The last in this series of columns by an anonymous coaching buyer takes a thought-provoking helicopter view of what’s going on in the industry.
This issue: profession or professional?
When I look for patterns and themes in the industry, I find its continued fragmentation to be the enduring theme of the past few years. I am reminded of a collection of medieval guilds, all vying for pre-eminence, but none able to dominate.
The discussions through the Coaching at Work accreditation forum (May issue) have been encouraging, but were long overdue and there is still a long way to go. The challenge for the coaching industry is whether it wants to become a profession or professional. I’m not saying most coaches are not professional in their behaviour, by which I mean having supervision, doing CPD and behaving ethically. But choosing a good coach based on all the standards and criteria seems to be getting more complicated, with accreditation not just of courses, but of individuals, too.
As for coaches entering the industry, it’s just as confusing: among the siren calls of industry bodies, who can you trust, and does it really make any difference? And there remains no clear act of redress for buyers who come across a bad coach – one who damages clients. There are no barriers to practice as in psychology or medicine.
If we are to have a profession in the UK, we will need a major rationalisation of industry bodies to form a single professional body, which the government could recognise as fit and proper to regulate the industry.
While the bodies have made small steps, including a joint ethical code, the situation is more akin to a dance, where everyone is trying not to get their toes stepped on, while keeping a respectful, not intimate, distance.
I don’t want to denigrate the efforts of the many individuals who put in their time to running these bodies, but you can’t all be right. The trouble is, none of you are really wrong either. So the challenge is, who will model a coaching stance? Just as a coach puts the needs of the client first, who will admit that their industry body needs to be subsumed into another for the greater good of the industry? I do wonder, though, that if it takes an ego to set up and run one of these bodies, what sort of ego would it take to dissolve it?
Without rationalisation, coaching will remain an industry, a trade, albeit with professional standards. The longer we have all these bodies, the longer the confusion will remain for buyers of coaching as they weigh up the merits of the MCC versus Master Practitioner versus MA qualified (and so on) coaches.
Coaches will just have to absorb the costs of multiple bodies claiming to offer what the others don’t – none offering much difference.
Perhaps the current economic climate is an opportunity for the industry to reflect on its shape. I know I have. It’s a mess – well-intentioned, thoughtful, well-meaning – but a mess. Is that what coaches want? If medieval guilds can offer single trade bodies to represent a specialised workforce, surely the coaching industry can do as well, or even better?
From the author
This is my last column as I’m moving away from coaching. The intention was always to mirror the long-established tradition of the Leader column in English broadsheets, which are anonymous.
I’d like to thank Liz Hall for keeping my identity secret, and for supporting and encouraging me over the past few years. I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading it or, at least that my meagre efforts have on occasion made you think. Last, but not least, my thanks to ‘T’, who knows the real me.
Volume 7, Issue 4