The School of Coaching Blog Archive

The top agenda for coaches in 2012 (according to the readers’ survey, Coaching at Work) is responding to economic challenges and demonstrating return on investment (ROI) and value for money.

Nearly half of respondents (49.2%) said helping clients to cope with the uncertainty that the economic downturn brings and making sure coaching is fit for purpose will be priorities for 2012.

For three years running in the survey, and high on the agenda again in 2012 is the evaluation of coaching effectiveness, ROI and value for money.  This was similarly stated in the ICF Global Coaching Survey in their initial Executive summary two weeks ago.

Other trends from the survey; coaching is seen to be changing, becoming more aligned with business needs and more integrated into other initiatives.  In addition standards and accreditation, health and well-being coaching and team coaching were all on the agenda for 2012 according to Coaching at Work Readers.

Mentors can respond to the current climate too. Some feel the current crisis is a crisis of leadership. Mentoring priorities included talent management, responding to the economic climate and working with youths. Specifically upward mentoring from junior people about flexible working and better ways of managing was suggested.

>To Read Coaching at Work Article

>To Read ICF Global Coaching Survey 

Most conversations about the development, performance and learning of another happen or should happen within the work place between managers and team members. 

Gaining the competitive edge, in Mike Taylor’s (an Alumnus of the School) experience, the most exciting benefit comes from leaders across the business becoming internal coaches and mentors. Open, trusting conversations are rare in corporate life. Google thinks so too!

The New York Times reports on a project carried out by Google called Project Oxygen. The aim of the project was to find out what the best managers at Google do, to have teams with individuals that perform better, are retained better, and are happier. The project team gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers — across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports. They then looked for some preliminary patterns in the data and formed hypotheses. 

They then gathered additional data by systematically interviewing managers to test these hypotheses. Finally, they analysed the data and drew conclusions. The conclusions were summarised in 'Google's Rules' which consists of a set of eight good behaviours and three pitfalls of managers. They bring many wider benefits for the business including more effective decision-making, positive and earlier resolution of different views, difficult issues and conflicts, higher confidence levels and even faster budget setting. 

>To Read Google’s Rules: Eight Good Behaviours and Three Pitfalls of Managers 

In June 2012 the International Coach Federation (ICF) commissioned an ambitious piece of industry research into coaching. The research was completed by PricewaterhouseCoopers and responses were completed by over 12,000 coaches from 117 countries in 9 languages worldwide.

Out of these, 7,700 responses were from ICF members, 52% of these were based in North America and 16% in Western Europe. The initial executive summary highlights the following :

• From the research and extrapolating the figures it is estimated that there are 47,500 professional coaches worldwide.
• Coaches seem to be most active in the higher income regions of North America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand and as such are not evenly distributed around the world. 
• Outside the higher income regions coaching is experiencing rapid growth for example in Latin America and the Caribbean. 
• The slowest growing region appears to be Western Europe.
• Overall positive balances in the trend indicators clearly point to a profession that is continuing to grow through difficult economic times. 
• From the study, the report estimates global coaching revenues to be close to US$2billion, this excludes any associated consulting or training revenues that may also provide professional coaches with income. 
• The report states Coaches are looking confidently to the future, with expectations over the next 12 months of increasing demand (clients and sessions) leading to growth in annual revenue and income from coaching. 
• And the ‘key issues for the future include tackling obstacles such as untrained individuals who call themselves coaches and availing of opportunities to increase awareness of the benefits of coaching in terms of return on investment (ROI) and return on expectations (ROE).

The full report is due in the coming weeks. 

ICF Global Coaching Study: Executive Summary

The School of Coaching has always placed a strong professional emphasis on regular supervision and in our continuing commitment three of our Faculty (Executive Coaches) are undertaking further development and certification in Supervision. We would like to share their learning journey with you on such an important coaching topic over the coming months.

The Supervision Foundation course re-emphasised the ‘Seven Eyed Model of Supervision’ that is introduced and used in The School’s Coach’s Programme for peer supervision. During the course we disassembled the constituent parts of the model, became clear on intent and reassembled to supervise holistically. A timely reminder; was to provide the supervision that the coach needs and not the supervision that the Supervisor wants to give, a perfect mirror of the School’s ‘following interest’ approach. A major theme of the training programme is to be alert to what is disconnected that needs to be connected whether that be within the coach, the coachee, the client organisation, the supervisor and the relationships between them, with the intention of raising performance in all parties. 

Watch out for our future blogs as our training continues and in between time we would like to hear any thoughts or questions you have in relation to supervision.