Perspectives on Our Work: A Conversation about Executive Coaching with a Commentary

M O’Neill, W Bergquist International Journal of Coaching in Organizations 2007

This article is based on a conversation that took place between Mary Beth O’Neill and Bill Bergquist in Seattle Washington during September 2004. Both O’Neill and Bergquist had participated on a panel of senior executive coaching professionals that was convened at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the International Coaching Federation (ICF) in Denver Colorado. The proceedings from this panel presentation were published in the fourth issue of IJCO in 2004. Given the success of this first panel, Bergquist, O’Neill and their panel colleagues offered a second panel presentation at the 2004 Annual Meeting of ICF in Quebec City. The panelists also decided to conduct a series of interviews, in pairs or trios, that would enable them to further extend the rich dialogue that took place during the two panel presentations. Each of these interviews was recorded and transcripts were prepared. An abridged version of the two other interviews [was] published in the two remaining issues of the IJCO in 2005 (along with proceedings from the Quebec City panel). In their joint interview, O’Neill and Bergquist talk about the nature of executive coaching, their own unique strategies for serving coaching clients, the relationship between organizational coaching and consulting, and the ways in which coaches should work with the problems that a client identifies.