Thomas J. Leonard, a former financial planner, is considered by many to be the father of coaching. Leonard founded Coach U in 1992, the International Coach Federation in 1994 and was the founder and CEO of CoachVille. Leonard can certainly be credited as the person who pioneered packaging and popularizing the coaching profession. He opened the door for thousands of individuals to earn a living as professional coaches.
In a 2003 article in Fortune Small Business, Joshua Hyatt describes his interview with Thomas J. Leonard:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2003/05/01/343394/index.htm/
By now, because of Leonard's exhaustive efforts, no one needs a definition of what a business coach is. That's mainly because most of us have given up trying to figure it out. Think of it this way: Coaches are like motivational speakers, except that they listen instead of talking. Is it possible to turn to someone else for self-help? If it is, that's another way to define what these sounding boards do. They offer support and guidance, serving as friends for CEOs who deservedly have none.
Several of Leonard’s colleagues had this to say:
"Thomas turned coaching into a viable business," says Jeff Raim, a 48-year-old coach based in Angel Fire, N.M.
Typically, coaches encourage their clients to scour their inner selves and "be the source of their own answers," as Dan Kennedy puts it
...
"Coaching draws from people some clarity about what needs to be done and how best to make that happen," says Kennedy. "There are people who would really rather be told what to do. Coaching is not for them."
A coach serves a distinctly different role from other professions that offer, what initially appear to be, similar services. Stephen G. Fairley and Chris E. Stout in their book “Getting Started in Personal and Executive Coaching” use the following graph to illustrate what they believe to be the key differences between a coach and roles such as friend, facilitator, mentor, trainer, manager, consultant and therapist.
Fairley and Stout believe there are two key dimensions that distinguish these roles: 1) who is considered the expert, whether that is the client or the professional and 2) what the professional actually does, whether it be predominantly asking questions or providing answers.
Coaching occupies a unique position in this matrix. Both coaches and therapists ask more questions than they provide answers, but they serve different people with different challenges. Therapists typically serve people in need of healing who have psychological or personality issues. Coaches generally deal with healthy people who are interested in performing at a higher level.
Coaches also differ from the numerous roles that offer expert advice in one form or another. A fundamental assumption of coaching is that the client is creative, resourceful and whole and is the expert in their life and consequently, should set the agenda. The coach and client are generally thought of as collaborators creating an alliance between two equals. The role of the coach is to encourage/support people on the path to making important decisions and empower them to find their own answers for achieving their goals. Consultants and the other roles in the lower right quadrant are hired for their expertise and their ability to provide answers to specific problems.
People generally choose coaches if they are stuck in a rut, want to affect change in their business but are experiencing difficulty or have important goals they want to achieve that are currently out of reach. Until the coaching profession was started, this was a market not being adequately serviced by other providers.
In the Fortune Small Business article, Joshua Hyatt states:
Unlike most entrepreneurs, he didn't spot a gap in the world around him and then set out to fill it. Instead, he found a business by looking inside himself. Leonard, who seemed to have a heightened awareness of his own demons, created the tool that he needed. "You often learn to teach what you most need to know," observes Raim.
From Hyatt’s interview with Leonard, it appears there was no deliberate strategy. Nevertheless, the steps that Leonard took parallel the initial implementation of a blue ocean strategy. That is not surprising since people rediscover tried and true strategies all the time. What is a blue ocean strategy anyway?
Most companies try to outperform their rivals through incremental changes in price or quality - assessing what their competitors do and striving to do the same things better. Cost and value are seen as trade-offs. As the market space becomes more crowded, supply overtakes demand causing products and services to become commoditized, encouraging price wars and rapid feature duplication among rivals. Grabbing a bigger share of the market becomes a zero-sum game and profits gradually diminish across the entire industry. The airline industry was a perfect example of this where price wars resulted in numerous bankruptcies and almost non-existent profit margins.
Markets that are well explored and already crowded with competitors are called "red oceans". They are called red because the only way to increase profits is by taking away market share from the competition. This usually results in bloody battles where few companies emerge unscathed. However, since the dominant focus of strategy research has been on competition-based red ocean strategies, this is not uncommon or unexpected.
"Blue oceans" on the other hand represent uncontested market space - pools of demand and customers that have not been reached by any competitor. Blue oceans have always been around. Just look back a few decades, and you will find that many industries we now take for granted – such as mobile communications or biotechnology – that simply didn't exist. Technological advances represent one reason blue oceans are developed, but another one is creative thinking that discards conventional wisdom and current product/service design.
Blue ocean strategy was made famous with the following book:
Blue Ocean Strategy
W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
Harvard Business School Press
These two authors studied 150 strategic moves representing over thirty industries and spanning a timeframe of more than 100 years to discern how these companies became successful through value innovation. The authors uncovered common factors leading to the creation of blue oceans and the key differences separating winners from mere survivors.
So why is this important aside from the historical curiosity regarding Thomas J. Leonard stumbling onto a blue ocean strategy for developing the coaching profession? The coaching profession has proved to be a very challenging business with a significant number of coaches earning less than they desire despite considerable effort. While Leonard’s work represents an outstanding beginning to the implementation of a blue ocean strategy, it falls short on several key issues. The Strategy For Coaches webcast in May 2010 will provide a detailed examination of the blue ocean strategy and how a more complete implementation of the strategy could make the coaching profession far more lucrative for the coaches while providing clients with an even better value proposition. This is one webcast you don’t want to miss.
A presentation of this post can be found on our YouTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyNDjPGzFXo
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