Fall Reflections

We have just come back from the energizing 2018 Annual Coaching in Leadership and Healthcare Conference, organized by Harvard Medical School in collaboration with the Institute of Coaching and McLean Hospital. Over two days, practitioners, academics and researchers shared their work and insights on coaching in different contexts, human development, organizational development, and inspired each other. Many of the sessions were recorded and resources will be available soon on the IOC website. In the meantime, you can see more details about the conference in the September Coaching Report, which was prepared as an overview of what to expect.

We have also created a slideshow of photos and social media from the event which you can view in the Event section of this month's report. The symposia and poster sessions, which focused specifically on on-going research in the field, presented the most current studies, including several which are funded by the IOC grants program. 

Looking forward, we have a webinar coming up on October 25, which will be presented by long-term collaborators of the IOC, Gordon Spence and Sunny Stout-Rostron, on the "sleeper effects" of coaching. Sustainability of coaching effects is now being widely studied, with more projects following up on their participants over several months after the completion of the coaching engagement. However, sleeper effects (i.e., such effects which emerge after the end of the coaching engagement), are a new phenomenon of interest. Gordon Spence was a recipient of an IOC Harnisch Research Grant and completed a study on "Coaching for employee engagement: Using self-determination theory to predict engagement, turnover intention, and well-being among employees." Spence and Ryan Niemiec presented a webinar in 2016 summarizing the conclusions from this study. However, the team appreciated the importance of having a long-term perspective on the impact of the coaching, and thus, Spence and Stout-Rostron added an in-depth qualitative component to explore the delayed effects of coaching a year later. They will be presenting their new and unique findings at the October Webinar.

Our selected article for this issue of the Coaching Report is a recent review of the status of research on coaching in organizations. It broadly reviews the field and makes recommendations for advancing research and practice. I also include links to two articles relevant to the October webinar, published several years ago, which address more specifically the theoretical framework of self-determination theory, as well as the concept of employee engagement. The Book of the Month is the newly published book by Reinhard Stelter, The Art of Dialogue in Coaching.

We are enjoying the fall crispness and colors here in New England, and I wish you a fruitful month in whichever season you are in, in different parts of the world.

Sincerely yours,
Irina Todorova
IOC Director of Research