Business View Oceania l February/March 2023

16 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA VOLUME 5, ISSUE 2 According to Mook, one of the most significant brands in ICF’s Family Organization ecosystem is Professional Coaches. “They have organizing chapters; they provide leadership development and training; and they support community and networking for individuals,” she explains. Credentials and Standards is the brand that oversees and manages the credentialing of individual coach practitioners; Coaching Education oversees and manages the accreditation and approval of coaching education providers. The ICF Foundation is the fourth pillar and a philanthropic arm of the ecosystem. “It offers coaching for the population that otherwise would not have access to coaching,” Mook reports. “And we started offering scholarships for individuals that would become coaches who,otherwise, might not have easy access to coaching education.” The fifth ICF brand is Coaching in Organizations. It provides standards for businesses and organizations that already use coaching within their own cultures in order to further develop their coaching capacities and capabilities. The sixth brand is the Thought Leadership Institute. Its goal is to create and influence the future of coaching by facilitating interaction between innovators, researchers, technologists, venture capitalists, press, and influencers to build and maintain the most comprehensive and highest-quality body of knowledge on the art and practice of coaching. “Coaching is still fairly new and evolving,” Mook relates. “So, there is quite a lot of research being done about coaching and the efficacy of coaching; what coaching does; how coaching supports the development of new ways of working. So, our Thought Leadership Institute looks into the future of coaching and how it can support development in different aspects of society. Our vision calls for coaching to become an integral part of a thriving society where individuals can reach their highest potential by fully living and contributing to the overall good of humanity.” Mook shares that the ICF is “keen on building strategic alliances with other associations and organizations that are like-minded, that share our values, that share our vision. So, we have worked with several other coaching organizations that exist in the marketplace, like the Association of Change Management Professionals” “We recently started working with the World Federation of People Managers Association. So, we are very keen on helping our members expand their views by exposing them to other associations that are bringing value and adding to what ICF offers as an organization, directly. We believe that by those strategic alliances, we can leverage each other and, in the end, offer our clients the best service that they can receive,” Mook notes. “We also spend quite a lot of time focusing on regulatory issues, positioning coaching as a selfregulating profession, while also seriously looking into attempts to regulate it,” Mook adds. “We don’t lobby directly, however, we do have many chapters that are operating at the state level and have very direct and friendly