The coaching profession has a power problem nobody talks about

If you are looking for a coach and have no way of knowing whether the person in front of you is any good, a certification from a recognized body like the International Coaching Federation is a reasonable thing to look for. It tells you that someone evaluated this person against a set of standards and found them competent. Organizations hiring coaches face the same problem at scale — a credential functions as a useful filter when you need to assess many candidates without the time or expertise to evaluate each one deeply.

And coaches themselves have reasons to seek certification. It signals commitment to the profession, opens doors, and connects them to a community of peers and ongoing development. For many coaches, the process of getting certified is itself valuable — it sharpens skills, surfaces blind spots, and provides a framework that genuinely improves their practice.

One distinction worth drawing here is between certification and training. Training, at its best, develops genuine capacity. Certification measures and validates what that training produced — or attempts to. The two are related but not the same, and the questions this article raises are aimed at the second, not the first.

So certification solves real problems; this article is not an argument against it. It is an invitation to look more carefully at some assumptions that tend to travel with certification — assumptions about credibility, about what coaching actually is, and about what happens when a profession's identity becomes too closely tied to any single institution's definition of it. These are questions worth examining, whether you are certified or not.

The most fundamental of those questions is one that rarely gets asked directly: what is coaching, actually?

Coaching is not a thing

Most practitioners define coaching as a creative partnership focused on the future. Rather than fixing a problem or downloading expertise, coaching is the process of evoking a client’s own resourcefulness. Most practitioners also answer by drawing distinctions. Coaching is not therapy — it doesn't deal with pathology or the past. It is not consulting — the coach doesn't provide solutions. It is not mentoring — the coach doesn't transmit experience. 

These definitions and distinctions are repeated so often and with such confidence that they can start to feel like facts about the world, as fixed and discoverable as the temperature at which water freezes.

Actually, they are not facts. They are agreements.

Coaching, like every profession built around human development and conversation, is a cultural construct. It doesn't exist as a physical object you can point to or as fundamental law of nature. It exists because enough people decided to call certain kinds of conversations by a certain name, and to draw certain lines around them. Those lines have shifted over time, vary across cultural contexts, and will continue to evolve. The same is true of therapy, consulting, and mentoring. The boundaries between them are not written into the fabric of reality — they are working arrangements, useful precisely because they help practitioners and clients orient themselves, not because they reflect some deeper truth about what these practices fundamentally are.

This has practical implications. It is not uncommon to hear coaches — or coaching organizations — correct someone who has "misunderstood" what coaching is, as if the correct definition were a matter of fact rather than agreement. A more honest framing would acknowledge the constructed nature of those boundaries while still making them useful. Rather than "coaching is not that," something closer to "the prevailing professional consensus defines coaching as..." or "in our organization we define coaching as . . ." — which says the same thing without pretending the definition exists independently of the people who created it.

In other words, if coaching is a construct, then any definition of coaching — including the one promoted by the most prominent certification body in the world — is necessarily partial and idiosyncratic. It represents one influential set of agreements about what coaching should look like, arrived at by a particular group of people, at a particular moment in the profession's development. That is not a dismissal. Influential, well-considered agreements are genuinely valuable. But they are not "facts", and treating them as such has consequences worth examining.

One place to examine those consequences is in the institutions that have built their identity around a particular definition of coaching — and in what those institutions tend to produce over time.

What institutions do — and what they tend to become

Certification systems exist because professions need infrastructure. A common language allows coaches in different countries and contexts to understand each other. Shared ethical guidelines create accountability. Training requirements raise the floor of practice. A recognizable credential gives clients and organizations something to hold onto when evaluating who to trust. These are genuine contributions, and the growth of the coaching profession over the past three decades owes something real to the institutions that built and maintained them.

But institutions, once established, also develop their own logic. This is a pattern observable across professions, industries, and organizations of every kind: what began as a means to an end gradually becomes an end in itself. Organizations develop an identity that needs to be protected, and so they build — gradually and often unconsciously — mechanisms that reward what affirms that identity and marginalize what questions it. The result is a system that becomes increasingly skilled at defending itself and optimizing for growth, and decreasingly interested in interrogating itself.

In the coaching certification world, the logic runs like this: standards created to protect quality begin to define quality. A credential designed to signal competence begins to confer it — or at least, begins to be treated as if it does, which amounts to the same thing in practice.

This logic is visible in the certification ladder. The progression from Associate Certified Coach to Professional Certified Coach to Master Certified Coach — or equivalent ladders in other certifying bodies — was presumably designed to reflect genuine differences in experience and skill. And for many coaches it does. But ladders also create climbers, and climbing creates its own incentives — for prestige, for higher fees, for the particular confidence that comes from outranking peers. What closes the loop is that the organization benefits directly from keeping coaches invested in climbing, and has little incentive to examine whether the ladder reflects genuine development or merely produces dependent participants.

