CHAPTER 4

DEVELOPING YOUR COACHING: FIRST STEPS

How do you develop your ability to coach?

This chapter takes you through four key steps:

1. 1Experience great coaching yourself.
2. 2Dip your toe in the water!
3. 3Get trained.
4. 4Continue learning.

Step 1: experience great coaching yourself

The crucial first step is to experience good coaching yourself. Ideally, you would go one better than that and feel the full-on astonishing experience of working with a great coach.

So, how do you find one?

1. Word of mouth

If something horrid happened and you had to find the very best lawyer in the business, how would you do it? Exactly – you’d ask around for recommend­ations. Do the same to find a coach.

2. HR

In larger organisations, someone in HR, L&D or talent management will be responsible for the quality and provision of business coaching within the organisation. Top HR directors’ ‘little black book’ of good coaches is now one of their most important assets, even becoming part of why they’re hired. Not only do the internal experts know who is around and what they’re particularly good at, they also often have a knack for suggesting ‘matches’ with a coach or two they think would work well with you. Typically, they will give you two to three CVs, from which you choose one or two for a ‘chemistry’ meeting (see below).

3. Referral sources

As with any other professional, word of mouth and personal recommendations, especially by people who know the local market well, are by far the best. Failing that, you can try referral sources, particularly the various accrediting bodies, training organisations and coaching brokers.

Some accreditors provide lists of coaches they have accredited. Good coach training organisations, and universities offering coaching training and degrees, similarly may make a public register available on their website. Others don’t publish their graduates’ details, but are prepared to suggest names of potential coaches on request, so it is worth contacting reputable training firms in your area. Coach broking services, online and offline, are proliferating; one that has weathered almost two decades of operation is TXG (www.txgltd.com).

4. ‘Chemistry’ sessions

Once you have identified a possible coach, the form is to meet them ‘for a coffee’ (i.e. informally) and in person, unless the service you are using is wholly online. Normally, this is free (but not always, so check). Be aware that the chemistry works both ways: you are trying out whether you can trust and work with this person, but so is the coach. If they suggest someone else, it might be that the ‘chemistry’ doesn’t work for them (they’re allowed!) but more commonly it’s because they think someone else would be better qualified to work with you and the particular issues you mentioned.

5. Having found one, how do I know they’re good?

Trust your instincts. If you find yourself opening up and telling them things you wouldn’t normally, and if that feels fine, and if by the end of the chemistry meeting you find to your surprise you’ve already had some good practical insights or action points, or things are clearer, it’s a pretty good sign. If the coach hasn’t been pre-screened for you by HR, and you need to do your own checking, again do what you would do for any consultant: see a CV, check credentials, take up references. For some questions that sort the genuinely accomplished business coach from the wannabe, see the box below.

6. If it doesn’t work, move on

Business coaching works fast: some coaching topics are cracked in a single session, or just two to three. Even with huge or long-term topics, if you don’t feel there are good results on the way within the first few meetings, raise this with the coach. If they don’t have a convincing explanation, politely move on.

We’re a start-up business/charity and funds are tight – how do we find a good but inexpensive coach?

Good coach training courses are like hairdressing schools, they need ‘practice clients’ for their students to experiment on. Find the best business coach training in your area/country and they are likely to be a source of acceptable coaching – it might be unpolished, but if the training is sound, it will be closely monitored and it’s usually free or low cost. This might sound alarming, but it’s like buying art at academies’ graduating shows: somewhere in there are the stars of the next generation. They won’t be a great coach yet, that takes years, but there will be some who are already good – you just need to be very alert in the chemistry and vetting process!

Step 2: dip your toe in the water

If you’re serious, a proper training course is essential. But if you can’t right now – too busy, too broke, too pregnant – then there are useful things you can be doing in the meantime. And as Herminia Ibarra advises in her terrific book on successful career transitions,³ it’s wise to test a new field with small experi­ments before taking the deep plunge. Depending on your preferences and time, you could try:

