The increasing entry of professionals into coaching:
At the same time, the profile of coaches in the industry appears to be changing. Individuals, whose primary training is in evidence-based organizational and human change, are stepping forward as professional coaches. These include psychologists, psychiatrists, adult education specialists and organizational change experts with postgraduate qualifications in business, human resources and other professions. Aside from a range of domain specific knowledge, these people often bring with them a set of practice standards and ethical understanding derived from their previous professional training.
The increasing sophistication of management and Human Resource (HR) professionals:
the consumers of coaching services have grown progressively more sophisticated. Human Resource professionals who employ coaches for their organizations are increasingly well informed, and coach assessment and interview processes for corporate coaching assignments have grown more demanding. Indeed, HR professionals often have a more detailed understanding of the range of coaching services on offer, and their applicability to various organizational needs and challenges, than do many coach service providers. Human Resource professionals are increasingly wary of what they perceive to be pseudo-coach credentialing mills, and increasingly ask searching questions about the theoretical foundations of the coach training and the validating empirical evidence. Private clients are also requesting facts and data about the effectiveness of coaching. ª[3]
Daniel Feldman and Melenie Lankau say:
The use of executive coaching as a developmental intervention for managers has increased dramatically during the past decade. Consequently, there has been a burgeoning practitioner literature on the topic of executive coaching. Empirical research on executive coaching, however, has lagged far behind, and theoretical work on the processes underlying effective coaching has been limited. [4]
According to Kathryn Foxhall
more psychologists are attracted to the executive coaching field. Psychologists in executive coaching say joining the field requires business and psychological know-how.
Psychologists who’ve ventured into the executive coaching field say there’s great opportunity for more of their colleagues to enter the field–if they understand and care about business.
The work, which focuses on making top leaders more effective, has come into its own, says Sandra Shullman, PhD, chair of APA’s Executive Coaching Work Group, an effort of the Board of Professional Affairs.
Executive coaching is a workplace trend and a trend in psychology,”she likely to be successful in handling referrals where an executive must change a deeply entrenched and dysfunctional behavior pattern (p. 17).[5]
As we can see from the above the training that is required to acquire all these skills is quite extensive and is worth considering whether one is ready and inclined to do so when considering becoming an executive coach. I know that there are lots of coaches who start with life coaching and when they find themselves not making enough money they think of moving to executive coaching “where the money is”. Most of them don’t prepare themselves well enough and probably they don’t know what it entails to make that move.
I also know that lots of coaches do not take seriously how important it is to be very familiar with the business environment and the business language as well as the language and psychology profile of people in the business world. This is why I insisted on finding highly professional opinions about the executive coaching requirements. Hope this helps.
To help coaching students make clearer decisions when considering executive coaching.
First let me describe some of the fundamental traits required for whoever aspires to be a highly professional executive coach.
Innovative Business Resources LLC describes them as follows6:
There really isn’t one way to go about becoming an executive coach, but there are definitely requirements that every coach should have,
says Shullman.
The most important one, according to Tippins, is hands-on experience that’s supervised by a seasoned coach who can provide evaluation and feedback. Tippins got guidance by interning at a large corporation under several I/O psychologists. Kralj went to business school and became a manager herself before joining a consulting firm. To gain such practical experience, Shullman suggests practitioners contact consulting firms or psychologist-coaches who they might apprentice with.