We need to look at the different specialty areas of coaching, like life coaching, personal coaching, executive coaching, motivational coaching, wellness coaching, coaching with people with special needs, coaching in the sports arena. These sub-disciplines of coaching all need to do research in order to be evidence-based and be responsible to their clients.

Next, we’ve produced a bunch of research, but we’re not doing it in a systematic way.  Somehow we need to come together again, and perhaps approach the path through other sources.  We need to set some priorities by the people who are actually going to do the research. Right now what is happening is that people tend to be doing research where they have the clients available to study.  There’s very little random sampling going on, and there’s very little in the way of control groups, so we can’t generalize either within coaching groups or across situations and geographic regions.

We can’t just be looking at the general coaching process.  We need to be studying what the coach is actually doing at the micro level.  We’re not doing that yet.  We need to do things more systematically, more internationally, sharing results.

The certification programs need to be doing more research.  They have a large array of people coming in, and what they’re not doing is systematic research on what backgrounds those people come in with, what competencies, what styles, what strengths, and where are they at the end of the certification training and then where are they six months later. What kinds of coaching have they done and what impact has that had.

We also need to be focusing on the larger impact on the system within which people live and work; so not only the impact of coaching on the individual, but also on their relationships and their families, organizations, and their communities and society as a whole.  That’s where we need to get involved with looking at where is society, and who are the influencers and potential influencers on the future of our society. We need to proactively focus our coaching where it can have the greatest influence to have the biggest impact on the future for generations to come.  Socially responsible coaching is a critical aspect of this, and there’s practically no research being done on the impact of coaching at this societal level.

In short, we need more diverse research, better coaching research, more involvement of the practitioner and partnership with the researcher, better studies that are more controlled with random samples and control variables, and then more people publishing.  More research—and then the actual practitioners actually looking at that research and using it to build their practice, not just doing what their gut tells them is the right thing to do.