Why the Integral+Leadership® Professional Coaching Pathway is needed

The unregulated nature of the coaching industry presents several issues for coaches, industry leaders and those who engage professional coaches. These issues include:

• Coaching is still a hobby for most people – anyone can legally call themselves a coach.
• The quality and experience of coaching is highly variable.
• The understanding of what coaching is and is not is largely misunderstood.
• Coaching has lost its voice among other methodologies being sold as coaching. Coaching as a term has become interchangeable with terms such as training, mentoring, remedial therapy, counselling, etc.

This and other factors are causing a dilution of the power and potential that coaching has to offer. Clients, particularly organisations, are left to deal with the negative consequences of having engaged a ‘coach’ only to discover they are not offering the Return on Investment (ROI) promised. This impacts the field of coaching as an industry as well as the organisations using coaches.

There are so many companies on the coach training bandwagon today – from universities to Tafe's, private colleges and one-person companies. Coaching is seen as another string to the revenue bow and very few of these training organisations are actively working in the field of professional coaching. In addition to the above, some of the problems with Coach Training Companies include:

• Students are being taught out of date change models such as the G.R.O.W. model. They are being misinformed with content and missing out on basic skills development in the areas of rapport, listening and questioning. This leads to a very poor quality coaching competence and sub-optimal client outcome.
• The teachers are teachers, not actual coaches coaching in the real world.
• Very few coach training companies have scientifically validated coaching methodologies, that are grounded in peer reviewed research, as well as experience.
• Few, if any, Coach Training companies understand that human beings grow, develop and mature throughout their adult life (developmental psychology). Not knowing or understanding this means that Stages of Maturing is rarely included in the main curriculum of most coach training companies.

If we take all of the above into consideration, it becomes apparent that finding a highly skilled and embodied, developed practitioner of coaching, who has the exceptional cognitive capacity needed for transformational conversations, is seldom found. Some of the problems here are:

• Most people cannot choose a coach training program that will deliver real coaching skills and knowledge, because they do not know what to look for. It then becomes a cost or convenience-based decision. This invariably leads to potluck experiences and disappointment.
• Coaches are often unaware of their own level of development (Stevens, 2020) and the maturity required to coach another human effectively. They do not have access to the developmental and awareness-based assessment tools to discovery where they are and what their needs are, before they coach a client.
  The problem with this is that immature coaches (unaware of their or their client’s stage of maturity) and trying to coach clients with a later, more mature stage structure.
• They will work with almost anyone that wants to engage them, without knowing if their client is ready, and where that client is from a maturity or development perspective. This will inevitably lead to a coaching conversation with zero actual human development.