The coaching industry is booming, but (how) does it work, and what is it all about?

We are evolving from an “Oh, you have a coach, what’s wrong with you?” to an “oh, you don’t have a coach. What is wrong with you?” discourse.?

As the coaching market is rapidly expanding, and as I have just finalised a 9-month Professional Coaching Certificate from Henley Business School, I wanted to share some of my newly obtained knowledge on the approaches to coaching, the innovation of coaching and the value drivers.

Coaching market stats:

• The coaching industry In 2020 was estimated at $20 billion,?
• it has an average growth of 6,7%
• in the last ten years, the volume of certified coaches has increased by 132x.?

According to the International Coaching Association (ICF) and analytics from Josh Bersin.

The art of coaching

Coaching is ancient trade (labelled around 1830) rooted in psychology, but in contrast to a psychologist, Coaching is not a protected title; no formal education is needed.?

Coaching is building on the same approach as psychology. I have listed the most common ones in the following:

Most “qualified” coaches should be able to shift between the different approaches as it suits the need of the coachee but will have their preferred ones. I, for instance, often switch approaches both from coachee to coachee and from session to session, but for example, I prefer the meta-cognitive approach over the psychodynamic approach.??

Coaching value drivers

Spoiler alert: Coaching only works in the proper context if you want it to and have great chemistry with your coach.

At Henley, I was introduced to some fascinating research by Assay & Lambert (1999). They identified four primary ‘‘active ingredients’’ that account for most of the variance in organisational coaching outcomes:?

The research concludes that only 15% of coaching outcomes come from a specific theory and technique (the abovementioned approaches). The rest are the external factors (40%), the relation between coach and client (30%) and the coachee's wish to transform (15%).?

This is something that I experience hands-on in my coaching. I always finish a process with a retrospective, and it feels like cheating when I hear the coachee go through the development they have experienced throughout the process. Often the development goes way beyond the value we have created in our session or the exercises and the techniques we have used. The value of the coaching process grows exponentially with the coachee's efforts to work on their development before, under and after sessions.

Coaching Market Innovation

To be frank, not much innovation has happened in the coaching market, which is weird if we consider the numbers above (both market growth and value drivers). It is one of few markets where technology has yet to make its intake. Still, humans are complicated, nuanced, beautiful creatures, challenging to fit into technology.

Of course, some innovations have happened, as we have seen in other markets; the first wave of tech innovation “marketplaces” has also occurred in the coaching market, with BetterUp and Coachhub being some of the more prominent players. We are also seeing the beginning of a second innovations wave, “coaching bots”, with Bunch and Mursion, to name a few. Still, they haven’t gained market share yet.?

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This concluded my second post in the People Business newsletter. I hope that you have enjoyed it. Feel free to comment, give critique and share suggestions for new topics as well as to share it with your network.