Does Professional Coaching Really Work?
While professional coaching is immensely popular as a trend in the self-development world, does it really work?
Hello, Talking About Money Community! I hope this post finds you well.
Today I want to discuss a question that might have crossed your mind: Does financial coaching actually work? If you read my post on the differences between financial counseling and financial coaching, you might still believe that by mere fact of helping your clients do better with their money, you are doing enough. What I hope that you left with is that counseling is more of a “technical” intervention, in that the positive change that happens in a counseling relationship can be tracked in concrete metrics such an improved credit scores or growth in savings account balances. Coaching, conversely, is more of an “adaptive” intervention (please see Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s book, Immunity to Change, for more information) and therefore can be harder to measure.
So, dear Reader, if you can’t measure it, how do you know that it works?
Luckily, some very bright people have been asking this very question for decades and I want to highlight some recent research for your reading pleasure. I think that while the field of coaching is still relatively new, scientific researchers are indeed showing that when done right, coaching does have a positive impact on coachees’ lives.
Coaching as a Tool for Deep Learning
The first article that I want to share with you is by Kerryn Griffiths and Marilyn Campbell titled Discovering, applying and integrating: The process of learning in coaching, published in 2009. In this article the authors describe coaching as “a goal-directed, multi-faceted process for enhancing people, work and life.” While a goal can be broken down into measurable benchmarks, it is harder to conceive that researchers can measure precisely how coaching enhances someone’s life.
What Griffiths and Campbell found in their data was that “…for respondents in this study, learning in coaching involved not just discovering or re-discovering new knowledge, but also applying it in their lives… [T]his study provides some empirical evidence of the significance of experiential learning in the process of learning in coaching.” This backs up what many practitioners see as true: While in an educational or counseling experience, clients can be presented with facts around personal finance and money management, but there can be an absence in providing space for clients to apply new knowledge to their lives. Professional coaching gives clients to opportunity to both reflect on new information and find meaningful ways to apply it.
The authors also note that “[t]his integrative learning process occurred as clients related to themselves, as coaches listened to clients, held them accountable, as clients took action, and most obviously, as clients took responsibility and began to self-coach. Furthermore, respondents commented how clients could never go back because this learning had become part of who they were.” It appears that the practice of professional coaching gives clients the space to both receive meaningful information and integrate it into their own lived experience.
Coaching as a Tool for Personal Development
The second research that I would like to discuss is that done by Tim Theeboom, Bianca Beersma, and Annelies E.M. van Vianen, and published in 2013, called Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context. In this team’s meta-analysis (a process by which researchers systemically merge the findings of many independent studies to calculate one overall effect), they found that “that coaching has significant positive effects on performance and skills, well-being, coping, work attitudes, and goal-directed self-regulation.”
Next up is a study completed by Joanna Molyn, Erik de Haan, Robert van der Veen, and David E. Gray called The impact of common factors on coaching outcomes and published in 2021. They found that the working alliance between the coach and the client “predicts well-being and coaching effectiveness over time, however, we found no support for goal attainment, resilience or perceived stress.” They go on to posit that “it is likely that individuals who find themselves supported by a social network are more capable in maintaining connections and benefit from the coaching sessions in terms of their well-being and perceive greater coaching effectiveness.”
What I found notable about these two studies was the impact of professional coaching on a client’s self-concept. While this is important, some life coaching models might not make a direct link between the client’s life and their concrete goals. This would have to be intentionally designed by the coach and the client.
Coaching as a Tool for Enhanced Performance
Finally, I want to conclude with the aptly-titled What Can We Know About the Effectiveness Of Coaching? A Meta-Analysis Based Only On Randomized Controlled Trials, by Erik De Haan and Viktor O. Nilsson, and published most recently, in 2023. This appears to be one of the most comprehensive investigations of the effectiveness of coaching to date. De Haan and Nilsson explain that “coaching is a customized personal development journey that promotes the client’s decision-making and performance through conversations, making use of shared inquiry, reflection, support, and challenge.” They go on to explain that:
“[T]here is evidence of three categories of coaching outcome—namely, personal development, behavioral changes, and the coachee and their work. The personal development category includes specific outcomes such as health-related measures (reduced stress, increased life satisfaction, and experienced support). The behavioral change outcome includes specific skills and performance measures expressed by better communication skills, management skills, and team-building skills. Lastly, the “coachee and their work” category includes outcomes focusing on psychological preparedness that affect workplace productivity, such as self-awareness, psychological capital, and self-efficacy. There is also support in the literature for a goal attainment approach in coaching, where the coach strives to achieve the intended outcomes by working on the coachee’s goal (Grant, 2012).”
Later in the study they investigate the idea of dosage, and offer that “it seems that coachees and coaches coregulate to maximize their take-up of coaching for at least the range of sessions between four and eight, so that they adjust the total number of sessions to what they need, or else make sure that they achieve what they can in the number of sessions provided, no matter the precise number of sessions, over a wide range (see Stiles et al., 2015, for an extensive discussion of this coregulation phenomenon in psychotherapy).”
Near the end the authors conclude that “it is that working on the alliance, trust, and mutual influence pays off in terms of coaching effectiveness. So, anything that can be done to strengthen the co-created relationship should be worthwhile, such as careful contracting and working flexibly with a variety of requested outcomes, agreeing on client-initiated goals and tasks (Gessnitzer & Kauffeld, 2015), and providing however many sessions the client can agree to. Provided outcomes and session numbers are carefully contracted, there seems to be a “sweet spot” in the range between four and eight sessions wherein coaching programs could make savings with limited detrimental results in terms of effectiveness.”
What we see in this research that professional coaching does indeed have an impact of the client’s life when there is intentional contracting with the coach (frequently called “designing the alliance”) and the client is open to self-reflection and accountability. The power of coaching seems to lie in this realm, with goal attainment appearing to be a downstream effect of this intervention.
While we are still in the early days of professional coaching as a focus and subject of scientific research, early investigations do indicate that professional coaching delivered by highly-trained practitioners does indeed have a significant positive impact on those being coached. The research also reveals that the documented outcomes of professional coaching are unique from counseling or educational interventions – namely personal development, behavioral change, and the client and their interests – and if offered with a level of professionalism and intentionality, can lead to the client becoming a better, more enhanced version of themselves.
What do you say?
Do you think of professional coaching as a trend or a fad, or do you see it as an intervention to be administered by a trained professional?
Before reading this post, did you think that coaching really worked?
Knowing that coaching has caught the eyes of scientists, what do you want them to investigate next?
Share your thoughts with this insightful and supportive (and did I mention good-looking?) community, either in the Comments below or on LinkedIn. Thanks, stay safe, and be well.
