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While the use of career coaching has grown tremendously over the past several years, there has been little research on how career coaching should be implemented in organizational settings and only anecdotal evidence on its effectiveness. This article examines the distinctiveness of career coaching versus other career developmental activities (e.g., mentoring and career counseling), the key indicators diagnosing the need for career coaching, and the organizational circumstances under which career coaching is most successfully utilized. The article concludes with guidelines to assist senior managers and HR professionals in effectively implementing career coaching.
Over the past five years, career coaching has emerged as a major growth area in HR consulting, as a key element of organizations' career development activities, and as an important component of executives' own strategies for advancing their careers. Today, there are an estimated 10,000 full-time and part-time career coaches, and, according to the International Coach Federation, the number of career coaches entering the field has doubled in size every year for the past three years (Levinsky, 2000).
Companies such as Motorola, Chrysler, IBM, Kodak, and AT&T are teaching line managers how to do career coaching (Tyler, 1997), while corporations like Bear Steams, Salomon Smith Barney, and Sears have utilized the services of external career coaches (Coleman, 2000; Morris, 2000). As the market for providing downsizing services has declined, outplacement firms are also adding services like executive coaching to their consulting portfolios (Hirschman, 1998). Moreover, both ambitious managers wanting to get the edge on their competition and new entrepreneurs making the transition into self-managed enterprises are seeking out the advice and counsel of career coaches as well (Coleman, 2000; Stauffer, 1999).
There are a wide variety of reasons for this sudden burst of career coaching activity. During the downsizings of the 1980s and 1990s, the emphasis on "bottom line" financial success precluded much attention to sustained career development for senior managers. Now that the labor market is tight and employees have greater expectations of being empowered, many organizations are finding their upper- and middle-level managers are having trouble leading in a more participative fashion. Furthermore, many organizations are now increasingly relying on subcontractors, outsourcing, virtual teams, and other collaborative partnerships to conduct their business operations. The old "command and control" management style is...