• ●Reading. Love reading? Try Jenny Rogers’ excellent Coaching Skills,⁴ which gives a great introduction to the whole field, and/or Sir John Whitmore’s Coaching for Performance,⁵ the classic on one of the core tools, the GROW Model, for starters. For more, see the references later in this book, and for even more, ask around to see if there is a coaching book club in your area – or start one!
• ●Training school sample events. If, on the other hand, you prefer to try things out for real rather than just read about it, training organisations typically run short events that are open to the public. As well as the usual ‘open days’, good schools may also offer short learning opportunities such as coaching ‘fishbowls’ (where you can watch top business coaches coaching live clients, for real) lectures, briefings and networking, either free or at moderate cost. These have many advantages: you can pick up some useful tips; you can look at the people and imagine being one of them (Good? Not good?!); and you can check out the ‘feel’ of the specific training provider in case later you want to take the plunge. But most importantly at this stage, you are exploring whether the field itself feels right for you.
• ●Short courses. The world is full of two-day coach training courses. They do not make you a business coach (and avoid any that say they do), but they can give you a good initial feel for the subject. Typically, such courses will explain GROW and get you practising it, run a listening exercise, etc. The skills won’t last – behaviour change takes repetition and time – but the jargon will stick, and it should start tuning your antennae in to coaching. Long ago, I paid a lot of money for a week-long course in a grubby hotel near the airport, with a broken window and a creepy little man leering from a bar stool talking about NLP. It doesn’t appear on my CV – but it got me started.

Step 3: get trained

You’ve experienced great coaching; there’s pressure in your firm to develop a coaching style of leadership; and/or you’ve heard of people who’ve made a successful switch to coaching as a flexible ‘portfolio career’. How do you step up to that level?

If you’re serious, you need to undergo formal training. Twenty years ago, you could break into coaching without it. But, today, with large numbers of good people coming onto the market with solid business credentials and training, why would a firm hire anyone without it? (See the box on ten tough questions!)

Formal training matters for deeper than just competitive reasons. Even with great natural talent, structured training puts you through your paces, exposes weaknesses you were unaware of, and brings out unexpected potential. Training also brings you up to date, plugging you into current best practice in the field, and gives you robust processes and a well-filled toolkit. It can also give you a community: some training organisations do, some don’t, but at its best the alumni group of graduates from X or Y training school you gain can be a rich source of referrals, mutual support and business help.

The elements of a good training course

We consider the detailed tools and techniques taught on coach training courses in the next chapter; here we outline the key elements.

Training courses will vary widely in what they cover, and how they do it, but any good course will have all of the following elements: structured learning; theory; practice; supervision; feedback; accreditation; and a learning community. (And one of the advantages of a formal training is they will require you to try even the elements you wouldn’t naturally be drawn to!) For a short video on the overall structure of a training programme, see www.meylercampbell.com, click on Mastered, and scroll down for the video.

Structured learning

There is an emerging international consensus on the core competencies of a business coach: see, for example, the Accreditation page on www.emccglobal.org. A training course that is accredited by a specialist body such as EMCC will have been grilled by them to ensure that each competency is covered somewhere in the training, so you don’t need to worry about it.

Theory

What deep theoretical roots will your work have? Good courses will include some consideration of the theory underpinning coaching. Some focus mostly on the practical aspects and have a minimal theoretical content, others major on it. Don’t expect this to be handed to you on a plate, however: there will also be quite a bit of asking you to reflect, think through and articulate the theory you bring to business coaching, and even (especially on a Master’s course) to push your learning further in your chosen specialism.

This is because all coaches need a ‘rock on which to stand’: something that gives their work deep foundations, and sets them apart. This is especially important in senior-level business coaching, where you will be expected to have something unique that you bring, possibly from an earlier or parallel part of your life. Psychology happens to be mine, for two of my colleagues it’s business strategy, and for many trained coaches I know it’s their deep experience in business, or being a lawyer, or even in one case a bishop; different people build their coaching on different rocks.

I mentioned psychology. It is not essential to have studied psychology to be a coach; psychology degrees, to this day, contain almost nothing directly on coaching, and psychologists have to do specialised training to coach like everyone else. But, if you are interested to study this further, perhaps to make it the rock on which you stand, see the box below.

