ABSTRACT
A few years ago, ILM undertook some research (published as Creating a Coaching Culture) that surprised us in being groundbreaking. There was a fair bit of research into how effective coaching was, but none that we could find that explored how many organisations actually used it, or how they used it, other than some very anecdotal work. The results were surprising in that we knew it had become widespread, but we hadn’t realised quite how widespread. At the time (2011) four in five senior HR managers that we spoke to (250 in total) said they had used coaching and a further 9 per cent said they were planning to. The size of organisations mattered – the larger they were, the more likely they were to use coaching. Because we spoke to HR managers, we limited ourselves to organisations with over 250 employees (the standard definition of ‘large organisations’, employing about half the UK workforce), but the inference from the research was that many medium-sized and probably quite a few smaller organisations used coaching as well.
