How has the ICS grown over the last 25 years? MF's Matt Driver reflects on its evolution, participant experiences and what the future may hold.​

Workplace coaching really began to take off in the mid 1990s.  Several members of the Management Futures team had already been coaching for some time and, as the profession started to grow, it seemed the logical thing to launch a development programme for new coaches.  

So it was that in the year 2000, the Intensive Coaching Skills (ICS) programme was born.

We owe a lot to the early pioneering thinking of Jenny Rogers and Phil Hayes who really got the programme off the ground.
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Early on, most programmes began with a fairly robust conversation about what coaching was, and the differences between coaching and counselling, and other areas like mentoring. Many participants found the non-directive approach challenging.

Over the years, as coaching became much more widely established, its essentially non-directive approach became more widely accepted.  Today, most ICS participants already have a good sense of what coaching is. Many have had coaching themselves and/or experienced some introduction to the topic.

The programme today is recognisable to those who attended 25 years ago, but it has been updated to reflect current practice. Today, for example, much coaching is done remotely on platforms like Zoom and Teams and sessions tend to be rather shorter. There is now substantial academic research into the field of coaching which suggests that it’s essentially outcome-focused approach can support many challenges that managers, professionals and organisations face.  For example, coaching has been shown to support employee retention, to enhance self-efficacy and ultimately to support high performance.

Our current team of tutors on ICS are an eclectic mix; combining extensive coaching, leadership and organisational experience: we have Matt, the linguist; Julia, a musician; Jab from the hospitality world; Dee, a social worker and Naomi, a GP.  It seems coaches can come from any field, although they are all passionate believers in the coaching approach and they have all been professional coaches for years, some for decades. In addition, they have all participated in the ICS programme and completed professional qualifications.

ICS participants today consistently tell us that this is one of the best learning programmes they have ever invested their time in. Many of them use words like “transformational“ to describe their experience. You can read some case studies in our online brochure but these experiences are by no means unusual.

Many of our participants now continue on to qualifications, and Management Futures provides support to them in achieving these qualifications but, above all, we offer support in becoming the best coaches they can be.

If you’ve read any MF LinkedIn posts this year, you will have seen the discussion of niche coaching, and this is something we refer to during ICS. We have coaches who specialise in many areas - like career coaching, personal impact coaching, supporting inclusion and diversity initiatives, health coaching, and many other areas. Building on this, we are launching our Coaching + initiative in the very near future.  This will offer clients a package of regular coaching plus some practical learning in some of these key skills areas.  

Looking to the future, we are aiming to provide additional support and learning for qualified and experienced coaches.  This will be in the form of short, topic-based workshops: watch this space for new offers.

From time to time, we hear from someone who did ICS years before who is wondering about re-doing the programme.   So, in our silver anniversary year, we are offering all ICS alumni a 50% discount on the regular fee. Places are limited, so get in touch if you’re interested.

We’re not sure what form a future ICS will have and the advent of AI will almost certainly evolve it!  We are keen to explore new areas of concern or learning – questions of equity and accessibility of coaching for example, and responding to increasing understanding of neurodiversity at work.  Above all, we will continue to base what we cover on high quality research and the thousands of hours of coaching practice gained by our tutor team.

Our aim now, as ever, is to build a coaching community which supports the continuing and collaborative professionalisation of coaching and contributes to a brighter tomorrow for individuals, teams and organisations.

Meanwhile, we continue to run our core ICS programme several times a year. We also run in-house ICS programmes with specific clients. And our monthly Learning Labs continue.

If you'd like to find out more, please contact us: we’d be happy to talk.