What are ethics and why does the coaching industry need them?
For a profession like coaching where there’s no standardized curriculum or learning, no centralized governing body, and many of the practitioners are first-time business owners, ethics can seem like a foreign concept or a fuzzy topic that no one really understands. But the truth is, they’re not really that difficult to grasp.
Ethics are the moral principles that govern a person's behavior or the conducting of an activity. In the case of business, that is the activity. In the case of coaching, it’s both the coaching relationship and the business behind it.
In fields where there are standardized curriculums, ethics courses specific to that profession are often a requirement and major professional organizations within the profession help further advance the ethical practice within those professions.
Contrary to what many may assume, you do not need an ethics professor to figure out basic ethics. Our shared cultural values largely inform what is and is not considered acceptable behavior in our society and they are the foundation of all professional ethics in any given country or culture, as well as the law.
Each individual has their own personal ethics that they abide by which are rooted in those cultural values, and each business or organization, whether or not it it has codified ethics, usually operates based on similar values.
Some of these basic moral principles that underpin personal and group ethics in most cultures include:
Don’t lie
Don’t cheat
Don’t steal
Don’t intentionally inflict harm on people
Respect others
Treat others the way you want to be treated
It’s very easy to see how these universal principles can quickly be applied to professional activities in various industries and that’s the foundation upon which most organizations, businesses, and industries build their code of ethics.
Thanks to this pre-existing ethical foundation, the coaching industry doesn’t have to start from scratch.
Business ethics have existed in the United States in a formal fashion since the 1970s, and ethics in psychology have existed since the 1950s, which gives professional organizations, business owners, and coaches plenty of material to lean on, learn from, and implement to make their own practices safer for their themselves and their clients.
Why are ethics in the coaching industry so lacking?
In the case of the coaching industry, specifically the business coaching aspect, it’s not that people don’t know or don’t agree about what is and isn’t ethical. The problem is the way in which the industry itself has normalized unethical behaviors which are frowned upon in other industries, and which in many cases are actually illegal at the state and federal level.
Earlier we pointed out how easy it is to see how basic ethics can be applied to professional activities. It’s also very easy to see how a large portion of the coaching industry does not meet even these most basic, universally agreed upon ethical standards. “Fake it until you make it” as a business strategy is taught in the industry as a standard marketing practice, even though it involves paying for fake followers, lying about your income, and fudging your credentials. No-refund policies as an industry standard means many clients lose thousands of dollars for programs that were misleadingly marketed. Many of the “hacks” taught and used by leaders in the industry are dubious at best and illegal at worst.
These practices were largely propagated by the industry’s earliest founding members, many of whom were not business professionals with formal training, but rather salesmen and get-rich-quick schemers looking to capitalize on early opportunities in online business.
They’ve been taught as the standard for how its done for many many years and have trickled down from teacher to student since the beginning, to the point that people believe that this is how it’s supposed to be. But a quick reality check from a legitimate business or marketing professional, or even a professional executive coach says otherwise.
How do we begin raising the ethical standards in the coaching industry?
The first step to raising the ethical standards in the coaching industry is not looking to organizations like Ethics for Coaching to tell you what to do.
It’s looking within yourself to understand your own personal values and ethics and how your own business practices live into those values and ethics.
You’ll never understand your own ethics if you don’t understand your values, and that’s a huge problem within the industry currently: a lot of people have sacrificed their own values in order to align with what their coach told them they should value. And many people who have woken up to this fact are now reeling as they attempt to rediscover who they really are.
The next step is taking the time to educate yourself about the values you hold and the practices which you engage in and understanding their impact on your clients, the industry, the economy, and the world – because all of these systems are connected.
As an organization, we can’t tell you what your personal values are or how those values will define your personal ethics. But we can provide you with research-backed information about how certain practices impact people and the planet, and then you can evaluate whether or not that impact is the kind that you truly want to make.
When we developed our handbook, we took impact deeply into consideration. We also understand that ethics don’t exist in a vacuum. They have to be according to some framework, whether its your personal morals, your cultural morals, or some other group norm.
That’s why we felt it was important to utilize a trauma-informed framework and a social systems theory framework to help us define our ethical foundations in addition to pre-existing ethical frameworks for business and helping professions which are much more basic and less likely to factor in trauma or social systems. Our ultimate goal with our ethical framework is harm reduction and these frameworks already exist, are widely adopted, and were developed by professionals and academics with a lifetime of expertise in these areas.
The third step is getting everyone on the same page with the basics.
As previously stated, the coaching industry is somewhat in the hole when it comes to standards and practices because so much of it is informed by internet scams and illegal activity, but that also means it’s fairly cut-and-dry about where we can begin to improve things. This is where Ethics for Coaching is focusing right now.
The final step is organizing our industry and having open discussions about some of the less cut-and-dry ethical situations.
This is the part that is yet to be determined, but can be through more public discussions like our town hall. Some of the future topics we want to tackle with our community include:
Where is the line between coaching and therapy?
What does an acceptable trauma-informed training need to include?
What is the appropriate way to market yourself as trauma-informed?
Clearly defining what is an actual “scam” and what is simply bad business practice.
The role of credentials in the industry.
No one expects you to be perfect.
A very important thing to keep in mind as you embark on your own personal ethics or harm reduction journey is that none of us are perfect and we never will be. Just like becoming trauma-informed, becoming ethical is not a state at which you arrive, it’s a daily practice and a mindset you attempt to maintain.
If you’ve realized that some of the practices you were taught or engaged in where unethical or harmful, don’t be too hard on yourself. Just make a commitment to yourself and your clients to do better in the future, and make a concerted effort to start learning. Knowledge is power! We’ll do our best to provide you with as much as we possibly can.
Do you have more topic areas that you think we should cover? We’d love to hear them. Send us an email with yours.