Are There Any Differences between Personal and Organizational Coaches?
Results from the two Development of Coaching surveys suggest that those who are most often oriented toward personal coaching are slightly more likely to identify change in their coaching practices (from when they began working as a coach) as a decline, while organizational-oriented coaches are slightly more like to identify this change as an improvement in performance. With regard to both personal and organizational coaches, it should be noted that there is a substantial difference between the improvement and decline scores. Both see improvement from the time when they formally began working as a coach to be much greater than decline—it is only that decline is slightly more commonly found among those oriented toward personal coaching. Do the personal coaches have higher standards for themselves than the organizational coaches, or perhaps higher expectations regarding their performance? We will have to wait until other differences are revealed to offer any preliminary suggestions regarding the nature or etiology of these minor differences.
Other responses to this initial question yield results that continue to be suggestive of a difference between personally oriented and organizationally oriented coaches. The organizational coaches indicate that they are slightly more likely than personal coaches to have overcome past limitations in their coaching skills and knowledge and are more likely to have realized their potential as a coach. Once again, these individual items do not yield statistically significant differences (especially given the large number of statistical analyses being performed) – but they do suggest a pattern.
Those coaches who do much of their work in organizations (or provide coach training) seem to be slightly more positive about their work (over time) as a coach and their improvement (over time) as a coach than are those doing much of their work as personal coaches. Is it because the organizational coaches are more experienced than the personal coaches? Or are those oriented toward work in organizations more likely to over-estimate their abilities (or the personal coaches to underestimate their abilities)? We will keep these possible conditions in mind while moving forward with our analysis of results from the remaining questions.
