“Executive coaching is much more like sailing, capturing the wind and maneuvering the uncharted coast, than charting the course and serving as the expert captain with a steady hand on the wheel and full steam ahead.” – Stern, 2009: 271
History was, today is, and tomorrow will be. Many coaches don’t understand the rich and eclectic history of executive coaching or even coaching itself. Some people believe that companies hire an executive coach to either fix one problem or an executive and then leave. That is genuinely not the case. Executive coaching is more than that. In this article, I will discuss how executive coaching came to be and why knowing its history contributes to our understanding of its importance.
Beginning with Thomas Leonard and Dick Borough
Executive coaching became part of the corporate language in the 1980s when a financial planner, Thomas Leonard, first offered life-planning consultations to his clients in Seattle. Leonard observed that although his clients are emotionally stable and require almost no treatment, they want more than usual advice on investing and securing income. They need help to organize their lives better, plan and achieve their goals. Leonard was coaching and training people in specific coaching skills within a few years that were complementary but very different from the skills practiced by therapists, mentors, and consultants.
Until the 1980s, executive coaching was carried out informally (if any) by HR professionals within the organization, with training focused on legal, accounting, or commercial marketing issues. Until the mid-1980s, even the term “executive coaching” was rarely used, and practitioners did not receive formal training.
It was then that a practitioner in Palo Alto, California, named Dick Borough, used the term “executive coaching” in 1985 to describe his leadership development activities. In 1988, executive coaching began to become mainstream and attracted the attention of Forbes magazine. In an article entitled “Sigmund Freud Meets Henry Ford” by Dyan Machan (1988), executive coaching is described as a hybrid of management consulting and psychotherapy. In addition, various personal development training programs have led to the emergence of executive coaching.
The Emergence of Executive Coaching
Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, different reasons are proposed to explain the emergence of the executive coaching field. Some believed that executive coaching is produced by psychologists trying to find new jobs in response to changes in the healthcare industry, which affected the mental health field particularly. Other reasons include the use of coaching by high-performing individuals (such as athletes) to improve their performance. The rapid development of the global economy has created a need for continuous growth.
The fact that executives lack growth opportunities also contributes to the development of executive coaching. Adding to that is the realization that poor executive leadership will lead to the financial collapse of a company and the recognition that interpersonal skills can effectively manage oneself and others in an organization.
A new way of thinking about executive coaching emerged in the 1990s. Instead of executive coaching being defined as a particular job, executive coaching was considered an activity. More executive coaches were moving from large executive search firms to consulting organizations. Executive coaching began to occupy a more important place in the executive development process of many companies because executive coaching helps executives develop skills that lead to higher performance and increased effectiveness.
In 1991, David Ogilvy revealed that executive coaches were an indispensable part of his life. He said executive coaching was a “big bang” for him in terms of effectiveness as an executive. Then, he added that executive coaching is “crucial to my business success.”
The Influence of Sports Psychology in Executive Coaching
In the history of coaching, the influence of sports psychology has always been pivotal. The 1974 best-selling book of Tim Gallwey’s entitled, The Inner Game of Tennis introduced sports coaching techniques to the management literature for the first time. Organizational and counseling psychology and sports psychology used to be the primary source of coaches seeking their theories, and the concepts of psychotherapy and counseling have recently been introduced. In fact, empirical executive coaching studies have also used sports coaching models or investigated the similarities between high achievers who are well-trained in business and sports.
But some people believe that the impact of sports psychology on executive coaching practices may undermine coaching results. For instance, Berglas (2002) believes that executive coaches who adopt coaching techniques from sports coaches “may sell themselves as purveyors of simple answers and quick results,” which can become a “great selling point to CEOs’. But it may also have long-term “disastrous consequences” for the company. Whether this is the case or not will depend on the coaching and organizational environment. However, sports psychology has been and will continue to be one of the main influencing factors of executive coaching practice.
The Professionalization of the Executive Coaching Industry
In the late 1990s to early 2000s, executive coaching was introduced in organizations to help high-potential leaders display toxic behavior. In these years, executive coaching was a service provided by approximately 200 practitioners and ceased to be an isolated activity linked to a specific practice area. At that time (1991), executive coaches mainly were associated with the executive search industry and were engaged in one-to-one executive consultant or executive mentoring.
From the early 2000s to now, a change of reason for executive coaching happened. Executive coaching is employed to help maximize high-performers or those that are not associated with problematic behavior. It has been argued that executive coaching is used to help high-performers because executive coaches cannot be, or do not wish to be, involved with executive failure.
Berglas (2000) contends that executive coaching started as executive mentoring, which was organizational leaders’ efforts to help senior executives achieve their goals. In this coaching approach, executive coaches focused on the executive’s leadership skills, and executive coaches used a “paternalistic model” where executive coaches provided advice and gave feedback. The executive coach would be responsible for deciding how to solve an executive’s problems. However, executive coaching changed as executive coaches realized that executive mentoring was insufficient to change leadership behavior. Executive coaching evolved into executive counseling, where executive coaches provided executive counseling using their expertise and experience from different areas of human resource management, organizational development, and psychology. Executive coaches focused on the executive’s emotional intelligence skills rather than just addressing what the executive needed to do differently. Furthermore, executive coaches realized executive counseling was not the most effective way to help executive leaders change their behaviors, and executive coaching changed again into executive team coaching, where executive coaches focused more on executive teams rather than just one executive. Team dynamics were considered when working with executive teams and executive coaches use behavioral modeling for change agents within organizations.
The executive coaching industry is now highly professionalized. For instance, executive coaching can be seen in various work settings and with a wide range of executive coaching clients, including executive leaders, executive general managers, and directors. Executive coaching is now a multibillion-dollar industry with executive coaches working in technology, finance, and resources; healthcare and pharmaceuticals; insurance, reinsurance, and financial services; telecommunications and media; education; manufacturing and engineering. Given the increasing number of companies that are purchasing executive coaching services, executive coaches are now recognized by their clients as key business partners.
While executive coaching was initially considered a softer skill set than an executive development or talent management program, executive coaching is being implemented within organizations and used as a valuable executive development tool. Since executive coaches are responsible for identifying high-performers, executive coaching has been the tool of choice for the human resource profession to improve executive performance and leadership capabilities.
Why History of Executive Coaching Matters?
Why on earth does it matter how executive coaching came to be? Understanding the linkages between past and present executive coaching is absolutely basic for a good understanding of the concept itself. It is not just “useful”; it is essential.
Understanding how executive coaching came to be can make us appreciate the essentiality of this concept more. If we know this concept by acknowledging how it came to be, we will better understand the truth of the matter, and we can complete the puzzle and be clear. The history of executive coaching explains how it has become the way it is right today and gives us directions on moving forward.
A Multibillion-Dollar Industry
Although it may be said that ten or twenty years ago, executive coaching was seen as an intervention to address problematic behavior, it is now recognized as a key tool for developing high-potential individuals. It may have gone through some roadblocks in its pursuit of recognition in the business world; still, executive coaching is now estimated to be a multibillion-dollar industry worth worldwide.
We have realized now that executive coaching provides a powerful development tool that leads to positive change and results in one’s performance, career, and the organization as a whole. If you are a leader or someone working in an organization, and you think this type of professional development is helpful to you personally or to those people you work with, then executive coaching may be an intervention worth considering.