Rajat is a Master Certified Leadership coach with 18+ years of industry experience and over 2500 hours of coaching experience, helping people and organizations attain maximum effectiveness.

As the domain of coaching matures in India, I see the following emerging over the course of not just 2019 but beyond.

Democratization of Coaching: As of today, coaching is offered to top leadership of the organization or the Hi-Pots, which have the potential to go much higher and just need a little support from an executive or leadership coach. We should see a trend of coaching moving down the layers of the organization and more coaching being offered to the executive levels. Every employee will have access to coaching in some format or the other. There are many organizations in India which are doing this as of now, but we will see more organizations moving into it.

Coaching as a Culture: With coaching getting democratized, there will be a movement towards creating coaching cultures within the organziations. As people see benefits of coaching increasing, the organizations will invest more in making everyone talk the language of coaching. The impact of coaching increases multifold with a coaching culture being created. If you see case studies (multiple of them) provided by the International Coach Federation of organizations which have won their Prism Award, one gets an idea of the size and deep impact that coaching cultures can make.

Coaching not as a Project: As of now, coaching is provided as a project or an intervention, which means that an employee is offered a 6-12 sessions kind of intervention after which the support of the coach goes away. This thinking creates issues in getting approvals for large scale projects as well as democratization of coaching. The organizations have to start looking at coaching as a continuous paradigm. Coaching should be tool that is available anytime and anywhere across the organization to any-body. If there is a need for an employee, they should not need to sign-up for an entire intervention. They would be able to speak to a coach for a single session or two and get help in their thinking process. This would need creating systems which employees can simply get into and select a coach. The approval process would also be within the system and the tracking as well.

As people see benefits of coaching increasing, the organizations will invest more in making everyone talk the language of coaching

Tracking & Measurement Systems Become the Norm: Coaching is a concept which is not typically associated with tangible benefits which can be measured. Also, with coaching going large scale within organizations, there will be a need to track them through systems. These systems would be responsible for tracking the coaching engagement happening throughout the organization and also the ROE/ROI of the engagements. There are more and more such systems getting created across the globe, and organizations are accepting them to help & support them with these complex processes.

Research in Coaching: We will also see more research coming from India in the coming years. As the Indian industry matures, our coaches and clients will start focusing on doing research to enhance the understanding of coaching within the industry. Initially, the research will focus on basics of coaching like benefits of coaching, impact of coaching or business of coaching. It would be interesting to see how much of the research is a joint research between Coaches, Industry and Consulting companies existing in India.

India's Contribution to Coaching: Another sign of maturity of an industry is the focus will start shifting from learning from other markets to creating learning from within the market. We already have some coaches in the industry utilizing our culture and knowledge to create newer paradigms in coaching world. We should see more and more of our ancient history & culture making an impact in this world.