Trends in coaching:  Inside? Outside? Upside!

Lately we hear a lot about how technology is disrupting the coaching profession. With the emergence of just-in-time coaching apps that work like Uber-for-coaching, one might get the impression that the days of face-to-face, long term coaching engagements are well-nigh over. Yet on the flip side, we also see a huge rise in the investment organizations are making to scale coaching programs: training internal coaches, utilizing team coaching, and offering external coaches to a broad array of leaders —not just the C-suite. We see more and more companies committed to fostering a "culture of coaching". This results in a huge increase in the number of internal coaches  and, so far, at least anecdotally, there doesn’t seem to be any lessening in the growth of the external coaching industry. Both are growing fast.  

Consider the example of Glaxo Smith Kline, a global pharmaceutical company with over 40,000 employees worldwide. They won the ICF Prism award for coaching excellence in 2016 for their commitment to training and utilizing coaches across the organization. GSK’s coaching structure is a mixed-modality model, including more than 200 external coaches, 1,000 internal coaches and 16,000 managers/leaders using coaching skills. According to Stephanie Trotter, the U.S. head of GSK’s Center for Coaching Excellence, "Building internal capability shows how everyone can be a coach or use a coach approach. Some leaders want to work with an internal coach because they need someone who understands the culture, and some leaders want an external coach who brings an objective perspective.”

So whether you are coaching from the inside — or outside, the bottom line: there is plenty of upside!  

Jeff Hull, IOC Director of Education and Business Development