Jonathan Sibley Receives Grant from Harvard Institute of Coaching

Jonathan Sibley and co-researcher Tatiana Bachkirova have received a $25,000 grant from Harvard Medical School's Institute of Coaching to study the inner workings of coaching.

Through this research, working with international panels of expert coaches, we will create a standardized instrument to describe what actually occurs during coaching sessions. This will allow comparisons between different styles of coaching as well as a description of the factors that all forms of coaching share.

This research project will result in a list of items that observers can use to rate coaching sessions on a scale from "highly uncharacteristic" to "highly characteristic" for each item.

There have been various attempts to create similar instruments to describe the process of psychotherapy, such as the Psychotherapy Process Q-Sort. To our knowledge, this will be the first instrument designed to categorize the coaching process.