Practice

Practice is at the heart of all good coaching training. The essential skills of good coaching can almost be written on the back of the proverbial envelope, but actually doing it is much harder – partly as there is so much to unlearn. The absolute essential for becoming significantly better is putting in the actual coaching hours. I notice coaches in training seem to improve, not steadily, but in sudden upward leaps. The first comes after about 9–12 practice coaching sessions, then another at about 20 sessions, and another after about 3 times that. Jenny Rogers⁷ says it takes 2,000 hours to become really competent; Malcolm Gladwell famously said it’s 10,000 hours to mastery of most things.⁸

Take care, however, who you practise with. There are lots of trade-offs to balance: working with people in your office who agree to be ‘guinea pigs’ saves time, which for a solo parent juggling work and heavy home responsibilities might be the single most important factor – but working with people who already know you, and expect you to behave in a certain way, isn’t the best space to feel free to try completely new things. Conversely, working with people you have never met, in fields that are totally foreign, is very valuable as you might feel much more free to experiment. And if you are right outside your professional expertise it forces you to be non-directive (see Chapter 5) – but there is a much heavier cost in terms of time, finding, vetting and briefing them, and possibly travelling distances to meet.

The two absolute essentials in a ‘practice client’ are that they be business-credible – there’s no point training on pussycats if you work with lions; and that they be currently in good mental health. It’s challenging enough juggling the new tools all at once, without the client suddenly sharing a serious mental health issue that you can’t handle.

^* Massive Open Online Courses – free and if carefully chosen, can be high quality.

This might sound alarming, and so it should. The boundaries with counselling or therapy, or ‘what do I do if a client strays into territory I’m not trained to deal with’, are among the worries most people bring to coach training. But good courses deal with this very firmly and early, building up your own awareness of your personal boundaries and your techniques to ensure you stay well within them. A further ‘belt and braces’ safeguard here is the next crucial element of the training course, namely:

Supervision

Even to become an OK coach, let alone a great one, you need someone to keep a close eye on you as you’re learning; somewhere to take questions and problems and explore forming ideas.

This is true when you’re developing your skill at anything, but in coaching, because we’re working with people’s minds, there must be an extra layer of protection built in. It is called ‘supervision’ and the concept came from the worlds of therapy and counselling. There are many elements to it. First, your supervisor is someone who watches out for the interests of all three parties to any business coaching: the coach, the client and the paying organisation. Are you, the coach, even subtly seeing your issues in the coachee, rather than theirs? Is the client a bad egg, manipulating you as part of their devious schemes? Is the organisation getting what they are paying for, or are coach and coachee drifting off into a happy little oblivion somewhere else?

A good supervisor should also help the trainee coach learn, pointing out new areas to explore, giving sage advice, an occasional rap over the knuckles and (hopefully, more often!) pointing out where the coach has particular gifts, which they were hitherto quite unaware were unique to them.

Feedback

An indispensable part of a training programme is feedback, ideally live in the moment, on your real coaching. It needs to be delivered sensitively, but straight between the eyes.

Accreditation

The course should be accredited. (It used to be that training courses were ‘accredited’, and individual coaches were ‘certified’, but this distinction has largely been lost, and the word is now used for both organisations and individuals.)

The situation on coaching accreditation has improved since the first edition of this book, but it is still not ideal. A single solid professional body with tough standards, and sharp teeth to enforce them, would give buyers a good deal of confidence. There is as yet no such institution, but while a decade ago there were at least nine different accrediting bodies, now there are effectively only three: the Association for Coaching (AC); the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC); and the International Coach Federation (ICF.) There are also some that are important in particular regions, such as COMENSA in South Africa (www.comensa.org.za) and WABC, based in Canada but working internationally (www.wabccoaches.com), but AC, EMCC and ICF are widely recognised as the big three.

Assuming your training is accredited, do you then need to go on afterwards to seek the further ‘badge’ of individual accreditation/certification? And, overall, does accreditation actually matter and, if so, which one is best?

It depends. Within organisations, typically one of two situations applies: either no accrediting body has taken hold, so you are free to take your own decision, or, often because a single influential person has become a ‘true believer’ in one particular accreditor, you can’t coach there (officially) without being accredited by that organisation – or indeed by an internal process the organisation has set up in response to the lack of a single powerful external body. The former, open, situation is far more common, but the latter is increasing.

However, in practice, individuals often bypass a need for personal accreditation if they have an irresistible lure in their CV (they’re a heavyweight business name; had a famous sports career; or were with a prestigious brand) and/or they have been careful to keep their network alive and fresh and have excellent contacts and a proven track record with the buyers who count.

