Insight
What the maturity model leaves out
For most of coaching’s short history, the people buying it have had no reliable way to tell one coach from another. The instinct is to reach for the obvious signals - a certificate, an accreditation, a glowing reference, a senior career before coaching, a high fee. The trouble is that none of them work.
Author: Simon Coops
We know this not only from experience but from the research. When Professors David Clutterbuck and David Megginson assessed coaches against consistent criteria, they found that a certificate was at best a hygiene factor, that individual accreditation tells you a coach is good enough rather than how far they have travelled, that client satisfaction can mistake a pleasant conversation for a transformational one, and - the finding I find most telling - that fees varied by as much as fifteen to one with no meaningful link to the quality of coaching actually delivered. Almost every signal a buyer naturally trusts turns out to be noise.
So a few people went looking for the thing that genuinely does separate coaches. What they arrived at is, strangely, barely discussed in coaching at all - most coaches have never given it a thought. But of every attempt I have seen to describe how a coach develops, it is the one that has resonated with me most. It is the idea of maturity.
The idea that has always stayed with me
The idea is that coaches evolve through recognisable stages. The newest work from a place of control - mechanistic conversations in which following the model matters more than exploring the person, coaching to the client rather than with them. Further on, a coach works from a wider toolkit, but it is still a toolkit. Further on again, they operate from a broad philosophy about how people grow, applied with real reflection rather than by rote.
And at the top sits what Clutterbuck and Megginson call the systemic eclectic, which is a lovely thing to watch. These coaches have immense calm, because they trust they will find the right tool if they ever need one - and then they hardly ever reach for one. They are almost miserly with their questions. They do less, not more. They hold the client and steer with the lightest, almost imperceptible touches, and they let insight arrive in its own time. It is, as one of their phrases has it, coaching for wisdom.
Melissa Hague has taken this idea inward in a way I admire. She frames coach maturity as the move from competence and performance towards presence, self-awareness and self-authorship - inner work that tools cannot touch - and she asks whether the competency frameworks we use really capture who a coach is becoming rather than only what a coach does. I think she is right, and it is the most honest version of the idea I have come across.
Where I part company
And it is the developmental story where I part company with the orthodoxy.
Every version of it shares one hopeful assumption: that the journey is open to anyone willing to do the work. Put in the hours, the reflection, the supervision, the courage to look inward, and you will ascend through the stages. It is a comforting idea. It is also the foundation of an entire training industry.
My experience, after nearly twenty years of watching coaches at very close range, is that the journey has a ceiling - and that the ceiling is set before the coaching ever begins, by the calibre of the human being.
By that I mean something quite specific. A high-calibre human being is someone who leaves a trail of good things in their wake in every part of their life. They are not infallible. They make mistakes, but they notice them and they put them right. They are modest and they are kind. They are endlessly curious, because they assume there is always more to be learned. They have a great attention to detail. And they have a sixth sense that they allow to interrupt them - so when a coachee says they “sort of” agree, a coach of real calibre cannot simply let it pass. What is it you are not sure about? They go towards the thing that does not quite fit.
Now look again at what we admire in the systemic eclectic - the calm, the willingness to do less, the curiosity, the modesty, the light touch. Notice that none of it is a competency. You cannot be trained into calm. You cannot be taught to be modest. These are not skills a coach acquires on the climb. They are expressions of who that person already was. The inner work is real, but it does not manufacture these qualities. It polishes them. Which is why I have always believed that training improves a great human being and cannot construct one. No amount of development bridges a gap in calibre, because development has nothing underneath it to act on.
That is an uncomfortable thing to say in an industry built on the promise that anyone can become a great coach. I am saying it anyway, because it is what the watching has shown me.
What I am not saying
I know how this can sound - like a claim that some people simply have it and the rest never will, a velvet rope drawn across the profession. So let me be precise, because the truth is more interesting than gatekeeping.
Calibre is not a fixed quantity you are handed at birth and can do nothing about. People grow in character all their lives. The point is one of sequence and foundation, not of fate. Calibre is the ground that the development is built on. Where the ground is rich, reflection and supervision and experience produce something remarkable. Where it is thin, the very same inputs produce a competent technician who never quite becomes a coach you would trust with the people who matter most to you. It is not that those who work at it cannot improve. It is that you cannot develop your way past the quality of the person doing the developing.
There is a sharp corollary here, and Clutterbuck and Megginson found this one too. The signal buyers trust most, especially at the top of the market, is a senior career - get me someone who has sat in the chair, who has been there. Yet they found that a high level of management experience, when it is not matched by coaching maturity, is poor value and can do real harm. The reason is not hard to see. The ex-executive’s instinct is to supply their own answers, the “I have been there” reflex, and it crowds out the listening. Stripped of calibre and maturity, seniority stops being an asset and becomes a liability. The thing buyers reach for most confidently is often the thing most likely to mislead them.
So how do you actually choose?
If maturity and calibre are the things that matter, and the usual signals miss both, what is a buyer supposed to do?
Maturity you can largely hear. Get a coach to talk you through real engagements - not their philosophy in the abstract, but what they actually did and why, where they held back, what they noticed, what they got wrong. A coach working from control and a systemic eclectic will describe the same session in entirely different languages, and the difference is audible within minutes. It is the closest thing the field has to a reliable read.
Calibre is harder, and because it matters most, it deserves the most care. You read it less in what a coach says about coaching and more in the trail they leave everywhere else - in the attention to detail, in how they treat the people who can do nothing for them, in whether that sixth sense is alive, in the modesty and the curiosity that no one is performing for your benefit. It cannot be captured on a form, which is precisely why the signals buyers fall back on never find it. Reading it takes judgement, and time, and the experience of having watched a great many human beings up close. It is most of what we are doing at Acuity Coaching when we decide whether a coach is one of ours.
The simplest question of all
Which leaves me somewhere I find rather wonderful. Most coaches, if they consider the question at all, settle for the bluntest possible version of it - you are either a coach or you are not. Maturity is the far richer idea, the one that has always resonated with me, because it says a coach is not a fixed thing but a person who develops. And yet when you follow even that idea all the way down, it arrives back at the very question the blunt version was clumsily reaching for. Not what this coach has been trained to do, nor how far along the journey they have travelled, but what kind of human being is sitting in front of you.
So the old binary was not entirely wrong. It was simply asking the wrong question. Not whether you are a coach - but what calibre of human being you are, and how far you have grown the craft on top of that. I have never thought of that as a limitation. I have always thought of it as a relief.