The renewal cycle deserves the same scrutiny. The argument for ongoing development in coaching is not unreasonable — like any practice that involves working with human beings in complex situations, coaching and supporting technologies evolve and so should the practitioner. But there is a meaningful distinction between supporting ongoing development and requiring periodic recertification as a condition of maintaining your professional identity. A physician or attorney does not lose their degree if they miss a continuing education deadline — they may face consequences for their license to practice, but their underlying professional identity is not contingent on institutional renewal. In coaching, the certification –especially when it becomes indispensable– is the title, which means the renewal cycle does not just update your knowledge — it reasserts the institution's ongoing authority over whether you exist as a coach at all. Whether that serves coaches or the institution is a question worth considering.

Although none of this is unique to coaching, it is worth noticing because the incentives and requirements we've been referring can quietly redirect a coach's attention from the quality of their practice to the advancement of their standing, and trap them in a loop of feeling 'not quite there yet' until the next level is reached.

There is also a subtler effect. When a ranking system becomes the primary way a profession organizes itself, the criteria embedded in that system begin to function as the definition of excellence. Coaches who develop in directions the system doesn't measure — who build original methodologies, draw on disciplines outside the approved curriculum, or simply accumulate decades of practice in ways that don't translate into logged hours and assessor evaluations — become, by the system's own logic, less credible than someone who has climbed the ladder. Whether or not that reflects reality is a question the system is not designed to ask.

That incuriosity is not only structural. It tends to take root in individual practitioners as well — and it shows up in a particular way.

The power relationship nobody talks about

When a coach becomes certified by a major certifying organization, they gain something real: recognition, community, and a credential that opens doors. But they also enter a relationship defined by a consequential power dynamic. The institution determines who qualifies as a coach, sets the levels of expertise, and dictates the ethical and educational standards required to remain in good standing. Implicitly, it also reserves the right to revoke that standing at any time.

This dynamic emerges in any institution whose authority rests not on external or independently verifiable grounds, but on its members' continued recognition of its legitimacy — religious institutions, political parties, professional associations. When authority is constituted by recognition in this way, the institution has a vested interest in maintaining and deepening that recognition, and may do it by institutionalizing processes that reward compliance and loyalty over critical inquiry.

By adhering to these definitions and maintaining their credentials, coaches are doing more than following rules; they are actively sustaining the institution that holds power over them. In exchange, the organization grants the legitimacy and professional protection the coach values. It is a mutually beneficial transaction, which is precisely why it is so stable and so rarely examined.

Over time, this dynamic exerts a subtle psychological shift. Institutions are supposed to have boundaries — a certifying body that tried to encompass every possible expression of coaching would cease to be useful. The problem is not the boundary itself. It is what happens when practitioners internalize those boundaries as if they were their own — when the organization's definitions begin to feel like your own conclusions, its limits like the natural edges of the territory, and its approval like the sole measure of professional growth. This creates an environment where deferring to your certifying organization becomes the reflexive response—a predictable outcome of a structure that rewards alignment and makes any departure from the norm feel professionally risky.

At that point the scaffold has not just supported development; it has replaced it. There is an inevitable tension here: the institution has a structural interest in keeping practitioners within certified territory, while practitioners — at least the most developed ones — have an interest in stretching beyond it. What makes the dynamic worth examining is the third possibility: practitioners who stop feeling the tension altogether, because the institution's boundaries have become indistinguishable from their own.

It is also worth noting two other factors that can significantly impact the power relationship:

• Certification fees, renewal requirements, and tiered upgrades represent substantial, recurring revenue streams for these institutions. The organizations that define what a coach 'is' also derive significant income from that definition. This is not inherently cynical, but it does mean their financial interests and their definitional authority point in the same direction—toward a world in which certification is indispensable. This is worth keeping in mind when evaluating how those definitions are made, and whose interests they ultimately serve.

• According to the ICF 2025 Global Coaching Study, the industry generated an estimated $5.34 billion (USD) in revenue in 2024. This shift into 'big business' means that major certifying bodies increasingly cultivate partnerships with corporations and institutions—the large-scale buyers and employers of coaches. While this alignment may be justified as a way to strengthen the industry’s overall reach and credibility, it also creates a distinct incentive structure that can prioritize corporate partnerships and credential renewals over traditional member advocacy.

What happens when the scaffold never comes down

Early in a coach's development, deferring to established authority is sensible. It keeps you from reinventing wheels badly, and it provides a scaffold while your own judgment is still forming. The real concern is what happens if that scaffold becomes a permanent feature.

