Exploring the future of coaching post-Covid by David Lines and Yvonne Thackray
The pandemic has provided an opportunity for coaches to re-evaluate and take stock of the practice and business and determine how they want to deliver coaching. Coaching is often described as the 'Wild West' because it has a perception that many who come into coaching consider that it's easy to earn money in coaching, versus those people who are coming to coaching to deliver something of value through coaching.
To explore what this might look like, Dr David Lines and Yvonne Thackray 'sat down' virtually, over zoom to explore this topic. Drawing on their own coaching experiences and bringing a broader overview of the coaching market, two major themes emerged from the conversations that they perceive could impact the future of coaching.
Asking bolder questions about the purpose of coaching
Coaches and their coaching credibility with business leaders
1. Asking bolder questions of the purpose of coaching
Executive coaching is perceived, by many who have been working in business and senior levels in organisations, to be the easiest occupation where business leaders and portfolio workers can become coaches and earn enough money. In that,
Many international corporations' share and identify that they use coaching in their leadership and management development initiatives, e.g. Google, KPMG, GSK, Fujitsu, HSBC, Microsoft.
They also have the necessary financial resources to invest and develop their employees.
This is why executive coaching holds its place in the market is because it's been tried and tested in different ways that corporates are more likely to pay for and consume coaching as a development process.
One of the reasons we need to begin clarifying this is that there are an increasing number of people who come into coaching because of these assumptions. This in turn is saturating a pool of available coaches, and because there are now so many coaches, it seems that everybody is a coach. This opaqueness makes it particularly challenging, both in time and resources, for clients to objectively determine what a good quality coach looks like especially when coaching is experiential.
One of the significant factors that is contributing to this is the business needs of coach training schools, and organisations who register coaches and want to keep that throughput through their business. They want hundreds of people trained and credited by their school, and then accredited by ‘non-independent’ membership organisations, and then supervised to maintain their accreditations/credentials. They're feeding a business model of coaches who have to pay for their career development, almost for life, but not necessarily linking that to any recognizable form of remuneration from clients or delivering on a market need.
Another significant factor is that brokers have added another set of entry gates that are increasing the hurdles for coaches who want to make contact with their clients. And of course, some of these brokers are determining the selection criteria for coaches, in addition to the credentialing criteria outlined and developed by membership organisations, as well as those criteria determined by the organization themselves. According to one of these agencies, they prefer people who've got a business background to be on their books, which makes it quite tricky for people who come from diverse backgrounds, to bring their equivalent skills and organizational experiences into corporate coaching. It could be argued therefore that coaching is being narrowed into specific business orientations and therefore becoming less diverse.
A question we need to be asking then is, have we spent too much time focusing on executive (and corporate) coaching in the way it’s currently defined? A lot of the emphasis when we talk about executive coaching is on the word 'executive,' i.e. the past experiences of the coach than on the word 'coach' itself. Without a clear definition of how the executive coach applies their coaching style and approach, it may be more practical to consider that executive coaching descriptively means a former executive who can apply coaching skills to their specific challenge.
Maybe then coaching needs to disentangle itself from executive coaching and become broader in its descriptions and application as it is entering into new arenas without necessarily being described or written about. Similarly, others could be just using the word coaching because it's a new sexy term; whether they are coaching or not is a different matter. To date, we haven’t yet started to track what coaching looks like in these different domains nor do we know whether the word is being used in the same way that we would understand coaching. Therefore, we need to be bolder and ask the following question, “What is the purpose of coaching in its broader definition and wider applications?” This way we can also begin answering the following question, has the word ‘coaching’ become popular (1) without a real change or (2) with a real change in their approach to the work. In the short term, this might be more difficult to sell, but to have a sustainable career in coaching it can increase the potential market opportunities because it shifts the mindset from which executives can afford to have a coach to how will people benefit from having a coach.
