Coaches and the users of coaching services who are aligned with the professional culture conceive of coaching as a “profession” and seek to build its credibility through establishing a code of ethics, professional organizations (such as International Coach Federation) and publications (such as the International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring), and research and scholarship regarding coaching. In many cases, the established professions (for example, psychology and business consulting) have claimed that they alone can certify coaches or, at the very least, that the field of coaching should be closely monitored and controlled. The motives behind this professional concern are laudable: concern for quality of service and for an adequate foundation of theory-based and evidential research to support coaching practices. However, underlying these legitin1ate motives is often an unacknowledged thirst for control of the field (with its potentially rich source of money and capacity to influence personal and organizational lives).
Professional associations often play a central role in promoting this culture. These institutions address what Houle suggests is “a need for status, a sense of commitment or calling, a desire to share in policy formation and implementation … a feeling of duty, a wish for fellowship and community.” While those aligned with the professional culture support research on coaching, they are inclined to identify coaching as an “art “rather than a “science” and cringe at any efforts to quantify (and therefore constrain or trivialize) the specific outcomes of coaching.
At this point, I introduce a hypothetical coach whom I will call Susan Stracker. Let us assume for a moment that Susan is strongly associated with the professional culture. She and other coaches who associate with this culture are likely to embrace many untested assumptions about the dominance of rationality in organizations. Susan is likely to find it hard to work with an “irrational” client – someone who seems to dwell only in the heart rather than in the head. Susan is likely to read quite a bit (hoping to keep up in her “field”) and expects her clients. also, to be knowledgeable.
Susan will embrace a perspective on coaching that is systemic in nature – she believes that ‘ a “knowledgeable” leader must always look at the “big picture “and she assists her clients in seeing and carefully analyzing this big, systemic picture. At a fundamental level, Susan and her colleagues in the professional culture conceive of the coaching enterprise as the generation, interpretation, and dissemination of knowledge and the development of specific values and qualities of character among leaders in the institution – and they tend to differentiate between managers and leaders.
As “professional “coaches, Susan and her colleagues are inclined to associate their work with leadership, rather than the more “mundane” (in their view) operations of managers in the organization. Managers may need coaching, but the “real” value of coaching concerns engagements with those who operate in a leadership position. Views about management from a professional culture orientation suggest that managers administer. They ask how and when, focus on systems, do things right, maintain, rely on control, and have a short-term perspective.
Furthermore, those aligned with the professional perspective are likely to believe that managers tend to accept the status quo, have an eye on the bottom line, and imitate. They are the classic good soldier and are copies of the stereotypical manager of the 60s and 70s. Given this limiting perspective on management, the role to be. played by coaches with a professional culture orientation is quite clear They are not in the business of assisting managers in performing specific organizational· functions. Rather, they are to assist leaders who decide what these managerial functions should be.
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