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ArticleMay 5, 2026

The Most Important Unsolved Problem in Coaching Education

The coaching field has done extraordinary work defining what good coaching looks like. The harder question is: how do you know it's actually happening?

The coaching field has done extraordinary work defining what good coaching looks like.

Competency frameworks, accreditation standards, supervision models, rubrics, performance evaluations. The ICF's current core competency framework was developed through a 14-month job analysis drawing on over 3,000 coaches, combining literature reviews, focus groups, surveys, and expert panels. The language we have for presence, active listening, powerful questions, client-centered exploration, and reflective capacity is precise and hard-won.

The "what" of good coaching is genuinely well-developed.

The harder question is: how do you know it's actually happening?

Not in theory. Not in one observed session. Not because a coach feels like they're improving or a program says it has good outcomes. Across real coaching practice, in real time, over the full arc of a cohort or a coach's development.

This is where coaching education still has a significant gap. And it's not for lack of caring. The coaches, faculty, and supervisors working in this space are often deeply attentive. The problem is that attention doesn't scale, and the evidence of development is almost always distributed.

A faculty member notices something in one session. A supervisor hears something different in another. The coach has their own read. A rubric captures part of the picture. A client responds in a particular way. But these signals rarely come together into a clear developmental view of what's actually happening with this coach, across this cohort, over this period of time.

Why does this matter? Because research is consistent that the coach is one of the most significant variables in coaching outcomes. Graßmann, Schölmerich, and Schermuly's 2020 meta-analysis across 27 samples and more than 3,500 coaching processes found a moderate and consistent relationship between working alliance and client outcomes (r = .41). Working alliance isn't just about rapport. It's substantially shaped by coach self-awareness, coach behavior, and the coach's ability to be present and responsive in ways that a client can feel. Which means understanding whether coaching programs are actually developing those capacities matters, not just for credentialing purposes, but for client outcomes.

Bachkirova's work on coaching supervision makes the parallel point from a development angle: the coach's own perspective, blind spots, and patterns of response influence the work more than technique does. Development, in this frame, is less about learning new approaches and more about the ongoing process of noticing your own patterns and what they're doing in the room. But that kind of development is extremely difficult to track without infrastructure that connects observations across sessions and over time.

And here's what makes this genuinely hard: the information that would answer the "how do you know" question exists. It's embedded in session recordings, feedback notes, supervision conversations, self-reflections, client responses, and faculty observations. But it's distributed. It lives in pieces, in different places, with different people. Without a way to connect those signals, the developmental picture remains fragmentary, even when everyone involved is paying close attention.

Research on coach education program evaluation confirms this gap. Studies consistently find that while the field has invested in defining what good coaching looks like, the evidence base for how programs actually develop coaches over time remains thin. Most evaluation happens at the level of session-level performance rather than developmental trajectory. Which means programs often know whether a coach demonstrated a competency in a given observed moment, but not whether they're developing that competency systematically across their work.

That gap matters for coaches, because it makes growth harder to see and harder to build on intentionally. It matters for supervisors and faculty, because it makes targeted support harder to provide. And it matters for the field, because without the ability to track development with real continuity, it's difficult to know what interventions actually work.

The coaching field has done the hard work of defining good coaching. That work is real and it's valuable. The next problem is different: knowing, with greater clarity and greater continuity, how coaches are actually developing toward it.

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