The corporate world has jumped on the coaching bandwagon and has spent a lot of money hiring coaches or in having in-house coaches. The money involved has been very attractive to coaches and many coaches and coaching businesses have sprung up to meet the demands of corporations. Unfortunately, the corporations have learned to use the powers of their lucrative coaching expenditures to demand and get certain concessions from the people they hire who call themselves coaches.

The most damaging requirement that most corporations impose is that the coaches breach the coach/client confidentiality. They require their coaches report to management or Human Resources what transpires in the coaching sessions, many times under the guise of progress reports. Or the corporations insist that the coaches they hire follow predetermined coaching plans, philosophy, or step-by-step methods. I am not faulting corporations for using their economic and prestige muscle to impose their will on their service providers to get what they want. That is their right. I am more concerned about the many supposed coaches and coaching groups who accept and follow these corporate demands, under the guise that they are providing life coaching. I am also concerned that the many employees of corporations, who were subjected to these non-coaching efforts, were led to believe they had been coached.

I responded to an article in the Wall Street Journal by Jared Sandberg that reported the complaints by employees of corporations about the suppose coaching they received, when in every case the people calling themselves coaching were not providing life coaching, but were teaching, consulting or doing whatever the corporations wanted them to do. But the employees and the article blamed life coaching as the cause of the problems.

Many corporations have approached us at The Coach Connection to coach their employees, and the initial talks have given the corporations strong motivation to consider using TCC. However, inevitably the corporations have presented their coaching demands and in all but two cases, they all required TCC Member Coaches and TCC to breach the confidentiality of the coaching sessions. Most of these corporations were extremely well known and were proposing some very lucrative coaching contracts, albeit under their special coaching conditions. We strongly rejected their demands to provide any information about what transpired between the TCC member Coach and the employee clients. Our mission to provide true life coaching and to totally protect the confidentiality of our clients is ironclad. Needless to say, we discontinued any further talks with these corporations, because they demanded that we breach the coach/client confidentiality of our clients. As a result, we turned down a number of lucrative corporate coaching contracts.

What is fascinating is that one of corporate executive decision makers whom we had rejected as a corporate client, and who chose to hire someone else, because they would breach confidentiality, eventually returned to TCC to hire a TCC Member Coach executive coach for himself, BECAUSE TCC and our Member Coaches WOULD NOT breach confidentiality, and divulge any part of his coaching.

It appeared in many cases that the corporations were more interested in imposing their will and ways on their employees through outside coaching and on using the supposed confidentiality of the coaching process as a means of spying on their employees. They appeared to have ulterior motives in hiring coaches, and were much less, if at all interested in gaining the true results from the life coaching process for which it was designed. We would have no part in this charade.

In fact, we asked several manufacturing corporations how they would feel if we contracted to buy one of their well known products (a car, a TV, a computer), then told them how the products were to be built, the qualifications of the people who assembled the products, and that we receive timely status reports on the progress of the products we wished to buy? You would have thought we were invading their company and were demanding corporate secrets. Yet, that is exactly what they demanded from TCC, and we asked them why they felt entitled to control our process the same way. They did not think we were very funny.

One corporate executive did agree in advance to NOT ask for, or receive any information about the TCC Member Coach or what transpired between the coach and their employee client as a condition of engaging TCC. TCC accepted this corporate client, under the explicit requirement that confidentiality would be totally protected. The employee client reaped results after completing only one cycle of coaching with the chosen TCC Member Coach, and the client chose to continue into the next cycle. Yet, the corporate executive decision maker imposed a new demand on TCC. He exerted considerable pressure on TCC and his employee/client that TCC and the TCC Member Coach breach confidentiality by allowing him to intrude on the process, before he would authorize payments for continued coaching, even though he knew it would virtually destroy the results from coaching and even though he had previously agreed not to break confidentiality. TCC and our TCC Member Coach both refused his demands flat out, and he ceased paying for the coaching for his employee, at least with TCC. The employee was so thrilled about the personal and career progress being made that the employee chose to pay for continued coaching wit the TCC Member Coach out of the employee’s own pocket.  

It is a very sad commentary that so many so-called coaching groups gladly meet these unreasonable corporate coaching demands. They appear to be more interested in reaping financial rewards than in following the ethics of the life coaching process to protect the full sanctity of the confidentiality between a coach and a client. Unfortunately, the so called coaching performed by these groups that comply with the many coach destroying demands of the corporate executives is rarely coaching. The article by Jared Sandberg and others like it exposes the problems these corporations cause by imposing their non-coaching demands. If you have received any form of so called “coaching” that was paid for by a corporation, I caution you that you probably did not experience true life coaching. I do not know what it was, but it was most likely not any form of life coaching.

