Chapter 6: The Complex Choreography of Becoming a Coach

Ask a coach about their coach training experience and you are likely to hear something like, “It was transformational!” This is largely true, regardless of the coach training program s/he attended. Is there a connection between these consistently enthusiastic reports and what scholar-practitioners refer to as adult development?

As an instructor in coaching education programs, I have witnessed inexplicable deep personal transformations, as well as a predictable pattern of regression in performances, followed by more artful deliveries. In this chapter, I provide an overview of calls to bridge the developmental divide and make the case for why coaching skills training may be one way to stretch a leader’s ability to better manage complexity. I describe the few studies of coaching students that have been conducted, then describe in more detail my own study that set out to answer whether coach training incites development. I then propose a theoretical model to explain these transformations. This is a first step to look into a relatively unexplored question: what might we learn about facilitating adult development from the process of becoming a coach?