2025 ICF Core Competencies
by International Coaching Federation · International Coaching Federation (ICF)
The professional standard the International Coaching Federation credentials against: eight competencies across four domains, from ethical practice and coaching agreements through active listening and evoking awareness. Updated September 2025 following a job analysis of 3,000+ coaches. This is the closest thing coaching has to a syllabus, and it is free from the source rather than an SEO blog's paraphrase.
More resources on Executive Coaching
The Effectiveness of Workplace Coaching: A Meta-Analysis of Learning and Performance Outcomes from Coaching
Meta-analysis of coaching delivered by internal and external coaches, reporting an overall effect of 0.36 on organizational outcomes (skill-based 0.28, affective 0.51, results 1.24) and finding internal coaches outperformed external ones.
ICF Code of Ethics
Full text of the ethical standards binding ICF professionals: four core values and twenty-eight standards covering client and sponsor agreements, confidentiality limits, conflicts of interest, AI disclosure, and role transparency when coaching borders consulting or therapy.
What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful
Goldsmith catalogues twenty interpersonal habits that stall already-successful executives — winning too much, adding value, claiming credit — then sets out his behavior-change method: 360-degree feedback, apology, advertising the change, follow-up, and feedforward.
Co-Active Coaching, Fourth Edition: The Proven Framework for Transformative Conversations at Work and in Life
The core text of the Coaches Training Institute lineage, organized around four cornerstones and the contexts of listening, intuition, curiosity and self-management. Includes designed alliances, levels of listening, and annotated transcripts of full coaching conversations. While GROW is a directive, goal-structured method, Co-Active is the relationship-and-presence school, and the listening-levels model here is the best written treatment of the active-listening skill.
Coaching for Performance, 6th edition: The Principles and Practice of Coaching and Leadership
The book that introduced the GROW model (Goal, Reality, Options, Will). This sixth edition, revised by Tiffany Gaskell after Whitmore's death, covers coaching mindset, awareness and responsibility, questioning sequences, and measuring coaching return on investment.