ICF Members and Credential-holders live and work in more than 140 countries and territories. ICF is a vibrant global community committed to the shared vision of making coaching an integral part of a thriving society. Our mission is to lead the global advancement of coaching. To do this, we must reflect on our blind spots and be aware of opportunities for improvement. We cannot ignore the challenges that many coaches and coaching clients face due to systemic problems in their communities.
As members of the ICF community, we ascribe to the core values of integrity, excellence, collaboration and respect. The foundation of these values is a shared commitment to diversity, inclusion, belonging and justice.
We will place diversity, inclusion, belonging and justice at the forefront of every decision we make within our Association. As we continue the journey toward our vision, we will recommit ourselves to valuing the unique talents, insights and experiences that every coach and client brings to the world.
Agreed by the ICF, July 2020 Signed statement here.
As an ICF Professional, I:
Ethical Interpretive Statement to Standard 25
Discrimination by ICF Professionals is unacceptable and is unethical and is a breach of this standard. Discrimination is prejudiced and biased behaviors of individual ICF professionals including those that are:
Based in, but not limited to, race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, spiritual practice, class, ethnicity, rank and status, ability, age, nationality, and other social group identities
Expressed with behaviors that can be conscious and unconscious, intentional and unintentional, and overt and covert
Demonstrated by providing unearned rewards and benefits to clients with dominant-group identities and penalize and harm clients with marginalized-group identities in ways that might have fierce outcomes which are life-diminishing, life-deadening, life-threatening, and life-ending
Explained and justified on legal, constitutional, scientific, cultural, religious, statistical, values, beliefs, profitability, medical, psychological, philosophical, emotional, physical, sexual, authority, superiority, systemic, and other “reasonable discrimination” grounds.
The attitude of ICF Professionals is to be neutral. It is about the client’s perception and assessments and options for action and not about the coach’s values and views. It is not the task of the ICF Professionals to transfer their value systems to clients or their environment. However, nobody is free of prejudices. The ICF Professionals must therefore know their own reservations and work on themselves through self-reflection. If they find that reservations are so strong that they affect the quality of the coaching process, it is not right to start the process. If the assessment is made during an ongoing process, the ICF Professional should take the case to supervision and if necessary, end the relationship.
An ICF Professional may turn down offering service to a client for personal reasons, such as value conflicts. However, these reasons should not be based on local legal definitions of discrimination. This standard also calls on the ICF Professional to consciously ensure that this Code will be followed unless it is superseded by local law or statute or organizational policy. ICF Professionals need to know the local laws regarding which people groups are legally protected and which people groups are often in danger of being discriminated.
ICF Professionals must act with awareness of the cultural filters which affect their views of the world, respect cultures different from their own, and be sensitive to cross-cultural and multicultural differences and their implications. Discrimination experienced by coaching clients from ICF Professionals and others, needs to be addressed in the coaching process.
© 2020, International Coaching Federation