Coaching in the workplace

The use of coaching as a workforce development strategy is the focus of this chapter. Coaching is enjoying a lot of popularity in terms of its uses by organisations internationally with the main purposes for using coaching being for individual development, leadership, and building capacity and employee engagement. This chapter can in no way cover all aspects and genres of coaching but attempts to provide a broad brush approach by discussing some of the key characteristics of coaching through defining it and delineating it from other similar interventions. This is followed by a presentation of the different coaching genres and their theoretical underpinnings before presenting details of two benchmark indicators of the growth of the coaching industry, namely the growing number of coaching associations and the emergence of scholarly journals reporting coaching research. We then turn to the results of four reputable surveys conducted on coaching from Australia, the UK and internationally before concluding with the presentation of a conceptual map of coaching within organisational contexts.