News

The first edition of the “Coaching Psychology Prizes”, awarded by the Colegio Oficial de Psicólogos de Catalunya last December, distinguished the research work of EADA professors Carme Gil, María Luisa Crespo and Joan Boada (PhD). All three of them have broad expertise in consultancy and people development, managerial skills and executive and team coaching. They received recognition for their research article in Coaching Psychology under the heading “Coach 10: Development and validation of a brief scale on the effectiveness of coaching processes”.

The research, which took them four years to complete, focused on the Coach-10 scale, an innovative tool in Spanish which was used to evaluate the effectiveness of coaching processes between the coach, who can validate their experience, and the client –coachee-, who is provided with a more objective perspective of themselves. According to the authors, “until now there were no studies –either comprehensive or partial- or scales that evaluated the scientific-technical effectiveness of coaching processes in the Spanish language”.

In their study they used a sample of 320 coachees from the EADA Coaching Service, of whom 44.2% were women and 55.8% were men. “The chief obstacle in the process was to get the coachees to return the filled in questionnaires in order to amass enough respondents to meet the requirements of a scientific study of these characteristics”, pointed out the professors.

Two of them, Carme Gil  and Joan Boada (PhD), are currently undertaking new research into coaches and coachees with a view to making EADA an international flagship in coaching research like other countries such as the USA and Australia.

EADA Professor María Luisa Crespo when she received the award, next to Joan Vilajoana (izquierda), dean of the Colegio Oficial de Psicólogos de Catalunya, and Juan Carlos Jiménez (right), president of the  Coaching Psychology dept. of the Colegio Oficial de Psicólogos de Catalunya.

Coaching: personal and professional development

The Colegio de Psicólogos de Catalunya awards give recognition to  research in coaching, an area that is becoming increasingly important in the corporate environment because, as the three experts point out  “it has to do with the level of our companies’ organisational development and hence with the demands they set on managers”.

It is also a field in which  EADA is a flagship given that in 2000 it began preparing professors in the People Management department in this methodology.“It became clearly obvious that coaching would facilitate the accomplishment of the objectives of our participants on different masters programmes”, they pointed out. To which they added that “EADA is the Spanish business school that dedicates the most hours to the coaching of all its students”.

Furthermore, they all coincide with regard to the benefits that this methodology has, both on a professional and personal level: “From the personal point of view, it constitutes a reencounter with oneself, and more specifically, with the analysis of what you do and the commitment you put into it. From a professional perspective it enables us to analyse the environment, the context in which you find yourself and to assess the use or not of available resources and also whether they are the most appropriate in order to address the needs or objectives the company demands of you at this precise moment”. In their opinion “this analysis is extremely powerful in both these areas because it connects with motivation towards achievement, with the possibilities that are opened up – the potential- and with the freedom to speak with the coach about anything and to undertake actions in the short term- not leave them for later on-”.

A good example of this is how coaching has helped many people to manage a change in their lives. According to the EADA professors, “changes have always taken place on any level – personal, social, work, corporate, political, etc.-, What happens nowadays is that internationalisation and technology have made these changes much quicker and people react with reluctance, above all because they need time to adapt”. That’s why, they point out “coaching can help to bring about a smoother adaptation”.

In Spain there is still a lot of headway to be made in this field. You could even say that it is in its initial stages.  The experts coincide that the future of this field has to do with the Coaching Lab, whose objective it is to accomplish lasting behaviour changes in an organisation’s teams. In this respect EADA, with its Coaching Competency Center, is in the front line in that it provides managerial competencies evaluation and coaching services with the help of state of the art audiovisual and biometrics technology.