Coaching is a specific discipline that can be applied to the development of individuals or teams in both a private and a corporate sphere. Life coaching is becoming more recognised in the UK but coaching remains predominantly a corporate activity where the corporate sponsor could be a business, police force, health body, charity or other organisation.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development states that:

“Coaching is an increasingly popular tool for supporting personal development. Just over six out of ten respondents in our Learning and development survey 20071 reported that they now use coaching in their organisations. Of these just over 50% say that their organisation sees coaching as a ‘permanent style’ of management and 73% of respondents expect to see coaching by line managers increase in the next few years.”

So what is coaching?

Broadly speaking, coaching a developmental tool which helps and individual or team to improve and move forward to their identified goals in a non-directive fashion. It holds as a core belief that solutions are best found in the client him or herself. Key features of the approach include:

• It is a non-directive form of development
• It focuses on improving performance, skills and outcomes
• Its key tools is effective questioning to find the individual’s own answers
• It assumes that an individual entering coaching in the rght frame of mind can move on from past performance and past personal issues to develop a new direction
• It is generally action focused and believes that improvement comes from doing not just thinking
• It is usually not appropriate where the individual is psychologically unwell and requires clinical intervention
• Coaching activities can have both an organisational and individual perspective
• In the corporate field, personal issues may be discussed but the emphasis is on performance at work
• It enables individuals and teams to discover both their strengths and their weaknesses
• It is a specific discipline which should be delivered by trained and accredited coaches

What makes coaching unique?

The difference between coaching and mentoring

Mentoring assumes that the mentor has specific personal experience of the issue on which mentoring is taking place. It works in an advisory, supportive and more directive manner than coaching which does not specifically require knowledge of the area by the coach.

The difference between coaching and counselling

Whilst the differences between coaching and counselling vary according to the model of counselling, for the purposes of simplicty, it can be said that counselling focuses on individuals in some kind of psychological distress where coaching focuses on improvement in everyone. Couselling also generally looks backwards to the “why” of where a client is in order to reach closure. Coaching on the other hand looks forwards to the “how” of moving to new goals.

Similarly, it can be hard to draw a clear distinction between coaching and counselling, not least because many of the theoretical underpinnings of coaching are drawn from the worlds of counselling and therapy. For the purpose of managing coaching services the key distinction to be drawn is that coaching is for those who are psychologically well; a coach should be able to recognise where an individual is so distressed by personal or social issues that he or she needs to be referred to specialist counselling or other support.

The difference between coaching and training

It is worth raising this difference since although reasonably clear anyway, it is a good indicator of one of the fundamental princples of coaching. Training seeks to deliver a body of knowledge or skill from the trainer to learners. In coaching, the knowledge is already in the coachee and the coach’s job is to facilitate the discovery of this latent knowledge or understanding.

Stakeholders in coaching

The primary relationship in any coaching activity is between the coach and the individual, but in a corporate context this is not the sole dynamic. Other key stakeholders include the sponsor of the coaching (who could be the line manager) and possibly, in addition, the overseeing involvment of an HR practitioner. This leads to a delicate balance of interests which must be established before the coaching is undertaken to ensure that all parties are happy with the desired outcomes.