It is also largely irrelevant for external coaches engaged directly by leaders from the ‘C-suite’ (CEOs, COOs, etc.), who are seldom even aware of accrediting bodies and who take their own decisions, well above the reach of all but the most influential HR or L&D enforcers.

Even if the coaching engagement is being handled by HR or L&D departments, two very different attitudes to accreditation are apparent. The world-class HR or L&D practitioners found in leading organisations in the world’s financial capitals tend to buy very discerningly, assessing each potential coach on their individual merits, rather than relying on just one factor, such as accreditation, alone. Putting forward a coach for the worldwide CEO or another senior leader in the organisation may not be the most important thing they will do in a year, but it may well be the most visible and high-risk, so savvy buyers will grill and assess coaches for individual fit and are unswayed by badges.

But if you are dealing with more junior HR personnel who have had less experience of the complexities of the coaching market, and/or who are further away from the centres of excellence, and/or in firms where someone has decided that coaching procurement must be systematised, then accreditation suddenly switches from irrelevant to an essential hoop to jump through, usually in a first online screening stage.

The question of which is the right one also depends on what type of coaching you are doing, and where. The ICF’s roots are in life coaching. It is the leading accreditation body by far in the USA, whereas in the UK it is relatively small; across Europe it is important in some countries and less so in others. The EMCC is, as its name says, dominant in Europe. The AC has been growing apace in many parts of the world. (The three organisations – ICF, EMCC and AC – have also worked together since the mid-1990s on common standards, and announced a cooperative alliance in 2012, but remain separate organisations.)

If you are a psychologist, you will be aware of the usually complex accreditation requirements prevailing in your country. (In the UK, see the BPS Special Group in Coaching Psychology (‘SGCP’) on www.bps.org.uk.)

Coaching psychology aside, there are usually two broad routes to individual accreditation, should you decide you need or want it. The most direct is to undertake a course that has been approved by the relevant accrediting body. There is then a ‘fast-track’ route where the training provider confirms to the accreditor that you are a bona fide graduate, you pay the accrediting institution a fee and submit further documentation (sometimes still quite extensive), and you’re in.

Some accrediting organisations also have an alternate direct route to accreditation for people who have not undertaken such a training course. This route is more of a sustained paper war, as the accrediting body needs to get directly from the applicant the evidence that would have otherwise been provided by the training course, but it can be done.

Community

Even the most committed introverts benefit from a chance to exchange ideas with others while developing their coaching. In fact, introverts can find communities of coaches quite congenial: for once, they’re in a group of people who are trained to shut up, and listen properly.

Choosing the right training course for you/your organisation

There is lots to consider – and then, research by my organisation at one point identified an astonishing 311 coach training courses on offer in the UK alone. Given all this, how on earth to choose? As with finding an individual coach, by far the most important method is word of mouth. Where did the people you respect train? Which course has the best reputation in the particular sector you want to work in? Who did other organisations like yours turn to?

Obviously, as with any prospective course, you study their website and visit, with questions such as the calibre and expertise of the faculty, and the particular approach of the course. In addition, there are at least six other filters that may help you get to a shortlist: life v. business; level; cost/ROI; rigour; practicalities; and community.

1. Life v. business coach training

Since you’re reading a book on business coaching, you’re probably interested in courses for business and organisational work. (For the personal/business coaching distinction, see Chapter 1.) Or not: you might want to draw on your business background to help people as an exceptionally good personal coach. Either way, you need to be clear on which sector the course is preparing you for. Unfortunately, this often isn’t clear. Some fail to distinguish between the two, or even claim it’s the same thing. I disagree: some of the basics are indeed the same, but business coaching is considerably more complex: for a start, there are almost always multiple parties involved in the initial contracting (as opposed to a single individual in life coaching.) You might want to take this one stage further and look not just for a training that specialises in business or organisational coaching, but also to identify the leading brand in your chosen business sector – which takes you back to asking around.

2. Level: Master’s or Practitioner?

The training and accrediting bodies have done good work in recent years in forging a consensus on two broad levels of coaching practice and training: Practitioner and Master’s. The labels are self-explanatory: Practitioner-level courses should have a sound basis in theory, but the main emphasis will be on actually coaching. They are usually one year part-time. Master’s degrees, as you would expect, have a much greater emphasis on and depth in the academic theory, and they are also usually longer – typically two years.

