What does the ‘new normal’ look like for coaching? This was one of the questions explored in a survey by EMCC Global, Henley Business School and CoachHub. Jonathan Passmore reports
What does the ‘new normal’ look like beyond Covid-19, or at least where we accept Covid-19 as endemic? We explored this and other questions in a global coach survey.
The research was a collaboration between the European Mentoring & Coaching Council (EMCC) Global, Henley Business School and digital coaching platform, CoachHub. Undertaken during summer 2021, with 1,266 participants from 79 countries, it explored four main themes: diversity in coaching, digital coaching, team coaching and expectations about future trends (Passmore, Lui and Tewald, 2021).
The impact of Covid-19
After two years of lockdowns and restrictions, the existence of the virus is creating a new normal, the norm of uncertainty. Given this we explored coach expectations about 2022 and beyond, as well as the impact of Covid-19 during 2019-21.
Most participating coaches were self-employed and the impact was very mixed, with some experiencing reduced income (21%), others increased income (12.49%), some increased hours of work (18.94%) and others reduced hours of work (18.05%).
The winners were coaches whose experience of working online saw them able to migrate to working solely online quickly, many of whom enjoyed increases in work.
However, coaching practice was affected in other ways, too, highlighting the impact of the pandemic on client presenting issues. The top three issues reported were: balancing work–life priorities (19.11%), relationships at work (17.94%) and stress (17.78%), reflecting challenges coaches faced, too.
We included a free field for coaches to share the challenges they’ve faced during Covid-19. Frequent responses referred to ‘isolation’, ‘online home working’ and ‘managing emotional content’. For us, this highlighted the importance of supervision to support individual coaches as lone workers managing a more emotive caseload yet engagement with supervision remains patchy, with much ambivalence in North America (see Table 1).
Table 1: Future Trends (Results based on a 5-point rating scale, where 1 was strongly disagree and 5 was strongly agree and 3 neither agree nor disagree)
Other findings
As with previous surveys (Passmore, 2017), the survey confirmed that globally, coaching is a highly gendered, ageing profession, with respondents aged 54 on average and females outnumbering males by approximately 2:1.
Separate research from CoachHub suggests there remains a bias in selection towards females. Internal data from thousands of coach matching processes, where the matching algorithm provides three matches for each client, but includes both the best fit male and best fit female, reveals that 80% of female clients and 64% of male clients select a female coach. There may be a host of possible explanations but small-scale research by Gray and Goregaokar, (2010) suggested that gender bias may be explained by female clients favouring the choice of female coaches, partly as a role model of business success. Male clients tended to justify selecting a female coach as more approachable for discussing sensitive, personal issues.
The coach survey also highlights that coaching is predominately a white profession, with white coaches disproportionately represented in the Americas, Europe and Africa. The results confirm some of our worst fears on race – that Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) coaches in geographical territories such as the UK and US are both significantly under-represented when compared to the national population, and command lower rates of pay than coaches who identified as white’.
While these disparities exist, the data from this survey does suggest that the profession is broadly representative in terms of disability and sexual orientation to other published data at a national level (Passmore, 2021).
The survey shows coaches have significantly increased their migration to online delivery. Most don’t anticipate moving back. It suggests coaches are broadly conservative when it comes to change: sceptical about AI, concerned about how to introduce environmental issues to client conversations and still unconvinced of the value of additional accreditation for supplementary services such as team coaching.
Future trends
We presented a series of statements, inviting coaches to respond on a 1-5 scale as to how strongly they agreed with the statement, allowing a comparative assessment of key issues for the future.
There were variations across issues and across geographical territories. European coaches were less optimistic about online coaching platforms than US and African coaches. This may reflect the traditional cottage industry approach to coaching in much of Europe, with sole practitioners undertaking work and a perception that platforms may change the status quo. In Africa, the emergence of platform providers is a further step towards globalisation of coaching, providing access for many English- and French-speaking coaches to higher rates of pay in European and North American coaching markets.
Coaches’ expectations about the use of online tools such as Zoom for coaching also varied. These differences may reflect the level of exposure to phone and distance coaching which have been a common feature of coaching in North America for 20 years, and may also be influenced by variations in broadband and electricity network stability. However, we can conclude that most coaches (86%) have a positive attitude towards online coaching following the pandemic, with a majority expecting to transition to online coaching for all or part of their work in 2022.
Conclusion
This survey provides an interesting snapshot of how Covid-19 is reshaping the coaching industry towards a more global online activity. However, it also highlights issues around gender and race, and the changing, more emotionally complex work being undertaken by coaches, and thus the need for greater inclusion and support for coaches as isolated workers.
- Readers can access a free copy of the report at: https://bit.ly/3pLkD6d
- Jonathan Passmore is Senior VP Coaching at CoachHub, Professor of Coaching and Behavioural Change at Henley Business School, UK and Chair of the British Psychological Society Division of Coaching Psychology.
References and further info
- D E Gray and H Goregaokar, ‘Choosing an executive coach: The influence of gender on the coach-coachee matching process’, in Management Learning, 41(5), 525-544, 2010
- J Passmore, Future Trends in Coaching: Executive Report 2021. Henley Business School & EMCC Global, 2021
- C Roche and J Passmore, Equity, Social Justice & Belonging in Coaching. Henley on Thames: Henley Business School, 2021
- J Passmore, Q Lui, and S Tewald, ‘Future trends in coaching: Results from a global coach survey 2021’, in The Coaching Psychologist, 17(2), 43-53, 2021