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Evidence-based coaching is increasingly a thing, but what constitutes evidence in coaching? And should all coaching be evidence-based?
Coaching is relatively new and has some of the inferiority complexes that new fields often have. Many coaches (including myself ) want coaching to be a serious practice, a scientific practice based on empirical evidence.
But should all coaching be evidence-based?
And what does that mean exactly? What constitutes evidence in coaching?
What is evidence-based coaching? The late coaching researcher Anthony Grant described the origins of evidence-based coaching in an insightful paper (Grant, 2016 ). The term was coined at the Coaching Psychology Unit at the University of Sydney in 2003 to distinguish coaching based on empirical evidence from coaching derived from pop psychology and the personal development genre. It was adapted from medical contexts, where it had been used for decades.
Grant defined evidence-based coaching as the “intelligent and conscientious use of relevant and best current knowledge integrated with professional practitioner expertise in making decisions about how to deliver coaching to coaching clients and in designing and delivering coach training programs”.
It is interesting that Grant highlights the integration between the most relevant current knowledge and the practitioner’s expertise. Coaching is a practitioner’s field, an eminently practical one, so it will never be an utterly theoretical endeavour.
Along similar lines, Stober and her colleagues (Stober et al., 2006 ) saw evidence-based coaching as lying at the intersection of three distinct lines: the integration of evidence from coaching-specific research (or a related field, e.g., psychology), the coach’s own expertise, and the specific context each client and situation brings. We can do all the empirical research we want and create tens of models and theories, but if they are not matched with a coach’s specific skills and coaching style in the service of the concrete needs of a particular client, they will be useless.
As I will never tire of repeating, coaching is a practical practice. Its main purpose is to help the client solve a problem, achieve an objective, and develop new insights and self-knowledge. The theory, evidence and coach’s skills must always be at the service of the client’s goals.
Evidence in coaching We are brandishing the term “evidence” a lot here, but what is it exactly? And what constitutes evidence in coaching?
The evidence-based approach in coaching came from psychology, but it originates in the medical sciences. In medicine, most of the research is conducted to see if a treatment works. The gold standard in medical research is the randomised controlled trial (RCT), whereby participants in an experiment are randomly assigned to two groups: the intervention and the control group. The former receives the treatment, while the latter receives nothing or a placebo, and then the impact or effectiveness of the treatment is measured.
This type of experiment generates new evidence proving or not the effectiveness of a new treatment. It is often said that a properly designed RCT is the only way to establish causality, as both groups are randomly created and the only differentiating factor that could impact the end result is the intervention the experimenters introduce.
This research philosophy was then transferred to psychology and from it to coaching. There are some differences between coaching and medicine, the main one being that we are not treating or curing anyone when we coach them, so there are also some differences in the research conducted in both fields.
Coaching, like all social sciences, deals with human beings as the subjects of enquiry, and as such, it is open to different types of research. The medical origins of the research and the importance that our society has traditionally given to numerical and quantitative data means that some researchers see a clear hierarchy of the evidence we can gather in coaching research (see pyramid below).
The Evidence Pyramid, taken from Grant, 2006 These researchers place RCTs, the “gold standard” of evidence by many, and their meta-analyses or systematic reviews (gathering conclusions by analysing many RCT studies together) at the top of the pyramid. These are then followed by between-subject and within-subject trials. Both types are longitudinal studies, meaning they measure an indicator before and after an intervention (for example, well-being before and after a coaching process). Between-subject studies compare some participants with others, but contrary to RCTs, no randomised control group exists. Within-subject trials evaluate the evolution of individuals thanks to the intervention of the experiment.
Next in this pyramid would be cross-sectional studies, that is, measures taken in one moment of time with no follow-up over time. These would be followed by case studies and expert opinion. At the very bottom of the pyramid, we’d find ideas and personal views. (As an aside, with the advent of social media, more and more people give more credence to opinions over scientific evidence, so nowadays, the personal views of a random anonymous person on X or Instagram often carry more weight than the conclusions of an academic paper written by a scientific team. We are really on our way to Idiocracy …).
