|
David Peterson has been a coach since the 1980s. In fact, he began writing his Ph.D. dissertation on coaching in 1987 and attended the Coaching Caucus, hosted by the precursor organization to the Professional and Personal Coaches Association (PPCA) in San Francisco, California in March 1994.
With Mary Dee Hicks, Peterson developed a coaching paradigm and built an approach around it. In his words, “we drew from training, therapy, behavior modification, developmental psychology, social psychology, sports psychology – any domain we could think of. We made a road map of what we know about individual behavior, change, and learning. Leader as Coach and Development First were written from that paradigm.”
In 1981, Personnel Decisions International (PDI), the company which employed Peterson, “became the first management consulting firm to offer a coaching program that was both structured and personally tailored to accelerate individual change and development” (Peterson, 1996, p. 78).
Actively involved with the APA Division 13 Society of Consulting Psychology, and Division 14 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), Peterson talks in his books about building trust and understanding, so people want to work with you. He identifies classical behavioral techniques of modeling, feedback, self-management, rewards and reinforcers, shaping and successive approximation, and behavioral practice as useful in coaching.
In September 2008, Peterson was among the 40 invited coaching researchers to the first International Coaching Research Forum, co-sponsored by The Harnisch Foundation and Harvard-McLean Hospital.
How has David Peterson influenced you as a coach?
Vikki Brock, Ph.D., MCC
Director, History and Archive Division
Tweet This
Email to a friend
