Coaching Education: Coming of Age (original) (raw)

2014, Journal of Psychological Issues in Organizational Culture

s longtime coaching educators, we started our graduate-level coaching programs in executive coaching at Adler Graduate Professional School in 2002 (Linda) and Columbia University in October of 2007 (Terry) with scant resources available to inform our programs of what needed to be included in a graduate-level curriculum. During the "needs assessment" phase of the curriculum development process at Columbia, we searched for coach-specific research to inform our design only to discovery a real scarcity of evidence-based resources in peerreviewed journals to support the popularity of coaching in general, and executive and organizational coaching in particular. A notable exception was a special issue found at the time on executive coaching in Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, published back in 1996, edited by Richard Kilburg, yet not much else was available. This state of affairs was reinforced by Brotman, Liberi, and Wasylyshyn's (1998) call for standards and accountability by researchers and practitioners alike to inform and educate organizational decision makers about the core skills, competencies, and experiences critical to successful outcomes of executive coaching. In a critical examination of the literature on executive coaching, Kampa-Kokesch and Anderson (2001) also supported the need for enhanced standards of practice and supporting research. However, by the mid-2000s we were only able to locate (1) a few comprehensive literature reviews focused explicitly on the topic of executive coaching in other peer view journals (e.g., Feldman & Lankau, 2005; Joo, 2005) and (2) many more books on coaching often reflecting the point-of-view of its authors, as well as (3) articles on the topic in the popular press. In a call for more research and theory to support coaching as a profession, Bennett (2006) identified the ways in which coaching fell short of meeting formal requirements for a "profession," in part because it had not yet embraced an agreed-upon body of knowledge (Freidson, 2001).