To achieve fast results, many popular executive coaches model their interventions after those used by sports coaches, employing techniques that reject out of hand any introspective process that can take time and cause “paralysis by analysis.” The idea that an executive coach can help employees improve performance quickly is a great selling point to CEOs, who put the bottom line first. Yet that approach tends to gloss over any unconscious conflict the employee might have. This can have disastrous consequences for the company in the long term and can exacerbate the psychological damage to the person targeted for help.
In 1923, Griffith developed and taught the first sports psychology university courses (“Psychology and Athletics”) at the University of Illinois, and he came to be known as “The Father of Sports Psychology” in the United States, as a result of his pioneering achievements in that area. However, he is also known as “The prophet without disciples”, since none of his students continued with sports psychology, and his work started to receive attention only from the 1960s [13]
