For the 1,000 to 2,000 coaching clients that I have had—and I have much of that data, and I’ll speak for myself: I have done very little with that data.  I did one research study for my own practice, and took 25 clients that I had worked with over a period of a year who were senior executives.  I tried to identify what the patterns of their presenting situations and their strengths and what their goals for coaching were, and then what the results of the assessments were and what the results of the 360s were, and then what coaching approaches we used and which worked and which didn’t work.  Then, what kind of results did we get at the individual, the team and the organizational level, as well as business measures? Then I followed up six months later to see what kind of sustained results were derived.

I found that 75 percent of the people that I coached were promoted or given expanded responsibilities within six months of the coaching, but I didn’t do enough with the data, or I didn’t have enough time …  And that’s one of the things.  If you’re a coach, you don’t have a lot of time.  It’s a very time-consuming profession, as an executive coach.  You’re spending a minimum of typically ten days, eighty hours of work, to coach an executive over a period of six to twelve months.

To then take all of what you learned and structure the research to be able to take that data and look for patterns and control it in such a way that you can compare that with the people who haven’t received coaching, so that you can actually generalize it and do some random sampling, so that you know that it’s not just because of your being the coach but because of what happened in the coaching in certain situations, I just don’t have the time to do that.

That’s probably the case for most practitioners, but there’s an opportunity for a partnership between the researchers and the practitioners:  to be able to use the time and the expertise of the researchers on how to design the “experiments.” They can design the research around what is coaching, how it’s done, by whom, with whom, in which situations, with what kinds of results, measured in what ways.  They can include what periods of time with what sustained results, and what the options are, and where there’s a good match, and does it make a difference if the coach is certified or has a certain kind of background.

All those things, we don’t know any of that.  Even with all the research that’s been done, we don’t know any of that, so as a potential discipline, we’re really in our infancy.

Now, we’ve learned some things, over the last five years especially, having to do with the diversity of what’s going on, especially in executive and leadership and organizational coaching, around the world.  One thing that we know in general is that people are doing coaching in very different ways.  They’re calling it coaching, but meaning very different things in different parts of the world.  Some of it includes mentoring, some advising, some consulting.  Some of it’s focused on mindfulness, some of it’s focused on self-awareness, some of it is on skill building, some of it is on habit change, some is on organizational development, some on intervention, some on relationships.  And everybody’s calling that all one thing:  coaching.