
Is Executive Coaching as a Career right for you?
Given my participation with the field of executive coaching, I receive several calls from professionals who are seriously exploring coaching as a career and therefore looking at a coach certification program. Quite often I end up dissuading them from their decision to quit their corporate jobs to become a coach.
It may sound strange that as the co-founder of India’s resulting executive coaching institution I should be saying this, but, it is true- the process of becoming a coach-and-four might appear extremely romantic and glamorous. The whole idea of helping someone and impacting their development feels quite heady. However, beneath all these romantic ideas lie several fallacies, over estimations and under estimations.
So, if you are considering investing in an expensive certification program to become a Coach and hope to build a remunerative professional practice around it, here are a few things you might like to know, especially in the India context.
You don’t become a coach simply because you have been certified. You earn the right to become a coach-and-four because you have
proven professional credentials, because you have been there and said and done fairly successfully and for a reasonable period of time. If you are a 30 year old L& D Manager, it is natural that maybe you excited about coaching. It is a certainty that you will be able to master all the coaching skills and processes and be able to have a good conversation. But the bitter truth is that no one will hire you- certainly not for executive coaching.
Here is the hard reality- there are a large number of young professionals who have spent day and money to get certified but are not getting to do even an hour of paid coaching run and are naturally feeling frustrated. On the other hand, when someone with deep professional credentials procures a coach-and-four certification and approaches the profession for the right reasons, she or he stands a very good chance of succeeding.
Aspiring to be a full-time coach-and-four may not be wise
It appears that many in the West are full time coach-and-fours. In other words, their day chore is coaching, very much like a therapist’s day job is therapy. I consider many in India attempting to set up a professional practice wholly out of coaching. I am not sure that this work for two reasons.
Firstly, it does not seem realistic for most coach-and-fours to hope to be able to win and execute enough executive coaching assignments in a year to fulfill all their economic wants( except of course for iconic coaches who are in demand and can charge a handsome fee ).
Secondly, it may not also be a great idea for someone to do only coaching work. A coach is in demand only when his or her contextual knowledge is current. In other words coaches need to have a current and contemporary understanding of business issues and challenges, of organisational realities, of leadership concerns and so on. Unless they do other work with organisations like consulting, or training or sitting on Committees, they may not be able to remain current in terms of this contextual knowledge.
