Seite - 40 - in Coaching im digitalen Wandel

40 Digital coaching: A conceptually distinct form of coaching? Stella Kanatouri The value of coaching as an approach to human development is increasingly acknowledged. Using technology to facilitate the coaching dialogue and to support coaching processes adds flexibility and allows to expand the reach to wider audiences. Whilst the practicality of digital coaching is obvious and indisputable, understanding the role of coaching media and the experiences they can produce may be useful for this form of coaching practice to be optimised. This paper draws on media theories and adopts a phenomeno- logical view of media to reflect on what happens when the coaching process, or aspects of it, is digitalised. It seeks to explore the connection between media capabilities and coaching skills in a digital coaching context, and it approaches digital coaching as a distinct concept of traditional, presence coaching. As the demand for coaching has been growing over the years (Bresser, 2013; ICF & PwC, 2012, 2016), the addition of technology in coaching practice enables us to expand coaching offerings on more layers of the organisation and on larger portions of the population, allowing scalable coaching, independent of geog- raphy and time zones. Beyond its undeniable practicality however, digitalising the coaching process or aspects of it raises important questions: What changes when the coaching process takes place remotely in a virtual space? How might new media shape the coaching experience? Given the diversity of technological coaching media and their evolving capabilities, the answer to these questions is complex. Different media may produce different experiences. Nevertheless, such questions need to be addressed if we are to seamlessly integrate new media in the coaching process and to optimise mediated coaching practice. Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY-NC-ND 4.0