Becoming a professional coach takes years of study, training and dedicated practice in working with coaching clients. Such endeavor prompts the coaching student to not only develop as a person but to devote the time necessary in learning how to maximize coaching results and master the coaching relationship process.

A professional coach who conducts a coaching session with a client is distinct from a manager who initiates a coaching conversation with an employee. Coaching skills are differentiated from coaching competencies by virtue of the context of their respective applications.

Tasked with the responsibility of employee performance appraisal and evaluation, along with the power to hire and fire, it is unreasonable for a manager to expect that direct reports will behave similarly to how a coaching client behaves with an external coach-- a coach who is hired by and works for the organizational coaching client.

The manager-employee relationship does not necessarily engender the same degree of trust nor honor the confidentiality parameters of the professionally established coach-client relationship. It is therefore with careful consideration that managers evaluate how coaching relationships will be defined, introduced and executed within the organizational setting.