Charging Listener's Skills: The Institutionalization of Executive Coaching in France and Its Consequences on Coaches' Practices

Born in the USA in the late 1980s, soon after introduced in France, coaching has become a new field of expertise offered to clients to enhance performance, develop leadership skills and help them to cope with issues related to the workplace. Despite a huge set of different definitions of what coaching is, we can define coaching with the International Coach Federation (ICF), one of the most representative coaches’ association in the USA and in France, as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential”. Coaching provides an action-based guidance, which has long been – and still often is – considered as a traditional figure of confessor, confident, intellectual guide, mentor, maternal figure (since most of the coaches are women, who coach managers who are mostly men). How has coaching become a new form of professional and personal development service paid by firms to their executives in corporate America and France? What are the moral changes that have favored this commodification? And what are the consequences of this marketization process on the moral and social status of coaching activity? Here are the main questions addressed by this paper. Drawing on several years of ethnographic inquiry, based on observations, interviews and surveys conducted with coaches, human resources professionals and higher executives, I analyze the genesis of coaching and its practices in France.

This paper first focuses on the introduction and the institutionalization of executive coaching in France in the 1990s-2000s. It shows how an informal activity has become a professional and valuable one. In particular, its institutionalization in France was triggered by the collective action of consultants who devoted themselves to the creation of this new activity. These “moral entrepreneurs” (Becker, 1963) struggled to impose coaching’s activity as an own jurisdiction (Abbott, 1988), by distinguishing it from both consulting and psychotherapy. A particular obstacle to the formalization of coaching was that in France, as in the USA, coaching emerged as an internal part of some consulting experts’ activity, what E. Schein (1969) early theorized as “process facilitator” opposed to “content expert”. In the US, Thomas Leonard, a financial counselor in Seattle, instituted Coach University (CoachU), the first formal coaching training program, in 1992 and Professional Coaches and Mentors Association, a professional association for coaching, in 1994, now known as the International Coach Federation (ICF) (Ozkan, 2008). In the 1980s, Leonard started to change the nature of consulting he was doing, especially to his richest clients, shifting from tax reducing and investment advice to “life planning”, what he called later on “coaching”. In France, the first consulting experts who turned to coaching explained that listening to their clients’ problems and helping them to cope with them was part of their activity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but was not recognized as a work activity in itself. Besides, some of the consulting experts who turned to coaching, especially those who devoted themselves to the creation of the French coaching association in 1997, were married to higher executives: they were used to listen to their husband’s professional problems and to help them, but in the shadow. The first introducer of coaching in France used his own personal life as a set of competencies to justify the creation of a new activity (Salman, 2003). Nevertheless, coaching’s institutionalization has also strongly been favored by public devices set up in a context of massive unemployment in France. Coaching has especially benefited from the institutionalization of the “bilan de compétences” (skills assessment) by the French law of 31^st December 1991.

This paper then raises some questions about the social and moral status of coaching activity, since it has been recently commodified and is still strongly linked with care: coaching is presented as a counseling activity and as a “helping” relationship; besides, as I already said before, coaches are mostly women working for men. As a matter of fact, coaching activity is not always valued, it is also sometimes mocked and treated as “woman’s weakness” by some employees. More generally and fundamentally, a tension especially appears with the commodification of coaching: coaching is a service offered to executives but often “prescripted” and paid by the firms; it’s a triangular relationship. Executives do not choose to hire a coach: on the contrary, they often must accept the latter’s “help” because their superior asked them to be coached. In France, coaches collectively try to solve this issue by giving to what they call “ethics” a huge place in their speeches and in their professional codification. I’d like to analyze this kind of answer as an original take on care practices and their issues when they get formalized in the corporate world. The paper will pay a special attention to the words that are used to talk about coaching, since “public” terms are often used to talk about care practices, which have previously been hidden in the “private” sphere, according to A. Mol, I. Moser and J. Pols’s point (2010).