The Advantages of Coaching

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This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/bs13070596

The definition of coaching has been applied in several fields, such as sport, life, and business. Even though coaching was first used in sport as a discipline that helps athletes maximize their performances, there is an increasing number of coaches who work for every kind of company as executive, team, or business coaches. Career coaching has become an important method of helping people expand their self-awareness, facilitate personal development, and increase their performance in the school-to-work transition.

coaching coachee counseling team coaching type of client

1. The Origins of Coaching

Nowadays, brands like IBM and Motorola offer coaching programs as part of their business development plans ^[1]^[2]. The International Coach Federation (ICF), indeed, estimates about 47,500 business coaches around the world ^[3], and a great number of Fortune 500 companies use coaches to work with their managers ^[4]. There are many definitions of coaching. John Whitmore ^[5] is surely one of the pioneers of coaching; he created the GROW (goals, reality, options, will) method, which is a sort of guide that highlights the questions that a good coach should ask coachees. He published the book Coaching for Performance, suggesting that coaching is about “unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them (clients) to learn rather than teaching them”. Laura Whitworth and Thomas Leonard, on the other hand, define coaching as the “relationship of possibilities […] based on trust” ^[6]. Stelter ^[7], again, offers another point of view about individual coaching and describes it as “the coach’s participation in the development and learning process of the person in focus. This process creates the foundation for new, alternative, or revised narratives of the focus person’s personal and professional life”. Coaching is not therapy, or counseling. It is an ongoing, participative, empowering, and collaborative method ^[8]. The first association that brings together coaches in the whole world is the International Coach Federation (ICF), founded in 1995. In the educational field, it was in Sidney in 2002 that some specialized courses and a master’s degree were introduced.

2. The Relationship between Coach and Coachee and Differences with Other Professionals

It is necessary to outline the difference between coaching and other types of helping relationships, such as mentoring, advising, and career counseling. The mentor is usually a senior employee who works for the same company as the individual he is trying to help. The latter is typically a younger employee with no experience in the field ^[9]^[10]. Their relationship, which can last even 5 years ^[10]^[11]^[12]^[13], is very close and based on trust. On the other hand, the coach is often an external worker, and the relationship between him and the coachees is not that long and close. It is based on improving coachees’ skills and capabilities. The adviser is characterized by high business acumen and technical expertise; it suggests to the client how to cope with operational issues and plan strategic actions ^[10]^[14]. The coach does not tell the coachee what to do or give business recommendations ^[10]^[15], he suggests how to accomplish great results by improving oneself. Eventually, the career counselor is someone who helps people highlight their job preferences before they start working or before changing jobs. The coach, instead, usually tries to help people who already work for a company improve their skills ^[10]^[16]. Although these coach profiles are not the only ones involved in helping relationships, they are of particular importance in the personal development of students at different stages of life ^[10]^[17].

Over the past two decades, the academic literature has offered a high number of articles focused on describing coaching, its evaluation methods, and how coaches can affect coachees’ lives. Nowadays, the efficacy of coaching is well established, and this is the reason why researchers started investigating the “so-called active ingredients of successful coaching—in particular the nature of the coach-coachee relationship and its impact on coaching effectiveness” ^[18]^[19]^[20]. In spite of this, there is still a great lack of scientific studies that focus on coaching and the relationship between coach and coachee, which is actually the essential condition for the success of coaching ^[21]. Indeed, it is known that the connection between coach and coachee has a high impact on coaching outcomes ^[22]^[23]. De Haan ^[19] reported, for example, the coach qualities valued by coachees, such as listening, understanding, and encouraging. O’Broin and Palmer ^[24] conducted research demonstrating that bond, engagement, collaboration, attitudes, and characteristics of the coach were assessed by both coaches and coachees as the most important aspects in relation to the creation of a coaching relationship. In addition, coaching focuses on dialogues: the coach is a sort of facilitator of the dialogue; “he or she is aware of the risk of inadvertently influencing the process of co-creation” ^[7]^[25]. In this dialogue, there are some key aspects between coach and coachee, such as trust, consciousness, responsibility, and freedom ^[5]. It is known that “coach’s behaviours, dispositions, education, and experiences are determinants of coaching success” ^[26]^[27]^[28]. Every coach has to listen to the coachee’s experiences, choices, desires, and aims without judging. The coachee, instead, has to be honest and motivated to achieve his/her goals ^[5].

3. From One to Many—The Difference between One-to-One, Group, and Team Coaching

Nowadays, it is possible to see an increasing shift from one-to-one coaching to group or team coaching. Each type of coaching has different pros and cons. One-to-one coaching “enables clients to dig deep into key focus areas” through the application of core competencies. It allows the coach and the coachee to design their relationship agreement, build a sense of trust and intimacy, improve communication and awareness, and focus on powerful conversations ^[29]^[30]. Team coaching can be defined as “a process that involves the collaboration of its members through the integration of different skills and perspectives” ^[31]. Team coaching has been considered helpful to “improve performance, and the processes by which performance is achieved, through reflection and dialogue” ^[32]^[33]. The shift from one-to-one to group or team coaching allowed the possibility to work on multiple agendas, facilitate teamwork, and focus on a wider scope. The benefit of this type of coaching is that it lets teams achieve greater results by working together and focusing on the common goal of the organization they work for. However, there are many voices and points of view, so it is not always possible to go deep into conversations ^[29]^[33].

4. The Advantages of Coaching in Relation to the Type of Clients

Coaching is for anyone: parents, adolescents, entrepreneurs, and athletes who want to improve their lives through a learning process ^[34]. It has different advantages depending on the type of client. In the business field, for example, it aims at individuals, managers, or organizations. Gilley and Gilley (^[35], p. 6) suggested that the main benefits of coaching in the company relate to different dimensions:

a more positive self-perception (individual dimension), in terms of enhanced relationship with manager, self-esteem, job satisfaction, career development, attention to the individual, individual and professional growth;
improved interpersonal skills (managerial dimension), in terms of enhanced relationship with employees, focus on worker’s strengths and weaknesses, worker’s motivation and performance, soft skills development, career opportunities;
higher overall organizational performance (organizational dimension) in terms of reduced complaints and lawsuits, enhanced general communication, working performance, teamwork and competitiveness, development of organizational culture and learning.

Coaching perks are also related to students in the educational field and individuals who are experiencing life transitions. Research conducted in 2016, for example, showed that “educational coaching is effective on students’ academic motivation, error-oriented motivation, and educational stress […] Educational coaching increases the students’ academic motivation” ^[36]^[37].

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