Abstract
This book is a “how-to text,” how a coach can help coachees develop new horizons, capabilities, skills, practices, habits, and opportunities. The objectives of the book is to empower coach to be more effective in helping people foster development and achieve their goals, leaving the person being coached more competent in activity, more able to contribute, find meaning in what they do and feel more fulfilled. The book provides a structure for practice so that coach can become proficient. Throughout the book, the author states that the three key products of coaching are long-term excellent performance, self-correction, and self-generation. This makes it easy to keep track of the main objectives of the book from page to page.
Coaching as an industry is thriving with an estimated 30,578 professional coach practitioners in 138 countries (International Coach Federation, 2018). Coaching as a branch of knowledge is important in the world of commerce today for three reasons. First, the need for innovation is endless. Second, traditional relationship between organization and employee has changed because of reengineering, downsizing, and so on. Third, organizations by necessity have to work in multicultural environments.
The author is also the founder of two training schools that offer a wide variety of programs on coaching, coach training services, and leadership. The author has trained thousands of coaches and worked with hundreds of clients.
This book is an excellent read for leaders, managers, supervisors, teachers, parents, and friends supporting each other to understand how they can contribute to someone’s competence in a respectful, dignified, and effective way. The author highlights that this book is meant for beginners who need structure and instruction as preliminary steps to build their competence, and then throw away as they design their own steps because one can never become a great coach by following a step-by-step procedure given by someone else.
The content of the book includes theories, concepts, principles, models, ideas, and application to practice. For example, basic concepts about language, observation, and assessment are discussed. The theories discussed are a blending of academic rigor and practical experience. The content draws upon a wide range of resources and involves the study of many disciplines from philosophy, sociology, psychology to somatic, cognatic science, integral studies, spirituality, and development theory.
A major part of the book is devoted to the flow of coaching (Chapter 3–9), which involves five major stages: establish relationship, opening, assessment, enrollment, and coaching. The author use a business coaching case study, involving a coachee named Bob, throughout the book to illustrate the coaching process. The author was engaged by Bob’s company as coach to Bob over a 6-month period.
One chapter is devoted especially for the speech act theory, based on the rationale that human’s attention and energy become focused as they respond to requests they hear and possibilities they see. Coaching is seen as a blending of different types of conversations such as promises, requests, offers, assertions, assessments, and declarations. The author explains clearly the kind of speaking that moves things forward, resolves conflict, builds alliances, and opens up opportunities.
As ending, the book also provides useful assessments about the condition for change and effectiveness of coaching. This include client’s self-assessment, general well-being, relationship, as well as sources of stress or renewal.
The author emphasizes that understanding of human being is the basis of coaching. “Until we can reveal to ourselves what we understand human beings to be, we cannot coach them. Without this understanding, it’s as if we are attempting to build a structure with materials that we aren’t familiar with.” Understanding about human beings is discussed philosophically in five notions: relating, language, mood, human body, and death.
Another impressive idea the author also highlights is that an opening is necessary for coaching. Timing is important for opening especially when client is experiencing a difficulty. Coach needs to stay alert for times when someone expresses his or her frustration, disappointment, or need for help in getting something important done.
The author also gives a lot of good examples on the importance of conversation for action. The basis is a lot of emotional turmoil within companies and families is around unwillingness of requesters to be satisfied. Human attention and energy become focused as they respond to requests they hear and possibilities they see.
The key strength of the book is there are researcher references available at the end of every chapter for readers to explore and deepen their knowledge and understanding. Reading the book is a pleasurable experience as the writing style is filled with sound articulation, clarity, and candor. The multidimensional context also makes reading interesting and stimulates further thinking and exploration.
This book is written from a practitioner perspective, not from the theoretical and empirical research angle. Evidence and research-based approaches to coach education are essential for the development of the coaching industry toward professionalization. This will also ensure that coaching practice is grounded in a common knowledge base that rests on coherent theoretical frameworks and a solid scientific foundation (Grant, 2008).
The concept of coaching in the book is general. However, coaching has to be distinguished from mentoring and therapy although they may use the same blend of psychological techniques. Coaching is more short-term, focuses on specific developmental issues, and is a paid-for-professional activity. Mentoring takes a broader view of the person and voluntary. Therapy focuses on people with some form of dysfunction or disorder (Blackman et al. 2016).
The explanation in the book does not differentiate whether the coaching is initiated and employed by client or prompted and hired by the client’s organization. An important question is whether there are differences between these two forms of engagement in terms of scope and scale of coaching services provided, that is, impact and effectiveness.
The risks of intense growth of coaching industry include drop in quality of services, lack of transparency, and chaos (Segers et al. 2011). The emerging empirical literature offers an opportunity to assess the many claims made for and about business coaching. The content of the book can be extended further to give an understanding the state of the coaching industry and who can act as coach. Coaching is an unregulated profession with no licensing requirement and anyone can label himself or herself as an executive coach. Empirical studies find that the important credentials for good coach include graduate training in psychology, business experience and understanding, established reputation as coach, listening skills, and professionalism (i.e. intelligence, integrity/honesty, confidentiality, objectivity) (Feldman and Lankau, 2005).
Lastly, the effectiveness of coaching is an important outcome and the level of evaluation can be widened to include affective reaction, learning, behavior changes, and organization results. It would be good to address if coaching has a tangible effect on personal and organization effectiveness using multisource data rather than relying exclusively on self-reports by clients. As coaching education has evolved, other areas such as adult development and learning, organizations, and systems can be explored to further enhance the content.
