Leadership and executive coaching

Abstract

The state of coaching as a field of knowledge and practice has recently changed significantly. Since the first edition of this Handbook some debates and agendas for research became less important but others became more prominent. The issue of differentiation between therapy/counselling and coaching received significant attention in the last decade (Simons, 2006; Bachkirova, 2007; Griffiths and Campbell, 2008; Spinelli, 2008; Maxwell, 2009; Price, 2009; Baker, 2013) but there are signs of the very recent declining of interest for this topic. One might assume from this situation that this issue has been resolved once and for all. However, the conclusions of the above publications indicate that for various parties interested in the development of the coaching field many questions remain unanswered. This suggests that the topic of differentiating coaching from counselling/therapy would benefit from revisiting and possibly reformulating.