2. Coaches and their coaching credibility with business leaders
We both acknowledge that whilst there is this ongoing collective confusion of what's the purpose of coaching, coaches still need to sell coaching into businesses if they are to financially survive. This is quite important, especially when people go out into the world and work as an external coach, people seem to forget that they've also got to set themselves up as a business. It's also essential to be building an awareness of what coaching service coaches are actually offering, and it needs to go beyond, "I'm offering eight, two-hour sessions of a conversation, which we will eventually get to the end of and ...” This is the details of the phases of coaching that we go through with our clients, which is an important part of the process. Yet, it doesn’t answer their underlying question of what service you’ll be providing that will add value to them and positively impact their role in the company: the response needs to be necessarily business focused enough for people, or pragmatic enough, for them to begin engaging in.
Another challenge we face when we work with brokers versus independently to gain access to a client, it often means that credible professional coaches have to make compromises to get into the organization, especially when you have to go through the HR gateway. In reality, many independent coaches prefer to contract for work through word of mouth via key contacts, or if they meet an executive, they often have contacts on their executive team who would be interested in working with you. This is another way coaches can get most of their work, however, if HR is required to be involved during the procurement process, it becomes more involved.
It might be useful to illustrate this with a couple of examples.
The first example is in a broader application of coaching. There's a lot of social media/digital marketing coaches in the marketplace who are very successful in what they do: they can tangible demonstrate how they have built up their following across different social media tools and convert them into business opportunities, and coach people how to present themselves to the market and have similar results. People will hire them to coach them in how to present themselves to be more engaging and interactive so that people will want to connect with them for business purposes, and they will want to know in detail the phases of coaching. However, what if the social media coach suddenly decides to expand their offering and coach functional leaders in innovation? Social media is an example of innovation, but is that sufficient experience and knowledge to be working on innovation challenges at an organizational level? Which transferable skills, expertise and experiences will they be bringing from their social media practice to coach leaders through their innovation challenges? How should they now demonstrate those tangible benefits? This is obviously not just limited to social media coaches, but it simply illustrates how quickly this can spiral and lead to confusion and reputational risk for other coaches who do have the credibility and experience in innovation coaching.
The second example, someone decides one day to say, "Oh, I'll be a coach." They are convinced they are a coach after reading a book on coaching, which might help, OR they think coaching is just about asking questions, and ask what they do, OR they go on their coach training program, and come out the other side and think they are a coach. This is misleading. A coach training program is just teaching them how to drive the car if you like, now they've got to drive and gain experience, but they also need to learn from that experience. One of the things that seem to be missing in the coaching world is continuous personal and professional development. Yes, there are courses run by different membership bodies and training schools, but we need to question if it goes deep enough so that the coach gets a sense of the type of practitioner they are, and then think about what they need to be known as? Of course, one of the things recommended by CoachSource was this whole idea that writing blogs, articles etc., was also a way of getting known because it's a way to develop your content [as a form of marketing]. This is different from practitioner blogs which focuses on sharing and developing a coach's practice, reputation and credibility.
Hopefully what these examples points to is that we're in the middle of an ecosystem that hasn't fully formed. There is what the mainstream (brokers, training schools, membership bodies) says it should be, but as the ecosystem forms more and more, there'll be a number of coaches that will get marginalized (typically the independents) because they don't fit the current dominating system. Some good coaches may be part of the marginalized group, and this can be a worry as the pathway to finding opportunities will be more challenging. At the same time, marginalized coaches are more likely to survive than those who are mainstream coaches because they are more agile. Good coaches who operate outside the main ecosystem tend to have a different sort of determination and perseverance to make it work and adopt a more critical-reflective approach to their continuous personal and professional development. This is a much-needed area that needs systematic improvement to support and develop coaches.
