It was fascinating.  There were some commonalities, but the way someone with an art background—and an artist’s mind and an artist’s standards and processes and models—approaches coaching is very, very different from the approaches of someone who’s from psychology or education or sports medicine, or a physician or a therapist.  It’s fascinating—we don’t have any research to substantiate exactly what are the differences…and do those differences impact the process or impact of coaching.

WHERE TO GO FROM HERE

Bill Carrier: I could probably write an entire article just about this part of the conversation, but I want to be respectful of your time, too.  I know we’ve got about five more minutes.  It’s such wonderful content. How would you like to spend these last five minutes?  What have we not addressed that you’d like to address?

Lew Stern: I guess the most important thing to me is: where do we go from here?  If research is going to do what it needs to do to help coaching move in the direction of being a more professional, evidence-based discipline, where coaches have data to substantiate that what they’re doing is the best that they can be doing with their clients, what do we need to do?  Here are my recommendations, and the recommendations that Sunny and I came up with.

First of all, we need to do much more research.  The amount of research that’s being done is actually going down.  It picked up in the mid-2000s but since 2008 less peer-reviewed original research was conducted through the first half of 2012.  One, we need to beef it up, and we need to get more practitioners and researchers working together to do real research, both controlled studies and non-controlled studies.  What we need to do is systematically find out who’s being coached, by whom, in what ways, with what results, and what factors are affecting the results and the satisfaction and the impact of the that coaching.

Number two is we really do need to expand the variables that we’re studying when it comes to results.  Since psychologists have become, or primarily have been, up until this point, the primary drivers of the research, the outcomes that they’re primarily looking at—not only, but primarily—are outcomes like depression and anxiety and happiness.  Also, they’re primarily focused on individuals, they’re primarily psychologically oriented, and the results that are primarily being measured are through standardized psychological testing.

What we’re not measuring is the impact of a leader on business/mission results.  We’re not measuring whether or not, over a period of a year, whether, literally, a person’s physical well-being is better.  Does their vagal tone get better?  Does their blood pressure go down?  There’s a happiness scale that’s often used, and that’s very positive, but does that happiness lead to a life that is more productive?