Customer Reviews

The Coaching Organization: A Strategy for Developing Leaders

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Until recently, there were no books on how to implement a coaching style of leadership throughout an organization. Now we have The Coaching Organization. This book provides leaders with a thoughtful strategy for introducing developmental coaching throughout an organization.

The Coaching Organization is straightforward, mixing helpful instruction with actual case studies. The authors also wrote Coaching Manager: Developing Top Talent in Business and have obvious expertise in this area.

After reviewing what developmental coaching is, the authors provide an organization assessment of readiness to implement a coaching culture. The assessment has four sections: 1) the cultural context; 2) the business context; 3) the human resource management context; and 4) organizational experiences with coaching. The last assessment section leads into one of the more innovative (and therefore worth reading) chapters, that of A Strategic Approach to Coaching.

Here the authors go beyond the obvious of "linking coaching to business outcomes" and go deeper to the systemic level. The goal is to create a coaching initiative that promotes a sustainable coaching capacity. Here's where the book pays off: the authors show how some "common sense" initiatives to introduce coaching actually work against the long-term sustainability of coaching. For example, if a coach is assigned to a poorly performing manager, what is communicated is that coaching is for those not doing well, thus, managers resist the coaching initiative so they won't be labeled a "poor performer."

Two other especially useful chapters are about how to build and lead a coaching capacity, and how to raise up qualified Internal coaches. These two processes are at the heart of creating a coaching organization. In my view, it will still take partnership with a coaching provider or trainer to do it, but the chapters serve as a guide for the overall process.

The Coaching Organization is one of only a few books on organization-wide implementation of coaching.

I liked their first book, The Coaching Manager, which discussed the importance and strategy of actually coaching--this new paperback book goes to the next level, taking a more strategic view of coaching. This is helpful because there's little out there that talks about HOW to create a coaching culture. The Coaching Organization admirably fills that gap. They get you to think about taking a strategic approach to development through coaching. Including what it takes to be successful.

The number of examples of real companies showing how they are using the development coaching model is really helpful. I especially liked the Whirlpool case, illustrating how a large, successful company uses coaching as an adjunct to its leadership development efforts and the importance of a senior leadership team dedicated to executive development. The cases used make a very compelling statement supporting the "business case" as to why it makes sense to create a coaching organization.

The authors are well-known academics in addition to being firmly grounded in the real world of business and consulting. They avoid excessive hype and selling their point of view, while making clear the value of their approach to organizations committed to genuine development efforts.