Where Do We Go Now?

On Monday I wrote about the first of these articles from Harvard Business Review (HBR) and today, have included the second.

The second article from HBR that is titled “What Can Coaches Do for You?” is centered on the direction of coaching in business.

While the article is short it says a lot about the lack of unity of direction in the coaching industry. There is no clear measure of the effectiveness of coaching, of which credentials are paramount to finding an effective coach or of what is an appropriate fee. It goes on to suggest that coaching, in general, rides a fine line coming close and often entering the “counseling” arena (see previous post) and also overlapping into the field of consulting.

The authors, Diane Coutu and Carol Kauffman, do include the results of a survey that was done and provide some informative graphical representations of a few of the results. I found the graph called “Is Coaching Personal” very interesting in that when coaches are hired in a business or executive setting, 97% said that they were not hired to handle personal issues, however, 78% said that they do handle personal issues.

In light of this information, I tend to believe that it is not just coaches who need to understand what coaching really is. But, we must also educate the public at large the differences between coaching, counseling and consulting. Otherwise, many people will not receive proper instruction and it could wind up harming the coaching industry as a whole.