that members value. Maintain close watch on members’ energy and participation levels, and take care of a floundering group before it folds.


Want to learn how to start a mastermind group? Click here to get my free video tutorial on how to create a mastermind group of your own.


5 thoughts on “What to Do When Your Mastermind Group Flounders”

  1. Rhonda says:

    Thank you for these great articles. I may be asked to help with the administrative part of helping Christian life coaches at our academy form a mastermind group so I might
    be looking for additional training as well.

    1. Rhonda, I think mastermind groups as part of coursework (or after coursework) for coaches is an excellent idea.

  2. Caroline M. says:

    This exact thing happened in our mastermind group! We realized we had been skipping meetings and that had a bad effect on the whole group. Now we are back to regular meeting dates and it is much more solid.

  3. Pacaw says:

    Our group members say they want to be in a mastermind group, but I feel the commitment isn’t there, really, for some of them. The rest of us are feeling that we do not want these others to be in the group where we make a complete effort to attend every scheduled meeting whereas some do not attend even though they promised.

  4. Terrence Perry says:

    I’m looking forward to starting a mastermind group soon. Thanks for the insight.

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