A profession populated by practitioners who primarily look outward — to a certifying body, to a set of competencies, to a hierarchy of credentialed peers — for answers to questions that are ultimately about their own judgment and development, is a profession at risk of a particular kind of stagnation. Not incompetence. The coaches in question may be highly skilled by their certifying organization's measurable standards. But there is a difference between a practitioner who has internalized a framework and made it their own, and one who has learned to operate within a framework without ever fully questioning it. The first is doing something genuinely professional and authentic. The second is, in a meaningful sense, still in training.

This matters because coaching, at its best, asks clients to develop exactly the capacity that excessive institutional deference tends to erode in coaches themselves — the capacity to think independently and critically, tolerate uncertainty, and trust their own judgment in complex situations. A coach who has not done that work in relation to their own professional identity is working with a blind spot.

None of this requires rejecting certification or the institutions that provide it. It requires something more modest: holding them lightly. Knowing what your favorite certifying institution says, and also knowing that what they say is one considered position among several possible ones. Using a framework, rather than allowing yourself to be used by it.

Some coaches arrive at this naturally within certified practice. Others — such as myself — find their way there outside it, not as a rejection of the profession's institutions, but as a reflection of what their own development requires. That choice carries real costs. It means building credibility through other means, in a market that increasingly treats certification as a prerequisite rather than one signal among many. It is worth naming precisely because the pressure to conform to institutional definitions of credibility is not trivial, and naming that pressure honestly seems more useful than pretending it doesn't exist.

What we are actually measuring

We began with a reasonable assumption — that certification is a credible signal of coaching quality — and we have spent some time looking at what travels with that assumption. Not to discard it, but to see it more clearly.

Here is what that examination suggests. Certification can tell you that a coach has met a defined set of standards, logged a required number of hours, and been evaluated against a recognized framework. That is genuinely useful information. What it cannot tell you is whether that coach has questioned their own frameworks deeply enough to know when to set them aside. Whether they have continued to grow in the ways that don't show up in credentials — through intellectual restlessness, through hard sessions that didn't go well, through the slow accumulation of genuine self-knowledge. 

To be fair, coaching outcomes are harder to observe and measure than a won case (law), a clean audit (accounting), or a successful surgery (medicine). This makes the measurement problem partly inherent to the domain. But the profession has also never built a widely recognized way to make visible the kind of growth that doesn't translate into institutional metrics — and that gap is worth distinguishing from the measurement infrastructure that does exist. 

Certification bodies do measure growth: required courses, supervised hours, and credential upgrades all track development along a defined path. What they measure, however, is development as the institution defines it — progress that can be evaluated against approved standards and converted into certification status. 

What tends to go unmeasured is precisely what is hardest to measure: the accumulated judgment that comes from years of navigating situations no curriculum anticipated, the capacity to set aside a framework when it stops serving the person in front of you, the kind of growth that shows up in the room but not on a renewal form. The consequence is significant: the profession currently has no good mechanism to distinguish between a coach who has held a credential for twenty years and one who has genuinely grown for twenty years.

Building that mechanism is unlikely to be a priority for institutions whose interest in measuring growth is necessarily tied to what that measurement can produce — a renewal, a credential upgrade, a new tier of qualification. Growth that cannot be converted into certification status offers them nothing to work with, and recognizing it explicitly would implicitly acknowledge that meaningful development may be happening outside their framework entirely.

If the profession is going to develop a more honest way of recognizing what grows beyond certification, the initiative is more likely to come from practitioners than from the bodies that certify them. That is simply what tends to happen when the interests of an institution and the interests of the profession it serves begin to diverge.

All of this creates a real challenge for clients and organizations. If certification is an imperfect proxy for the quality you actually care about, what do you look for instead? There is no easy answer, but there are better questions. Not just "are you certified?" but "how has your approach evolved?" Not just "what framework do you use?" but "where does your framework fall short, and what do you do when you reach that edge?" Not just "what level are you?" but "what have you changed your mind about?" Not just "what approved courses have you taken to obtain or renew your certification?" but "what else have you learned to broaden your understanding of human motivation and behavior?". The answers to those questions tell you something certification cannot.

For coaches, the challenge is different but related. The question is not whether to seek certification — for many practitioners, in many contexts, it makes good sense — but whether the pursuit of institutional recognition is running ahead of, alongside, or behind the deeper work of developing a genuinely personal practice. A credential earned in the service of that deeper work is one thing. A credential that substitutes for it is another.

Coaching, as we have seen, is not a fixed thing. It is a living set of agreements about what certain kinds of conversations can do for people. Those agreements will continue to evolve, as they should. The institutions that currently shape them have played an important role in the profession's development, and some will continue to. But as coaches, we need to remember that our profession thrives when practitioners think for themselves, hold certifying institutions accountable to their members, and treat frameworks as tools rather than absolute truths.

That, in the end, may be the most coaching thing a coach can do.