Customer Reviews

Coaching People: Expert Solutions to Everyday Challenges (Pocket Mentor)

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Coaching employees is one of those things that is more easily said than done. And it's far too easy to mistake managing with coaching. I found Harvard Business School Press' Pocket Mentor series book Coaching People: Expert Solutions to Everyday Challenges an excellent concise guide for successfully coaching people with optimal results.

Contents: What Is Coaching? How to Know When to Coach; How to Develop Coaching Skills; How to Manage a Coaching Session; How to Customize Your Coaching; Tools for Coaching People; Test Yourself; To Learn More; Sources for Coaching People; Notes

In a mere 69 pages, the writers pack in more useful information than books three and four times the size. Everything is geared towards practicality and immediate application, so the book delivers value from the very first pages. The distinction between what is, and what isn't, coaching is a perfect beginning, and sets the stage for what follows. Coaching is not behavior correction or task assignment. It's a mutual sharing to help someone reach their goals and improve their effectiveness. The coach doesn't have to know all the answers, but they do need to be willing to listen, share, and work with the coachee to make changes and monitor the results. The book also contains a number of practical worksheets and checklists to gauge the effectiveness of both parties. This may take the form of a checklist to assess your listening skills, or an action plan to outline a plan and follow up on the outcomes.

For the price and size, there's no reason this shouldn't be included as part of someone's package of materials when they are promoted to a position of management. And even if you're not officially management, you may still be an informal leader in your sphere of influence. Working on your personal coaching skills will only help to solidify that role and enhance your effectiveness with others. If you've never given any thought to how you can help others achieve their goals, start here...

The first work place experience for the majority of people was the old command and control style of management. Unfortunately as we move up the managerial ladder, we tend to follow the examples we have been exposed to. What worked a few years back no longer works. With the work population shifting more to knowledge workers, the techniques and tactics which worked in the past are no longer working. To get the most out of today's worker, managers must be more coaches and less drill sergeants. Unfortunately most managers have no training in what coaching is or how to utilize coaching with direct reports.

Coaching People provides a very useful resource for any manager who wants to do a better job of managing their direct reports - helping them learn and develop into better employees and individuals. Coaching will also help the coachees reach their goals.

Coaching People is a book in the Pocket Mentor series published by Harvard Business School Press. The idea behind the Pocket Mentor series is to give the basic information in a short, easy to understand book which can be carried around in your pocket. This book certainly accomplishes that goal. It is short and can be read in about an hour.

The book covers all the basics necessary to allow you to effectively coach any employee or for that matter anyone in your circle who wants coaching. The author starts by defining what coaching is and what it is not. Then there are some very good coaching tips and approaches. One that is highly valuable is to separate what you feel/believe from your actual observations. Far too often we act on feeling and beliefs and not on the reality of what we have observed.

There are chapters on: How to develop coaching skills, How to manage a coaching session and How to customize your coaching. One of the more valuable resources in the list of questions you can use in your coaching and to evaluate your effectiveness.

While the book is short, it is full of great information. For those not schooled in coaching, you will probably need to read the book a couple of times and then write out some specific tips and tools you can use. This is an extremely good resource as an introduction to coaching. Even if you think you are a fairly good coach, I would highly recommend this book. Read it as a refresher course, keep it handy and refer to it often. It is too easy to fall into poor habits. This book will serve as a very useful reminder on the basics of good, effective coaching.

As a manager you can use the concepts in this book to transform yourself from a manager to a leader.

This book came highly recommended by my chief nurse. I found
the book a great tool to use not only at work but at home too.