Reframing it in this way, the opportunities for independent (marginalized) coaches have become more abundant. It all now depends on whether they're bold enough to find and make those connections and create the work for themselves, and often they actually ask the harder questions of what it is that they want to purposely deliver and consequently take greater risks than those who work in the mainstream. This means that coaches who recognize their own reputational and credibility value may find it easier to sell their services, but it still means that all coaches need to be good at selling themselves. Coaches, regardless of which pathway they choose to take, still need to be able to, in conversation, demonstrate both their credibility and experience to business leaders that they're worth hiring,
Proposing a future for coaching
Coaching attracts people who have their own reasons of wanting to be a coach. While there are no real controls in place for how people add coaching to their business title, we believe those who will have a sustainable career in coaching are coaches who want to deliver something of value through coaching and want to earn a living from it because they,
Focus and deliver on their 'tangible' reputation and credibility with a clear coaching USP, and
Are able to sell their coaching services that meets a specific market need.
To achieve this a lot of intentional trialing, experimenting, reflecting and refining is required to find their clientele that matches their coaching style and purpose-driven business that focuses on solving a specific market challenge. And on a practical front, coaching needs to be delivered flexibly through technology as well as in person. If it's not possible or easy to do face-to-face, then all coaches have to be familiar with and comfortable with using technology to engage in that conversation and run it as if you're doing it face-to-face without feeling that there is that distance between the two.
To build and grow their purpose-driven business, coaches need to sell their services and find ways to get in the door of the organization. One option is to work in organizations that have developed, or hired a broker, to help them select executive coaches following a specific selection process to better identify what type of coaching you purposefully want to do. It would also be reasonable to assume that quite a lot of organizations don't ever use coaching at all, because either they can't afford it or think they can't afford it. There might be a pool of SME type organizations out there that don't realize the value of coaching for them and their people and they are filled will people with a high degree of expert employees. Broadening your potential client base to different size of organizations may mean changing the business model to share costs amongst different SMEs if financial resourcing is a challenge. Shifting and revolutionizing coaching business models may be a more positive way to attract and work with new clients. For example, coaches might suggest to startups, "We'll take a percentage of your profits/shares as you accelerate and grow while we provide the different type of coaching you'll need to meet your organizational and business challenges" if a standard contract isn’t an option. Or they may even form new collaborations and business models to deliver more focused products that deal with a client's multi-faceted challenge in a range of organizations, including corporations.
Once coaches have identified their coaching USP, and built their reputation and credibility, the next step is scaling up their coaching business which is often exceedingly difficult unless they find (1) coaches with similar qualities to themselves and (2) open to going through a specific type of training. With that quality control in place, when the coaches begin working with that company’s clients they can be assured that when they attend their coaching sessions they will receive of equivalent quality the coaching they expect even when it’s being delivered by colleague of the business owner. Otherwise, the amount of coaching is limited by the number of hours in a day, unless, of course, they’re going to get into the world of team coaching where you might be able to charge more whilst remaining a solopreneur.
What seems clear, and becomes more prominent as coaches move from working independently to growing and scaling their business, is how continuing personal and professional development (CPPD) is integral to their business especially when it enables them to knowingly deliver quality coaching that tackles a specific organizational challenge. There’s still a long way to go in developing a robust CPPD system that effectively supports all coaches in their work, but for now perhaps we might agree that there are more 'wild and wiser cats' amongst the 'wild west' of coaching.
Connect with David Lines via Linkedin and Yvonne Thackray via tgc The Bloggers
Dr. David Lines is an executive coach, process consultant, facilitator, and a practitioner supervisor. He coaches executives and CEOs to realise their full potential and develop a deep understanding of how they can lead more effectively and authentically in a fast-paced, changing world. The principles that guide his practice are rooted in the belief that individuals can work out and resolve their own issues and learn within an authentic, compassionate and challenging coaching environment. David has been facilitating programmes on group dynamics and process facilitation for over thirty years.
Yvonne Thackray is an executive coach and peer supervisor, and a practitioner researcher and editor, who has combined her passions through all these roles for the past decade at the good coach. She works with clients internationally, with a keen interest in leadership (professional and personal) and knowledge management (intuition and tacit knowledge). A specialist in the field of coaching she defines coaching as providing that quality of attention that enables another person to have the confidence and clarity to reach and humbly manage their potentials now and in the future.