Have no illusions that any training, even a Master’s/PhD, will offer any guarantees: someone said to me once she was working for a PhD in coaching ‘because I don’t have any business experience, but I want to be a business coach because it pays more and this will get me in the door’. It won’t – as noted above, savvy organisational buyers look at much more than a single piece of paper, however weighty.

Instead, in deciding which level is right for you, I suggest you use the coaching trick of following your intrinsic interest. Whichever route you choose, it will be hard work and you’ll need real motivation. Some people have regretted for years that they don’t have a degree and now’s their chance. Or they just love studying in a university environment, with beautiful surroundings, essays and assignments, theoretical depth, and a degree at the end. For others that’s the last thing they need – they want a course that’s practical and high-energy, with a real focus on putting the learning to use in the world. Follow your dream – that will give you the energy to flourish in the training, even if, as for most people, you have to juggle it with full-time work and other commitments, such as family.

3. Cost – and return on investment

For organisations, the 2019 Harvard Business Review (HBR) article, ‘The Leader as Coach’, argues that training leaders to coach is an essential part of coping with disruptive change, as illustrated in the case of Microsoft.⁹ In the face of AI and machine learning, investing in leaders’ and managers’ ability to unleash ‘energy, innovation and commitment’, as the sub-title of the HBR article puts it, by building their ability to coach, has become core to survival and growth. The detail of the strategic ROI case is further spelled out in Andie Athanasopoulou and Sue Dopson’s excellent book, Developing Leaders by Executive Coaching, Chapter 4 of which is entirely devoted to measuring coaching’s impact, including surveying the many studies of ROI of coaching.¹⁰

So, for an organisation, the return on the investment in coaching training for their key people is clear. But for individuals the calculation may be different. If you are paying for the training yourself, you need to know your reasons: do you need to pay the mortgage and feed your family as a result of this, or is it just for your personal interest? If, for example, you want the training to lift you to a new level in your organisation, or to convert you into a successful freelance business coach, then look for evidence that substantial numbers of previous graduates of the course you are considering have done just that.

What you can typically earn as a coach, and the many ways people do it, are discussed in Chapter 13. In brief, there is a very wide range: I knew one business coach (but only one!) who earned £1 million a year for three years (prior to the 2008 crash) solely from his coaching – but at the other extreme, one primarily life coach training organisation told me with great honesty that having surveyed its graduates, 95 per cent of them weren’t able to earn their living from coaching alone. In between, from the results of several market surveys, plus my observation of generations of graduates over 25 years, most who put in the business effort can and do earn a reasonable (but not huge) living. Like any business endeavour, it takes time to get up to the level of full professional charging. Some with great marketing and selling aplomb get there within three months, but for us more ordinary mortals it takes on average 12–24 months.

If, however, you are considering coaching for personal interest and fulfilment, then the ROI will be different, and scrutinising your shortlist for perhaps the particular angle they cover, and the type of people you will be working with, will matter more. Again, what have previous graduates of your shortlisted courses done with their training: is it encouraging, even inspiring?

4. Rigour

At a basic level, indicators of a rigorous training are straightforward: is the approach clearly grounded in well-established, empirically-evidenced approaches? Is the faculty of high calibre? Is the selection process tough? Rigorous selection processes are one of the big differences between general coach training, where usually you pay your fee and are in, and specialist business coaching programmes.

Beyond that, rigour may manifest differently for different people. As a young diplomat, I had the job of taking the then Singapore Minister of Finance, Dr Tony Tan Keng Yam, around the country for a week. At the end of his visit, he said he wanted to give me a present, to say thank you. It was a piece of advice: ‘Anne,’ he said, gravely, ‘always be the third owner of a hotel.’ As an underpaid young diplomat, I’d rather have had something more practical, but actually the subtle wisdom of his gift, the metaphor, has stayed with me. I prefer training with a well-established organisation that has had time to settle down and get things consistently right but on the other hand you might prefer the funky new kid on the block.

5. Practicalities

The research is abundantly clear that the way of learning any new skill is to learn a bit; put it into practice; mull it over; learn a bit more; try it out and mull again. The conscious and unconscious processing and absorption that goes on between learning modules is just as important as the times when you are actually concentrating on learning aspects of the new skill. For this reason, most coach trainings are modular, with days or half-days spread out over time. That’s the optimal way to learn and for the learning to stick and, for most people, this also fits well with the rest of their working and personal lives, as they can manage a module a month, for example. But even though this is the optimal way to learn, it may not suit some people’s diaries – if for example you have to travel a long way for the training, learning in one intensive blast may be better for you.

