Most people think of leadership coaching as a new thing, but if you search back through the literature on organizational psychology and leadership development, you will find it mentioned as far back as 1937. Anthony Grant of the Coaching Psychology Unit at the University of Sydney in Australia discovered this when he went back through psychological databases and produced an incredibly interesting collection of abstracts covering all of the work on coaching that he found between 1937 and 2007. I have since updated his search to 2010 to complete the picture.
The idea of leaders being coached is not new at all. What is relatively new is the idea of trained professional coaches, and the focus on studying how to coach. The idea that people in organizations need to be coached has been written about for decades. However, between 1940 and the 1980s the idea was that leaders themselves should learn how to do the coaching. So a leader learned how to be a better leader by being coached by his boss, and she in turn developed leaders reporting to her by coaching them. In this early literature, the comparison to sport and the arts shows up. If people who perform at high levels in these areas need coaches, why wouldn’t a corporate leader who is expected to perform at a high level need a coach?
Now we see in a lot of organizations training their leaders in coaching skills, and many of these organizations believe that they are doing something new. Clearly they are just picking up on an idea that has been written about for at least 70 years. What is new is our knowledge about the kinds of coaching that are effective.
Around the early 90s, there was a big shift in coaching related research and writing. People started to think hard about the coaching techniques used to accelerate development, and we saw more and more talk about coach training and the emergence of the professional leadership coach. The next big change came when the amount of research being done on coaching started to soar. That happened in the early 2000s, and now we have professional journals on coaching, graduate degrees in coaching, and even the evolution of a dedicated area of psychology called coaching psychology.
All of this is great. We are learning a lot about how to work with people to increase their skills, help them become more resilient problem solvers and strategists, and help them find success and happiness.