We hope that you will consider giving real life coaching a try where you will experience the security and relief of total confidentiality.The corporate world has jumped on the coaching bandwagon and has spent a lot of money hiring coaches or in having in-house coaches. The money involved has been very attractive to coaches and many coaches and coaching businesses have sprung up to meet the demands of corporations. Unfortunately, the corporations have learned to use the powers of their lucrative coaching expenditures to demand and get certain concessions from the people they hire who call themselves coaches. The most damaging requirement that most corporations impose is that the coaches breach the coach/client confidentiality. They require their coaches report to management or Human Resources what transpires in the coaching sessions, many times under the guise of progress reports. Or the corporations insist that the coaches they hire follow predetermined coaching plans, philosophy, or step-by-step methods. I am not faulting corporations for using their economic and prestige muscle to impose their will on their service providers to get what they want. That is their right. I am more concerned about the many supposed coaches and coaching groups who accept and follow these corporate demands, under the guise that they are providing life coaching. I am also concerned that the many employees of corporations, who were subjected to these non-coaching efforts, were led to believe they had been coached.

I responded to an article in the Wall Street Journal by Jared Sandberg that reported the complaints by employees of corporations about the suppose coaching they received, when in every case the people calling themselves coaching were not providing life coaching, but were teaching, consulting or doing whatever the corporations wanted them to do. But the employees and the article blamed life coaching as the cause of the problems.

Many corporations have approached us at The Coach Connection to coach their employees, and the initial talks have given the corporations strong motivation to consider using TCC. However, inevitably the corporations have presented their coaching demands and in all but two cases, they all required TCC Member Coaches and TCC to breach the confidentiality of the coaching sessions. Most of these corporations were extremely well known and were proposing some very lucrative coaching contracts, albeit under their special coaching conditions. We strongly rejected their demands to provide any information about what transpired between the TCC member Coach and the employee clients. Our mission to provide true life coaching and to totally protect the confidentiality of our clients is ironclad. Needless to say, we discontinued any further talks with these corporations, because they demanded that we breach the coach/client confidentiality of our clients. As a result, we turned down a number of lucrative corporate coaching contracts.

What is fascinating is that one of corporate executive decision makers whom we had rejected as a corporate client, and who chose to hire someone else, because they would breach confidentiality, eventually returned to TCC to hire a TCC Member Coach executive coach for himself, BECAUSE TCC and our Member Coaches WOULD NOT breach confidentiality, and divulge any part of his coaching.

It appeared in many cases that the corporations were more interested in imposing their will and ways on their employees through outside coaching and on using the supposed confidentiality of the coaching process as a means of spying on their employees. They appeared to have ulterior motives in hiring coaches, and were much less, if at all interested in gaining the true results from the life coaching process for which it was designed. We would have no part in this charade.

In fact, we asked several manufacturing corporations how they would feel if we contracted to buy one of their well known products (a car, a TV, a computer), then told them how the products were to be built, the qualifications of the people who assembled the products, and that we receive timely status reports on the progress of the products we wished to buy? You would have thought we were invading their company and were demanding corporate secrets. Yet, that is exactly what they demanded from TCC, and we asked them why they felt entitled to control our process the same way. They did not think we were very funny.

One corporate executive did agree in advance to NOT ask for, or receive any information about the TCC Member Coach or what transpired between the coach and their employee client as a condition of engaging TCC. TCC accepted this corporate client, under the explicit requirement that confidentiality would be totally protected. The employee client reaped results after completing only one cycle of coaching with the chosen TCC Member Coach, and the client chose to continue into the next cycle. Yet, the corporate executive decision maker imposed a new demand on TCC. He exerted considerable pressure on TCC and his employee/client that TCC and the TCC Member Coach breach confidentiality by allowing him to intrude on the process, before he would authorize payments for continued coaching, even though he knew it would virtually destroy the results from coaching and even though he had previously agreed not to break confidentiality. TCC and our TCC Member Coach both refused his demands flat out, and he ceased paying for the coaching for his employee, at least with TCC. The employee was so thrilled about the personal and career progress being made that the employee chose to pay for continued coaching wit the TCC Member Coach out of the employee’s own pocket.  

It is a very sad commentary that so many so-called coaching groups gladly meet these unreasonable corporate coaching demands. They appear to be more interested in reaping financial rewards than in following the ethics of the life coaching process to protect the full sanctity of the confidentiality between a coach and a client. Unfortunately, the so called coaching performed by these groups that comply with the many coach destroying demands of the corporate executives is rarely coaching. The article by Jared Sandberg and others like it exposes the problems these corporations cause by imposing their non-coaching demands. If you have received any form of so called “coaching” that was paid for by a corporation, I caution you that you probably did not experience true life coaching. I do not know what it was, but it was most likely not any form of life coaching.

We hope that you will consider giving real life coaching a try where you will experience the security and relief of total confidentiality.