So, you want to be a coach

Posted by Ricki Sharpe on July 12, 2007  
Filed Under Coaching

Fancy a new career as a coach? Seems like a good option: do the relevant course, brand yourself Executive Coach, buy fancy business cards, and wait for the phone to ring with the offer of a lucrative corporate contract.

The global spend on coaching by organisations is estimated at US$1.5 billion, so there’s plenty of business to go round. Oh, and don’t worry about whether you’re any good, or whether you actually achieve what you were hired to do in the first place, as it’s highly unlikely that anyone will bother to check or ask you to prove your worth.

In a recent article, Coaching Psychology: How did we get here and where are we going?, Dr Anthony Grant and Dr Michael Cavanagh, of the Coaching Psychology Unit, University of Sydney, remarked, “in the unregulated coach training industry, grand titles, pseudo-qualifications, meaningless accreditations and self-appointed global thought leaders abound. Anyone can call themselves a Master Certified Credentialed Coach. Anyone can set up a coach training organisation, and anyone can teach coaching.”

A recent survey of the 14 Australian life coach training organisations (Grant & O’Hara, 2006) found that some coach trainers had no qualifications whatsoever and some organisations had non-existent affiliations or academic appointments with universities. Some organisations claimed that coaching could be used to treat anxiety or depression. All offered impressive credentialing of one kind or another.

However, we should not be too cynical about the coaching profession as it has developed on the back of strong demand by industry, often for a quick fix to a pressing HR need. Many organisations are conflicted as to whether they want an experienced business coach to develop their talent pool, or a psychologist to help with a difficult interpersonal issue with an employee. Both the experienced business person and the psychologist often claim skills to deal with both situations.

Only five per cent of respondents in a global study of 2529 coaches were psychologists.

According to research on buying trends in the UK coaching market, organisations often want executive coaches to have both a sound track-record in business and psychological expertise. The research, by management consultancy Ridler and Co, found that 95% of those organisations surveyed believed that it was important or very important for executive coaches to have had a prior career in business, which included working at a senior level. However, some 85% of those polled said psychological expertise was also an important or very important asset for coaches.

This does not mean, said Ridler and Co, that professional training in psychology was a must for coaches. Rather, it said, most respondents wanted coaches to be capable of dealing with challenging relationships with coachees that have a difficult psychological dynamic.

Should all coaches be psychologists? It is noteworthy that psychologists are generally under-represented in the coaching industry. Only five per cent of respondents in a global study of 2,529 coaches were psychologists (Grant & Zackon, 2004). The majority of coaches come from a consulting, management or sales background. Grant & Cavanagh claim that “such expert business-related knowledge is important and useful in coaching within those domains. Indeed, many non-psychologist coaches do excellent work with their clients and work in an ethical and professional manner. Such coaches are in high demand, and offer coaching services that most psychologists are not trained to deliver.”

However, they argue that “all coaches should have rigorous tertiary-level training in theoretically-grounded approaches to coaching, and should have a solid grounding in recognising and referring clinical issues. Such coach education should also equip graduates to think critically and analytically, vital cognitive tools in an area where sharp coach training operators use pseudo-science and scientific jargon to give the impression of having a solid scientific framework. However, we strongly believe that where coaches are working on issues that require significant cognitive or emotional development, then such coaching should be conducted by psychologically trained professionals.”

The disparate nature of the coaching industry is a significant stumbling block to the professionalisation of the discipline. In order to address these issues, an international dialogue, the Global Convention on Coaching (GCC), is due to be launched in July 2007. The GCC is aimed at identifying the core shared frameworks standards and competencies that underpin professional coaching. It will consist of a range of working groups made up of representatives of the key stakeholder groups in coaching. An impressive range of stakeholders are gathering to be a part of this process. They include professional bodies (e.g., American Psychological Association, the Australian Psychological Society and the British Psychological Society), universities across the world, practitioner bodies (e.g., the International Coach Federation, European Mentoring and Coaching Council), coach training organisations, and major private and public sector consumers of coaching (corporates and government bodies).

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