Book Review: Sraban Mukherjee,Corporate Coaching: The Essential Guide

Coaching and mentoring are being used by both professionals and general public as a pair word. While mentoring is popular in many Indian organizations, coaching as a tool for an organization’s health and well-being is relatively a new concept. The book in review starts with a brief overview of what coaching is and what it is not. Coaching though a commonly used concept is also frequently misrepresented. Coaching, mentoring, training and counselling are all human resource (HR) tools and are often used synonymously and interchangeably. From the applicability point of view, each has its own uniqueness. The author in the introductory chapter brings about the difference very clearly. The next five chapters are devoted to how coaching actually works, various strategies and models adopted for coaching activities. Under the broad umbrella ‘Corporate coaching’, the author chooses to have a separate chapter each on behavioural coaching, performance coaching, leadership coaching and coaching for talent management.

It is an established fact that there are no magic mantras for acquiring positive and long-lasting behavioural changes for any individual. Coaching interventions are often time-consuming and at times may appear as a frustrating and a futile exercise. The force field analysis and the strategies that a coach uses to facilitate and enthuse during a coachee’s behavioural change journey have been elaborately dealt in chapter 3. The author rightly emphasizes the need to celebrate the achievements, however big or small in the coaching engagement.

Attracting right talent, recruiting and retaining them have always remained a major challenge for HR team in most organizations. A full chapter is devoted to coaching needs of the potential high performers where the focus is on the transactional and transformation challenges that a coachee encounters as he/she builds on leadership competencies. Developing and grooming internal coaches is a long-term investment. The process itself can act as a retention strategy. Chapters 6 and 7 discuss in detail the advantages and issues involved in the process.

Corporate coaching interventions are expensive activities and organizations investing in these activities would certainly like to know the rewards of their efforts. The last three chapters take us through some of the popular tools and inventories used in coaching. The pitfalls of blindly following a standardized tool, the degree of customization needed to gain meaningful insights into the developmental need of individual and organizations and the challenges in measuring effectiveness have been adequately highlighted.

Overall, this small 254-page book acts as a ready reference for practitioners. The simplicity with which the author weaves the story makes it highly readable. The short case scenarios that complement the chapters make the reader relate easily to real-life challenges he/she faces at workplace. Annexures often do not draw the required attention as they are normally positioned at the end. Positioning them at the end of a chapter enables the reader to connect better with the concept discussed in the chapter. Though the book is primarily targeted for top management and other decision-makers, it is equally useful for the junior and middles as a self-help guide.