4.2 The future of coaching

Coaching continues to grow as a field. The last 20 or 30 years have seen a tremendous increase in the number of coaches and the number of people interested in being coached, and that seems to be continuing. In terms of how it might change sort of qualitatively, I can see a few possibilities. Within the literature, so both the academic literature and books published about pitching, I can see a hunger for a better evidence base. So the papers that have been produced in the academic journals increasingly interested in large-scale quantitative control group studies which really demonstrate what coaching can do and how it does it best. So I think they'll be increasing an evidence base around coaching, which I think will really improve the performance and effectiveness of it. Linked to that, I think there's going to be more regulation. It's an unregulated field at the moment. Anybody can call themselves a coach. You don't need to have trained. You don't need to have gone on a good training course in order to be a coach and to charge, frankly, quite a lot of money for it. So I think there'll be increased regulation around the field in the industry. And the third thing I wonder about, this may be more a hope than a prediction. But I think at the moment, coaching organisations tends to be very limited to the upper echelons. It's the senior leaders that tend to be coached. And I think, or perhaps I hope, that increasingly, people will see that actually, coaching enhances anybody's motivation, confidence, and performance in the workplace. And I would like to see it growing down the scale as well as broadening its reach.