The coaching process: A UFO

Résumé 0

The definitions of coaching used by professional associations—e.g., the Société Française de Coaching’s “coaching means accompanying people or teams in the development of their skills and expertise within the scope of professional objectives”—are rather abstract and dull, obscuring the multiple approaches to coaching. Indeed, coaching is a practice that takes the most varied forms and which is even considered a UFO—an uninstitutionalized formal occurrence, or even an unidentified formal omnipresence. The varied approaches to coaching are thus yet to be explored. The results of this exploratory research will be of interest to prescribers, people in charge of selecting coaches in companies, and coaches themselves and their coachees, who want to work with individuals that share a minimum of their conception of the process. These results also demonstrate the interest in recontextualizing the rise and the practice of coaching by linking it, based on the mental representations that its stakeholders have of it, to broader social and economic phenomena and currents of thought.