William Carrier and William Bergquist
Table of Contents
Lew Stern Interview: Research on Professional Coaching [Bill Carrier]
The Coaching Research Agenda: Pitfalls, Potheads and Potentials [William Bergquist]
The Coaching Impact Study [Cambria Consulting]
Sherpa: 2014 Executive Coaching Survey Report [Sherpa Coaching]
Research on Coaching: A 2005 Retrospective [Bush and Lazar: IJCO]
The Marketing of Professional Coaching: An Eleven Year Perspective [Lazar and Bergquist]
The Bookshelf: Bibliography of Coaching Research [Stern]
There’s a lot of territory left to explore and even more for us to finish mapping.
When the New World was explored and settled, a host of nations and peoples found different things—forests, lagoons, deserts, wintry northlands, sunny southern climes, flatlands and microclimates (not that they called them microclimates back then). Many times settlers wouldn’t range far and, even for explorers who never stopped, it could take decades to travel a region well. They’d share their discoveries and document them, mapping the New World much as the Old World had been charted. Where once, “Here Be dragons” was written, slowly but surely, the edge of what was known was extended.
Much as early explorers and cartographers, many of our coaching colleagues are in the process of redefining the boundaries of coaching. We’ve been sailing from an old world of Personnel—where “here be dragons,” might have included the dangers of anything actually personal showing up at work—to a new world of self- and organizational leadership, integrated and with integrity.
As individual coaches, we learn well what works for us—we settle our certain tracts and explore the regions nearby—but there are only so many clients we can see in a day, a year, a decade; there are only so many opportunities and problems and solutions we can discover, explore and document with our clients. We build our own maps of what works and for whom through personal experiences. Many of us learn the area in which we work so well that we become guides for other. In some cases, we share our understanding and, collectively, it creates a clearer picture of the place our profession has settled.
We have so many pioneers and singular settlers, however, and so many people who are busy building forts and tilling souls, that our documentation remains vastly incomplete. The terrain of our work from our collective perspective remains largely unknown…and so we remain uncertain: are there still dragons out there?
We write in this and our next issue of our common effort in the cartography of coaching: the research which underpins the workings of our efforts and highlights the performance of our profession. In this first of two issues on the systematic effort to document coaching, we’ll address research in and about coaching both historically and conceptually—we’ll cover the terrain rather broadly. In the second issue, we’ll dive deeper into certain subjects and look into the future of professional coaching research.
In compiling this first of two issues of The Future of Coaching on research, we have taken a metaphorically appropriate effort to look at where we are, where we’ve been, and where we are going with respect to research on professional coaching. We first look at the state of research today and are delighted to offer an insightful interview on this topic conducted by one of us [BC] with a leading figure in the field of coaching, Lew Stern. As a practitioner with a scientific background, Dr. Stern outlines many of the accomplishments and challenges associated with research in coaching. We follow the Stern interview with an essay written by one of us [BB] that parallels the focus of Stern on the challenges and promises of coaching research—to a certain degree, exploring not only where we are but also where we are not. This second essay probes broad issues concerning decisions about the type of research to be conduct and the sources of information about coaching that are identified when preparing a coaching research project.
Also in the spirit of where we are, we are grateful to be able to share the survey conducted by the Sherpa Consulting Group regarding the current status of professional coaching as identified by respondents to a worldwide Sherpa survey. We are presenting the latest (2013) report.
In taking a look at where we’ve been, we next offer impressive examples of coaching research that have been conducted in recent years. Outcomes of the first research project were reported in 2006 by members of the Cambria Group (Derek Steinbrenner, Ellen Kumata, and Barry Schlosser). As one of the most widely acclaimed reports in the history ofthe International Journal of Coaching in Organizations (IJCO), it was republished in 2010, with a brief commentary written by the original authors. We have reprinted this report with the subsequent commentary. The Cambria study exemplifies research that focuses on coaching outcomes and the factors influencing successful coaching. We also have the insights offered by the Cambria authors several years after the initial publication of this IJCO article. We also look backward at an entire issue of IJCO that was devoted to research on professional coaching—with a particular focus on Return-on-Investment (ROI). This issue of IJCO was published in 2005.
As we are doing in all issues of The Future of Coaching we conclude with two very practical essays—one concerned with conducting the business of professional coaching and the other concerned with a review of literature related to the field of professional coaching (The Bookshelf). In this issue, we focus on the marketing of professional coaching and turn once again to an essay originally published in IJCO. We offer a unique perspective in this case, for we have not only the original article about marketing cycles written by Sheila Maher and Suzi Pomerantz [co-curator of this digital library] written in 2003, but also the commentary on this article written in 2010 by Maher and Pomerantz and a second, contemporary commentary prepared by John Lazar [publisher of IJCO] and one of us [BB] on this original article. In many ways these three different documents offers the reader an historical perspective on the field of coaching and the marketing of coaching—including three snapshots over an eleven year span of time. If nothing else, it’s an interesting look at the way the map of the same terrain may change over time.
The Bookshelf is also unique in this issue. We offer not the review of a single book, but rather an expansive bibliography on all of the peer-reviewed articles reporting on coaching research from 2008-2012—a crucial period of time following the International Coaching Research Forum (see the interview with Lew Stern for more on the Summit). This bibliography was prepared by Lew Stern (and his colleague, Sunny Stout-Rostron) in 2012 and serves as a wonderful bookend for this issue of The Future of Coaching: we begin with a Lew Stern interview and end with his exhaustive bibliography on coaching research. We hope you find these diverse offers to be of value to you in your own endeavors as a professional coach or user of coaching services.
This issue of The Future of Coaching is dedicated in memoriam to our dear colleague, Gordon Lee Salmon (1942-2014)
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Table of Contents
Lew Stern Interview: Research on Professional Coaching [Bill Carrier]
The Coaching Research Agenda: Pitfalls, Potheads and Potentials [William Bergquist]
The Coaching Impact Study [Cambria Consulting]
Sherpa: 2014 Executive Coaching Survey Report [Sherpa Coaching]
Research on Coaching: A 2005 Retrospective [Bush and Lazar: IJCO]
The Marketing of Professional Coaching: An Eleven Year Perspective [Lazar and Bergquist]