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Now the business has two additional branches, Corporate Coach U, founded in 1997, which trains business coaches, and Corporate Coaches, which hires them out to needy firms. Currently owned by CoachInc.Com CEO Sandy Vilas, the company, based in Steamboat Springs, Colo., has 60 staff members who work from home and 3,800 students and graduates in 36 countries. "Last year we took in $4 million," says Vilas. "We're expecting revenues of $10 million in 2001."
Coach U is by far the largest coach-training institute, but there are at least 12 others. They include the Academy for Coach Training in Bellevue, Wash., and the Newfield Network in Silver Spring, Md.; both offer in-person workshops as well as teleclasses. Coaching's rise is just beginning, predicts Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, a research scientist at M.I.T. who studies workplace change. "It's a vehicle for the transfer of knowledge and skills. And in a knowledge-based economy, it will be increasingly important."
Jane Creswell, 39, who attended Corporate Coach U's first teleclass in 1998, is a case study in the merits of online coaching. An overstressed IBM product manager in Raleigh, N.C., Creswell sought training because she wanted to leave IBM and set up an independent coaching practice. While continuing her job, she coached a few outside clients on the phone. "I realized," she says, "that I was talking about things I needed to talk to folks at IBM about--stress on the job, communications problems with people, whether they were doing the wrong kind of work." She approached the head of her division and asked to coach colleagues who might be interested in talking about such issues as job-fit and departmental-communications problems. She got permission to try a pilot project. "That pilot never ended," says Creswell.
Within six months, she was appointed full-time coach at her office, at her previous salary. Six months later, IBM's corporate chieftains invited her to the company's global headquarters in Armonk, N.Y. When her successful division was spun off this year to become Home Director, there were several full-time coaches at IBM, and the program was growing. "We've done lots of research over the past three years," says Tanya Clemons, V.P. of global executive and organizational development at IBM, "and we've found that those leaders who have the best coaching skills have better business results."
When these corporate higher-ups describe their coaching sessions, they sound suspiciously--well, shrinky. But coaching is not therapy, practitioners insist. Neither is it mentoring, training or some other form of repackaged management skills. Actually, it's a grab bag of techniques that combine bits of all these with "nuggets of wisdom" from arenas as diverse as football and 12-step programs. Sometimes what a coach does, says Kathleen Phillips, an in-house coach at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, the former management-consulting arm of Ernst & Young, is help a client see a problem--or a problem job--a different way. In that way, say proponents, coaching helps shore up weak points in their employees as well as build on their strengths.