As a leadership consultant for about thirty years, I first began to notice the phenomenon of professional coaching in the marketplace maybe ten years ago, and it took me another five years to realize it was a growing and legitimate addition to the world of input to organizational prowess as well as individual development. Myself, I had always been a coach as part of my consulting, and it had always been in the context of forwarding the intent of the client work (usually the fulfillment of their vision).
In the last couple of years, I have gravitated more to a formal coaching process for my clients, either inside the context of a consulting engagement or not. My main reason for this is that I realize that nothing else I do has as much of a potential for leveraged impact as coaching a senior executive of a company or a business unit or a division, etc. In other words, with very little time or money invested on the clients part, the import and impact of the coaching work can and should yield returns that are hundreds or thousands times the investment.READ»