This pyramid gives more weight to quantitative studies set up like medical studies or lab experiments, which denote a positivistic view of how knowledge can be obtained. However, there are other views out there, and many researchers believe human beings are too complicated to be quantified in this way and that personal interviews or other types of phenomenological research types go deeper into human thinking and are, therefore, more valuable than any RCT.
Everything lies in the eyes of the beholder, and our eyes look at the world through different lenses. These lenses are given to us by our culture and our worldview, or what others would call our philosophy .
It’s the philosophy, stupid! Clinton’s team’s infamous election slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid! ” meant that the economy was the most crucial topic for the electorate at the time. Likewise, philosophy is vital and should be the starting point of any researcher in coaching or any social science.
We all have different philosophies, and coaching researchers are no exception. Some, called positivists or neo-positivists, believe that there is a truth out there that can be learned and measured, that there is nothing special about the human psyche, and that human behaviour can be studied and predicted using science, like any other natural phenomena.
Positivists will tend to use quantitative research methods. For them, the higher you go in the pyramid shown earlier, the better: RCTs are the best research method, then between-subjects trials, and so on. The more participants you analyse this way, the more robust your evidence will be. Positivists seek to find evidence that is generalisable to the broader population and replicable by other researchers.
On the other hand, other researchers with more interpretive or social constructivist inclinations believe that we create a social reality through our language, so there is not one single reality out there but many, and that the human mind is too complex and rich to be analysed in the same way as natural phenomena. Each human interaction is unique and not replicable, so it should be analysed through techniques that allow the researcher to study it in depth.
For them, people are not mere numbers, so they will tend to use more qualitative research methods. They might interview only five subjects, but those interviews will have rich qualitative data, allowing the researcher to go deep into certain phenomena. They won’t necessarily want to generalise their conclusions to the entire population, and their research results are unique to the subjects they studied, so they cannot usually be replicated. Interpretivists and social constructivists will reject the pyramid above.
Some may even reject the very idea that we need evidence in coaching research. Their views on hard evidence will be more slippery than those of positivists and neopositivists.
So, the philosophical views of the researchers will have a significant impact on their views on what constitutes first-class evidence and how to go about collecting that evidence.
Evidence-based coaching, yea or nay? So, we finally arrive at the question at the title of this post: should coaching be evidence-based?
As we have seen, different people value different types of evidence based on their worldview and research philosophy. Some researchers and practitioners, like those close to existential coaching , will reject any positivist views and negate that coaching should be based on hard evidence. They will value the individual and the phenomenological study of the coaching session.
Other coaching researchers will argue that we may need evidence to move the coaching field forward, but coaching is not the same as medicine (we are not treating any illness after all) and it doesn’t need to be so rigorous with its data. RCTs are fine, but they are not the only evidence out there, and other types of data are equally valid in coaching research.
I have some leanings toward existential coaching, but I also use other coaching approaches. I am a pragmatist at heart, and I see the pros and cons of both positivist and constructivist approaches. We need rigorous research based on evidence to advance the field of coaching and build a robust body of knowledge that informs its practice and makes it better. The research method we select and the type of evidence we collect will also depend on what we want to find out. RCTs are ideal to look at outcomes and evaluate the effectiveness of a coaching intervention, but if we want to look at how coaching works and the lived experience of coaches or coachees, qualitative methods will be better suited.
Many of our clients expect us to be scientific and based on evidence, they don’t want to buy any pseudo-science-based mumbo jumbo (although there is plenty of it in the coaching world).
And yet, coaching sessions or clients are not like gravity or the speed of light: they don’t always behave the same way. It’s difficult to extract generalisable and replicable laws when studying human beings.
Even if we cannot generate exact laws that will always be true, we can learn new things and improve the practice of coaching as we research it. Coaching is a relatively new field, and there is still so much we can do to make it better. Researching it with a scientific approach, regardless of the type of evidence we find, is one of the best ways to improve our coaching practice, so let’s do more of it please.
Academic References Grant, A.M. (2016) ‘What constitutes evidence-based coaching? A two-by-two framework for distinguishing strong from weak evidence for coaching 1’, International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring , 14(1).
Stober, D.R., Wildflower, L. and Drake, D. (2006) ‘Evidence-Based Practice: A Potential Approach for Effective Coaching’, International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring , 4(1).
