Hard to Evaluate: Coaching Services

Abstract

Coaching is a service which is co-produced in interaction with the client as well as being both intangible and confidential. Coaching processes are characterized by a high level of complexity and disparity and are as a result almost impossible to standardize. Taken together, these characteristics lead to coaching being a service that is hard to evaluate for both the customer and the client. As a result, coaching is often only informally evaluated, which brings with it the risk that these assessments turn out to be devaluing and indeed for the client even discriminatory. Professionalism demands that the particularities of coaching are accommodated by the use of sound scientific methods of evaluation. An evaluation model will be presented here that encompasses the three criteria of structural, process and result quality.