Title: Essential Business Coaching
Authors Averil Leimon, Francois Moscovici, Gladeana McMahon
Price £14.99
From Routledge
Contact www.routledgementalhealth.co.uk
ISBN 1-58391-883-3
To coach or not to coach, that is the issue for many organisations unsure about the value of the discipline or ‘black art’, depending on your viewpoint. Top executive coaches can cost a pretty penny, and if you’re faced with finding the budget for them, you will need the comfort of sound justification to let you sleep easy at night.
If you’re in that position then you should find this book useful. Its strength is that it looks at how organisations buy coaching and for whom. There are plenty of client case studies from major companies, which talk about what coaching did for them.
These are backed up by a separate set of interviews with the clients or coachees who share their words of wisdom about the benefits of coaching.
The subtleties of the psychological processes are translated into a palatable form for the non-specialist reader and I’d say this is an asset to the book. Managers or beginners on the coaching scene would also probably appreciate the tabular approach to responsibilities that sets out matters such as goals, confiden-tiality and respect for the coach, client and organisation.
This is not one of the big thinking books on coaching, like Flaherty’s soon to be seen as seminal work (reviewed elsewhere) but it is a no-nonsense, clear thinking manual for the novice or the jaded. That’s it’s strength.
Useful? 3 ticks out of five
Well-written? 3 ticks out of five
Value for money? 3 ticks out of five