Similarly, with the format of the training – do you flourish in an Oxbridge-style small tutorial group environment where things are very bespoke, but you can never escape the spotlight – or would you much prefer to sit anonymously at the back of a large lecture theatre, watching and observing the others with wry detachment?

6. Community

Most people want to get on with the people they’re training with, but when you’re grappling with something new and challenging – maybe for the first time in decades! – it can be very helpful to be with congenial fellow-sufferers. When I did my Psychology Master’s, a couple of fellow ‘mature students’ and I became good friends. We helped each other cope with juggling our hectic work and study lives, and their support and friendship made all the difference.

This matters even more if you are making the leap out of full-time work. The people you train with can become your instant new community, partly replacing some of those no-longer-around work colleagues. So, keep an eye out in your due diligence: is the ethos of the community a generous one of mutual self-help, or do people just scurry to lectures and scurry out again, keeping their contacts close to their chest? This is where going to trial events is invaluable, to ascertain the ethos of the gathering, and whether it is right for you.

Step 4: continue learning . . .

Having trained, you are still only, in that wonderful Churchillian phrase, at ‘the end of the beginning’. The next two years post-training in particular are absolutely crucial, to keep practising and learning, until it becomes fluid and unconscious and you can flick in and out of coaching mode in an instant.

This is particularly important for the majority of people who do business coach training not to become a professional coach but to develop their management and leadership skills: for them, coaching might just be the few-minute opportunity that suddenly opens up standing by the water cooler. Paradoxically, to be able to coach well in those two to three minutes takes hours of more formal coaching sessions. The training course will teach you what to do and get you started; you then need to keep going, to build that rapid-response capability.

The pieces for ongoing learning are mostly the same as in the training: practice, supervision, formal learning and support/community.

Practice post-training

Fortunately, for most people coaching becomes instinctive, and is so fulfilling that it is no hardship to keep doing it. Sometimes, the deepest rewards come outside the workplace: one older man had the rest of us almost in tears once when he said quietly: ‘Over the weekend, I had the first real conversation I’ve ever had with my 14-year-old son.’

Nevertheless, you need to ensure you have formal coaching arrangements in place, to build up your hours. Within an organisation, there is usually no difficulty: once word spreads that you can coach, there’s a queue at your door. The Coaches in Government Network was a clever arrangement in the UK civil service that lasted many years. It was a group of people who wanted to keep up their coaching, but who recognised that senior people were often more prepared to work with an external coach. So, they swapped: a network member in, say, the then Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) would have a client or two in the Education Ministry, and vice versa. The coaching was not charged, but was in all other ways fully professional and properly contracted. All the coaches had ‘day jobs’ in the civil service, so couldn’t take on many clients, but it was still a neat solution, providing access to quality coaching, from people familiar with the government’s unique culture and jargon, yet external to the client’s particular department. The model has since been replicated in many large organisations, where people keep up their coaching skill by having one or two formal clients in another division or country – everyone benefits.

Freelance coaches who don’t have an immediate pool of potential clients on their doorstep come up with a variety of solutions to keep building their hours. (And their confidence – and hence their business!) Many have ‘transition clients’ where they charge lower fees than a more established coach. It’s a win–win: the client gets coaching from a qualified source but more cheaply, and the coach is building their experience. Others volunteer, in local schools (head teachers have the same intense performance pressure as CEOs, with far less money to achieve it), or in churches or arts and community organisations.

Formal new learning, or CPD

Accreditation and training bodies recognise that ongoing learning is an indispensable part of professional practice, and most require set hours per year of logged CPD. They will give credit for a mix of activities, including attending courses, supervision and reading.

