Hidden in Plain Sight: The Active Ingredients of Executive Coaching

We propose that I/O psychologists who coach executives have overlooked psychotherapy outcome research as a source of information and ideas that can be used to improve our executive coaching practices. This research, based on thousands of studies and many meta-analyses, has converged on the conclusion that four ‘‘active ingredients’’ account for most of the variance in psychotherapy outcomes. We describe how this literature has identified four primary ‘‘active ingredients’’ that account for most of the variance in psychotherapy outcomes: 1) Client/extratherapeutic factors (40%), 2) The relationship or alliance (30%), 3) Placebo or hope (15%), and 4) Theory and technique (15%). Working on the assumption that psychotherapy and executive coaching are sufficiently similar to justify generalization from one domain to the other, we describe these four active ingredients at length and explore how they may be at work in the executive coaching process. We also suggest that I/O psychologists have training and experience that allows us to leverage some of these active ingredients in our executive coaching (e.g., understanding of client individual differences related to coaching outcomes). But we also have areas of weakness (e.g., building a strong working relationship with an individual client) that may need to be bolstered with additional training and development experiences. Executive coaching is hot. In the past 15 years, what was stigma in corporate America (‘‘You have a coach? Hmm . . .’’) has become status symbol (‘‘You don’t have a coach? Hmm . . .’’). Perhaps as cause or consequence of this change, executive coaching has exploded into a billiondollar-plus industry (Stober & Grant, 2006; Valerio & Lee, 2004), the scent of money and interesting work attracting people with all kinds of backgrounds into the business of coaching. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to D. Douglas McKenna. E-mail: [email protected] Address: The Oceanside Institute, 3866 Oceanside Ave., Greenbank, WA 98253; Sandra L. Davis, MDA Leadership Consulting Inc., Minneapolis, MN. Order of authorship is arbitrary; both authors contributed equally to this article. In the halls of major corporations over the past several years, we’ve run into former professional football coaches with playbooks, entrepreneurial educators armed with MBTIs, communications specialists with 360s, orchestra conductors with rhythm and harmony metaphors, and spiritual gurus with transcendent wisdom, all practicing executive coaching. Retired or fired executives are also getting a piece of the action. On a recent visit to a client company, one of us was surprised to bump into another company’s CFO who had been terminated the day before. His freshly printed business card announced his new job: Executive Coach. Fired one day, executive coach the next. But the market for executive coaching is changing fast. As the current