Profession? Or Professionalization?
By Dr Alf Hatton
Access Wikipedia and you will find some twenty-one features that denote a profession. There are, of course, other definitions, and even a small body of academically rigorous research on ‘professions’, but Wikipedia will suffice as a starting point. Clearly, not all professions need to match all twenty-one. Which, if any, of these does UK Coaching/Mentoring currently match and how well? Without being overly critical of Coaching/Mentoring’s current ‘state of play’ as a profession, there is clearly some way to go before the gap is closed on high status professions such as law and medicine. The current accreditation focus (e.g. EMCC, Association for Coaching) does remind me of the 1980s debate in my sport about ‘professional instructors’. It revolved around ‘professional’ meaning ‘paid’, rather than - as it should have - ‘excellence’ in knowledge and practice. The sport is the poorer for it to this day. Some features of ‘high status’ professions we can dismiss as being dated or irrelevant to us: “institutional training; exclusion, monopoly and legal recognition; control of remuneration and advertising”. Some exist already e.g. “skill based on theoretical knowledge”, indicating an embryonic ‘profession’ and very welcome features of current practice. Others still may well be ‘just over the horizon’, e.g. “testing of competence”, “licensing of practitioners”. These could become requirements in an increasingly regulated practice/profession and society, not to mention a litigation-oriented one: “My coach ‘advised’ me to... [fill in the blanks]”.
Testing competence will be difficult, given the ‘in the moment’, experiential, dynamic nature of coaching. It would militate against ‘transferability’ of experience, knowledge and skills from other professions, e.g. management, counselling, HRM/HRD, among many. There are the beginnings of a form of licensing in accreditation – and levels of accreditation – implying, if not exactly guaranteeing, competence levels. This may be no bad thing. However, it needs very wide debate and, if Coaching/Mentoring is a profession, it also needs “the profession’s” acceptance in the form of some sort of democratic decision. Genuine professional bodies are regulated largely, if not exclusively, by the professionals themselves.
Other features deserve more thought, e.g. “skill based on theoretical knowledge”. Coaching/Mentoring’s theoretical basis is only now really being developed, although there is a great deal of totally relevant ‘borrowing’ from other cognate professions, e.g. counselling, CBT, which already provides a firm basis for both practice development. Hardly any ‘knowledge-in-use’ in coaching practice exists uniquely, solely in coaching’s domain – and nowhere else: even coaching-specific ‘GROW’ has its empirical foundations in psychology.
One suggestion to move this forward would be more practitioner and collaborative research. Very few coach education/training programmes can match the extensive “3 to 5 years” training in traditional professions. Maybe this is not reasonable, given the nature of Coaching/Mentoring practice. That said, Oxford Brookes University has developed a Professional/Practitioner Doctorate which is beginning to establish this as a high standard. One ‘professional’ thing to do would be to redesign CPD to incorporate a requirement for some form of rigorous data-gathering and deeper reflection, as evidence of efficacy. There is a growing body of opinion, but not much rigorously collected evidence, that coaching “works”. Thus, its status, prestige and rewards may ‘grow’ (pun intended!) if as a community of practice we professionalize the accumulation of evidence. Then again, there have been many ‘fashions’ in HRM/HRD – who recalls/still uses ‘BPR’? Or has it been ‘re-badged’?
Coaching/Mentoring might decide to research collaboratively with other ‘Talking’ professions (psychiatry/clinical psychology, psychoanalysis/therapy, CBT counselling, OD/HRD facilitation, etc.) to develop a ‘body of knowledge’ which, if not ‘unique’ to each, might identify boundaries. Who has not found themselves in a ‘difficult moment’ when the coachee topic/focus switches to something ‘very hot’ for them, and wondered “What was the trigger?” “What were the signs I missed?” There is a suspicion that some Coaching/Mentoring ‘knowledge’ may be beyond being mastered/communicated via protocols, models, etc., and might only be acquired through extensive individual experience. Is this simply a case of individual ‘mastery’ or ‘unconscious competence’ by some? There are clearly some coaches who do ‘make a difference’ for individual clients/employers, way beyond what a majority will aspire to achieve.
Finally, are there just too many separate organisations (CIPD, ILM, BPS/SGCP, Association for Coaching, Academy of Executive Coaching, i-Coaching Institute, etc.) all apparently aiming to be the professional body right now? Although some are in dialogue about standards, accreditation, etc. – and that is a really good, indeed ‘professional’ thing - given most of them have ‘vested interests’ in delivering training and now accreditation, is it at all likely that a single ‘professional’ body will emerge?
Perhaps the ‘strategy’ should be to develop professionalization a whole lot further, along the lines suggested above, and in so doing, become a profession, rather than declare we are one. After all, the ‘chirurgiens’ did not acquire professional licensing, regulation, university-based training, etc., until a couple of hundred years after they stopped cutting hair!
11th February 2010
Dr Alf Hatton,
BA (Hons), DMS, MBA, MSc, MPhil, PhD, Chartered FCIPD, FMA