Refresher courses and new techniques

I notice after their initial coach training, the next course coaches typically undertake is training in the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®). (For more on MBTI, including the debate over MBTI v. trait personality measures, see Chapter 7.) The ‘gold standard’ coaching toolkit was, in the past, MBTI, FIRO-B® and a good method for 360-degree feedback. Or, to put it differently, one intrapersonal psychometric (i.e. one that gives an overall picture of individual personality); one interpersonal (i.e. that measures people’s needs with regards to others); and something to get reliable data from the context. The advent of Positive Psychology means the goalposts have moved and a good coach is now expected to have a Strengths instrument in their toolkit as well, such as the VIA, Clifton StrengthsFinder or Cappfinity’s strengths assessments. (For more on all this, see Chapter 7.) Apart from MBTI, none of these is expensive to train in, but there is a significant other cost in adding them to one’s toolkit, as every new approach needs time to practise, absorb and integrate. For that reason, most coaches add about one a year, in the meantime pairing up with others to cover the gap.

Supervision

You will have had a taste of supervision on your training, but there were plenty of other people around then to keep an eye on you, and for you to turn to – now, post-training, supervision really matters. It’s a comforting feeling to know there’s someone there for regular contact and updates – and to call in emergencies.

Professional coaching supervisors can be found the same way as you would find a coach: by word of mouth and, failing that, through their specialist body, APECS (www.apecs.org), although many people stick with one of the contacts they made through their original coach training. Alternatively, you can work in groups of peers for co-supervision. This lacks the heavy-hitting expertise of a top professional supervisor – but has the advantage of being free. Recognising this, many good supervisors offer a half-way house: in addition to their one-to-one supervision work, they lead small-group regular learning sessions, which combine elements of supervision (often through case discussion) with ongoing peer learning. These are cheaper, as the cost of the supervisor’s time is shared among the group.

Reading

It is said that Sir Francis Bacon was the last scholar in Europe to know everything; an insomniac, he walked in the Palace grounds by night, reading and, by the end of his life, had read everything in his then-known world. In the early days in coaching, when so little was published, that was almost possible, but since the mid-1990s an avalanche of information has poured down on us. The trick is to pick up on the indispensable new tools and approaches without drowning. There are several ways to do this. From the multiple specialist journals, I pick out just two, scanning the useful Coaching at Work (www.coaching-at-work.com) to keep an eye on what people are actually doing in organisations, and industry gossip, and the Consulting Psychology Journal (www.apa.org) for the latest global best practice and research.^* If you have even less time, an efficient way to stay on top of it all is to join the Institute of Coaching at Harvard (www.instituteofcoaching.org), as their teams scan what is coming out around the world, and curate regular digests of the best coaching-relevant material.

^* The other specialist journals are Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcoa20/current; The Coaching Psychologist, www.bps.org.uk/publications/coaching-psychologist, and the International Coaching Psychology Review, www.bps.org.uk/publications/international-coaching-psychology-review.

Support/community

Groups who have come together in training courses often want to keep in touch post-programme. You might think this matters most for people embarking on freelance coaching careers, and indeed they do often need and want it. But it is equally important for people within organisations to help keep their coaching active, and as a counterforce to all the other organisational demands. LinkedIn is important, and I have also seen groups meet in person at lunchtime or, more occasionally, over dinner. But one of the most successful I have observed over the years is the coaching book group. One I know consists of just three friends, all experienced coaches. Asked how they organise it, one member said: ‘Three of us, over a sandwich lunch, a couple of hours, having read a book/article, leads into conversations about our coaching experiences/sharing what’s worked/hasn’t worked, etc. It’s great – we love it!’ Another larger group I know alternates reading discussion, with practice – they take it in turns to bring a new tool, which the group tries out, and discusses afterwards. Efficient, and fun.

But what is underneath all this hive of activity? What exactly do coaches do behind closed doors?!

They start with the essentials: listening more, asking penetrating questions, having people stop and think for themselves. These are the basics of coaching: the subject of the next chapter.

Table 4.1 Table of training providers

¹ The timescales shown relate to the highest level of training provided. Courses at lower levels may well take less time to complete. Most programmes are delivered part-time, some face-to-face, others are online, wholly or in part.

² Only the main accrediting bodies are listed; some providers’ courses may also, or instead, be accredited by individual universities or other organisations.

Disclaimer: the above table has been designed to provide preliminary information on coach training providers using information drawn from publicly available website content as at September 2019. It is not intended that the table should provide detail on all issues relevant to training providers, nor is it intended to be an exhaustive list of all organisations offering some form of coach training. The information is liable to change and its accuracy is not guaranteed.