The Cincinnati Business Courier and the University of Cincinnati’s Executive Education Department recently partnered with Sherpa Coaching, an executive coaching certification firm in Cincinnati, to conduct The 2006 Sherpa Coaching Survey, their first annual global survey on the state of executive and business coaching.
Over 400 executive and personal coaches were surveyed...the largest sampling of coaches ever published. An additional 130 human resource (HR) and training professionals also responded, including many who train in-house coaches and hire coaches from the outside. Polling was largely in the United States, but respondents were noted from Mexico, Canada, Sweden, France, England, Italy, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan.
IQS Research of Louisville, Kentucky provided online services for the polling project. IQS founder and President Shawn Herbig says, “This was an innovative piece of work, and the number of responses produced a 96% degree of accuracy in the Sherpa Coaching Survey’s results.”
Coaching has come of age; 80% of HR professionals, the customers, rate the value and credibility of executive coaching as ”very high” or “somewhat high”, with only 20% rating current coaching as “mediocre” and less than 1% as “low”.
Coaches and HR professionals agree closely about who needs a coach. Twenty percent put coaching into play for individuals in transition: transfers, new hires and recently promoted employees. The remaining 80% were evenly divided, between those who use coaching for individuals with a specific problem and those who see coaching as a normal part of leadership development.
The survey explored:
- Who can best use the services of a coach?
- What’s the best background for an executive coach?
- How are services delivered, and what do customers really want?
- What’s the frequency and time frame for coaching?
- How is its value measured?
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