Kennedy and Company - Coaching, Leadership and Career Development, Presentations

A History of Coaching

Executive coaches have been offering their services to high level executives for over 30 years. It began growing in popularity as an approach and profession in the mid-1970’s. In 1975 The Inner Game of Tennis, written by a former tennis champion named Timothy Gallwey, showed the world a unique and radical approach to helping people learn to play the sport. Instead of continually barking orders or even making suggestions, like most coaches of his day, Gallwey based his method on the belief in the innate ability of people’s bodies to learn and to perform. He focused on allowing his students to learn through their own experiences on the court. He saw the coach’s role as asking questions to help players to increase their awareness of how they played and to adjust accordingly. Gallwey believed that the game of tennis—like the game of life—was one of expressing our potential and being the source of our own answers.

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Many of those who came to learn the Inner Game were business people. They soon saw that the new messages they were hearing on the court could be applied in their boardrooms, as well. It was obvious that this coaching style could help manager/leaders assist their people to take better control of their jobs and careers and to get the kinds of results that were rare in the command-and-control management culture of the time. As a result, Inner Game coaches soon found themselves literally going to work across America to spread the word. Meanwhile, a student of Gallwey’s named John Whitmore was bringing the Inner Game to Europe where he wrote the classic coaching text: Coaching for Performance (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 1995).

At the same time, well known coaches from baseball, basketball and football were being hired to speak to sales people and managers in many American companies, further helping to blend the ideas of coaching, management, and leadership.

By the start of the 1990's a small group of people were taking steps to bring coaching as a profession to new levels of acceptance and professionalism. Thomas Leonard, a former financial planner, founded Coach University. A colleague of Leonard's and a former CPA and auditor, Laura Whitworth, along with Henry Kimsey-House, a career development professional, began The Coaches Training Institute. Whitworth and Kimsey-House went on to write Co-Active Coaching: New Skills for Coaching People Toward Success in Work and Life (Davies-Black, 1998). Coach University and The Coaches Training Institute have trained the majority of today's professional coaches.

In 1998 the members of the Professional Personal Coaches Association (PPCA) and The International Coach Federation (ICF) joined together to create the primary body representing and supporting professional coaches today. (The ICF name remains.) Later that same year the ICF took the next step in professional development by starting to offer certification to coaches who qualify.

And where is coaching headed? Everywhere. Coaching is becoming an established skill-set and approach for leaders in business, government and non-profit organizations around the globe. Perhaps the most significant application of coaching, however, will be in its use by everyone who wants to learn it’s basic skills and applications. It will be a wonderful world when parents, teachers, friends and co-workers can all coach those they care about to express their potential, and to discover that they can find their own answers, just as they could all along.

For more information, please contact Kennedy & Company at:
206-783-6829 or info@ResultsThatMatter.com