By Andrew R. McIlvaine

CB Bowman believes there's a problem in the world of executive coaching. Bowman, an executive coach herself, says the field is overrun with individuals who are ineffective as coaches because they lack the necessary understanding of how business works.

"I was speaking with the head of HR for a major consumer-goods business, and he told me he had to go through 23 executive coaches before he found one who understood business," says Bowman, owner of Plainfield, N.J.-based Executive Leadership.

"I started querying other people, and they agreed that it's very hard to find good executive coaches with actual bottom-line business experience," she says. "They end up having to teach the coaches about business before they can actually get down to the business of coaching!"

"A coach who's also an executive could suffer from the same blind spots as the client," says Andrew Neitlich, founder of the Center for Executive Coaching in Sarasota. "There's an abundance of people who can make good analytic decisions. But there's a shortage of people who understand how to engage and relate to other people."

The question of whether business experience is necessary depends on the definition of executive coaching, says Karl Corbett, managing partner at Cincinnati-based Sherpa Coaching, which trains and certifies executive coaches.

Corbett says executive coaching consists of a series of meetings between a business leader and a trained facilitator that results in positive changes to the leader's behavior."If you're talking about providing specific training, then yes, experience in a particular business is necessary. But if you define coaching as changing business behavior, than anyone who develops, enhances and refines the skills of coaching can coach anyone," Corbett says. "There are executive coaches who can go into a hospitality or manufacturing firm and change the behavior of top executives without knowing a thing about those industries."

"If you work with an executive coach, you go through a series of diagnostic exercises, journaling and homework assignments to help the client discover, on their own, whether their business behaviors are hurting them, and then the facilitator works with them to change those behaviors," Corbett concluded.