Master or Muppet? 3 Questions to Determine Whether a Coach I…

Becoming a “certified coach” these days is easy: Read a book, attend a weekend workshop and get a certificate by mai. Ta da! You are now a certified coach.

According to the International Coach Federation’s 2016 ICF Global Coaching study, there are 53,300 professional coaches worldwide, and an estimated 33 percent are operating in North America.

Related: Why Executive Coaching Is a Critical Part of the CEO Journey

The commercialization of professional coaching, in fact, has become so rampant it’s starting to resemble a puppy mill. And that’s a huge, huge problem, because of the excessive number of “certified” muppets out there who lack the needed depth and breadth of experience.

That alone is causing clients harm and disabling businesses. Evidence? Here are two theoretical scenarios you might come across:

Someone attends a two-day workshop, receives her coaching certificate and then has business cards made stating that she is an “executive coach” — without any practice hours or supervision logged.

Someone received feedback that he was excellent at his functional role, so he decided to try coaching as a way to become an entrepreneur.

If I had a dollar for the number of times I’ve heard people say, “I really want to ‘help’ people,” I’d be a millionaire. Harm is done when coaches think they’re going to “help” people. ‘Helping’ implies a self-directed focus: The “coach” is merely fulfilling his or her personal need to feel good about himself/herself rather than focus on responding to the client’s needs.

Real professional coaching, however, is singularly focused on enabling, not “helping.”

Vetting your coach

Stimulating, nudging, agitating and providing insight and awareness, to take a person to his or her learning edge, is the core of coaching excellence. As an executive coach, I’m an enabler and a truth-teller, not a helper.

The ICF has established criteria involving discipline, rigor and science to qualify coaches. However, the industry overall still resembles the Wild West: That ICF study referred to found that nearly a third of coach practitioners studied hadn’t received even 125 hours’ worth of training. This was analogous to buying a fancy product labeled “organic” and then finding out that it has artificial ingredients.

To determine whether someone is a reputable coach, then, ask these questions:

1. What would your clients say about you to me? 

Because coaching is a raw, personal experience, clients may not want to discuss their experiences.

However, if a coach has assisted a client with achieving significant results, the client will likely be delighted to speak about what happened, what he (or she) gained from it, what would have made it better and how he/she is still using what the lessons learned.

Although providing client references isn’t a deal-breaker, it is a barrier to determining a coach’s depth and breadth of impact. Because it’s natural for people to overrate their abilities, it’s important to dig into a potential coach’s experience.

If you think about it, why would anyone say he stinks at his job? In fact, research published in Harvard Business Review found that 24 percent of leaders surveyed overrated their coaching skills. So, the message is: Push for references.