1.1 Everyone can be a coach
Everyone can develop a personal life and find or create a work situation imbued with creativity, innovation, and playfulness. Everyone can find relative happiness, despite the dour predictions of politicians and pundits. And anyone can be a coach. You may be a professional coach, or perhaps you are a manager who is eager to engage employees. Maybe you just want to improve your own life or your spouseâs. Maybe you want to help your colleaguesâor your group or teamâdefine goals and move toward their fulfillment effectively and efficiently.
In this chapter, I will present an overview of the types of coaching available and the primary schools of thought in the field. I will explore what it means to be a coachâand how coaching is different from mentoring, training, and counseling.
But primarily, this book is about values; it is about life values, work values, community values, world values, and all the values that power our lives and our organizations. It is also about value alignment. And in chapters 3,4, and 5, Iâll introduce you to a way of thinking about values and present a framework, a methodology, and tools for value reengineeringâCoaching by Values.
1.2 What is coaching?
Coaching is the art of bringing out the greatness in people in a way that honors the integrity of the human spirit. It is both an innate human capacity and a teachable skill.
Coaching is not a new discipline that has suddenly been invented. It is probably as old as the first Stone Age spear-throwing competition and has always been a natural part of life for people everywhere. It is used by millions of great parents who love their children unconditionally, believe in them, and put their own needs aside to nurture their potential and encourage them to be great. It is used by thousands of great business leaders who try to develop their people, not by abusing their power, but by believing in them, challenging them, supporting them, giving them more positive than negative feedback, and making sure they take care of themselves.
The term coach originated in the sports field in the late 1880s and became a well-known sports profession thatâs taken many different forms over the years. Even today, the term coaching often produces a mental image of a football or basketball coach. Depending on what the coach actually does, this analogy may or may not be adequate. The head coach is in fact usually a general manager or chief executive officer responsible for running an entire program. The image of a quarterback coach or an offensive line coach who enables others to play through teaching is somewhat more accurate.
The first use of the term coach to mean an instructor or a trainer arose around 1830 at Oxford University as slang for a tutor who âcarriesâ a student through an exam, but only in the past â20 years or so has an individual been able to purchase coaching services outside the sports or performance arena. The evolution of coaching has been influenced and enhanced by many other fields of study including personal development, adult education, psychology (sports, clinical, developmental, organizational, social, and industrial), and other organizational or leadership theories and practices.
In its modern applicationâas a new way of working with people within different contextsâcoaching is a relatively new discipline. Although its emergence as a popular profession is unclear, according to some sources, it began in the United States in the late 1980s. Only a decade or two after its quick rise to popularity, however, the practice (at least in terms of application to management) appeared to fall into disuse for a time. These were the days of the full-blooded management-training programs and marathon groups.
The current field of coaching is the result of the convergence of several developmental strands dating back as far as the 1940s. Only in recent times has it been recognized as a field with a largely cohesive set of principles, knowledge, and skills. Since the mid-1990s, it has coalesced into a more independent discipline. The proliferation of coach-training schoolsâclose to 100 in the United States aloneâand the establishment of the International Coach Federation1 (ICF) have led to a dramatic increase in the number of professional coaches worldwide. The ICF, one of the largest nonprofit professional coach associations, has more than 35,000 members spanning many chapters in 123 countries. Members in ICF hold one of three credentials: Associate Certified Coaches, Professional Certified Coaches or Master Certified Coaches (MCC). It has drafted a set of core competencies for coaching that are now recognized as the fundamental competencies for this profession globally.
According to British sources, the most important developments in the profession of coaching, especially in the business world, include the following:
- Tim Gallweyâs 1974 book The Inner Game of Tennis proposed a novel, psychological approach; he claimed that as well as being prepared physically and technically, a player must be prepared psychologically to attain peak performance. Gallwey, a tennis coach, observed that the opponent in oneâs head is greater than the one on the other side of the net.2 From this observation, he pioneered the facilitative approach to sports coaching, a discipline that had previously been solely a skills-based learning experience with a master in the sport.
- In 1992, Sir John Whitmore, a motor racing champion, published Coaching for Performance in which he developed one of the most influential models of coaching, the GROW model (Goal, Reality, Options, Will). He has since become a guru in the business world and has continued to refine his model. The latest version of the GROW model appeared in the fifth edition of Coaching for Performance, published in 2017.3
- In the 1990s, the Western world went into recession, and corporate downsizing became the rage. It may have seemed good in theory, but did not take into account human needs. This left managers and leaders in highly stressed environments without support, increasing the need for individuals and organizations to continuously develop. This need for performance maximization contributed to the upsurge in coaching.
- When businesses first began to rely on coaches, they were brought in as often for poor performers as for high performers (often to deal with performance issues when the manager did not want the hassle or conflict). Now, however, the vast majority of coaching is aimed at high-level performers rather than remedial cases. Coaching today is for the high performer, top talent, and those leading an organization.
What is the process of coaching all about?
Coaching is for people looking to work actively toward making tangible changes. The process of coaching refers to the activity of the coach in developing the coacheeâs abilities, especially those required for making the sought-after change(s).
Coaching tends to focus on an existing problem that an individual wishes to resolve (or move away from) or on a specific outcome that the individual wishes to achieve (or move toward). In both cases, the coach aims to stimulate the coachee to uncover innate knowledge and/or skills so he or she can achieve a sustainable result. Coaches will normally make sure the specific learning can be successfully reapplied by the coachee to other problems in the future. The structure and methodologies of coaching are numerous, as we will see later, but all coaching approaches have one unifying feature: They are predominantly facilitating in style; that is, the coach mostly asks questions and challenges the coachee to learn from his/her own inner skills. The coaching process is underpinned by the coachâs established trust in the coachee.
It is important to note here thatâdespite their focus on questioning and dependence on trustâcoaching is not therapy, and coaches are not therapists; psychological intervention is outside the scope of the coachâs tasking. The problems and outcomes that coaches address are rooted in current contexts with aims for the future; they do not have emotional etiology or baggage from the pastâin other words, the coachee has the resources he/she needs to make reasonable progress at the time he/she seeks coaching. As Vicki Brock said in her 2008 doctoral dissertation on the history of coaching,4 âMost definitions [of coaching] assume an absence of serious mental hea...
