IJCO can play an important role in sharing experiences, research and innovations across these markets. Sharing our experiences with our international colleagues will help us keep the whole profession moving forward in this global economy. In doing this, it will be important to look at how well coaching interventions can be transferred between diverse cultures and to identify elements that make it possible to generalize results across settings.
6. Provide Training and Support for Business Development.
Finally, a new issue has come to our attention since we wrote this article. There is an urgent need for coaches and coach trainers to learn how to develop their practices as businesses. Many coach training programs are missing this critical component and that contributes to the abysmal numbers of coaches who are unable to sustain a viable executive coaching practice. Citing research findings in his book Getting Started in Personal and Executive Coaching: How to Create a Thriving Coaching Practice, Stephen Fairley stated that more than half (53%) of coaches surveyed earned less than $20,000 a year. In the last few years a few books have come out to address this missing piece: Get Clients Now, by CJ Hayden in 1999, Four Steps To Building A Profitable Coaching Practice: A Complete Marketing Resource Guide For Coaches by Deborah Brown-Volkman in 2003, and most recently Seal the Deal: The Essential Mindsets for Growing Your Professional Services Business by Suzi Pomerantz in 2006, which is the only book to address the need to integrate networking, marketing and sales activities for ultimate success.
CONCLUSION
To summarize, we both feel strongly about the need to continue to innovate the profession (which some still argue is not yet an official profession). We are in the maturity phase of the market lifecycle. Now, more than ever, we still call for LEADERSHIP in our profession! We’ve come a long way in the five years since we wrote the article. Consumers are now excited rather than skeptical. There’s been an increase in internal coaches and more organized and sophisticated coaching programs inside corporations. Doctoral programs and degrees in coaching in mainstream academia add to the credibility, sustainability and improved research, innovation and evaluation of our field. And organizations like ICCO are leading the way to expand the dialogue such that it includes all stakeholders. We are starting to see a rise in collaborations, alliances, and mastermind groups of coaches pooling their resources and expertise. We’d like to see more organizations and entities address executive coaching as a mature product, begin to provide much needed stewardship and leadership, and shape sustainable growth through the market lifecycle of this important service.
Download Article 1K Club
