Leadership Coaching – Working with leaders to develop elite performance: edited by Jonathan Passmore
The book is a collection of writings by individual contributors.
The editor has asked each contributor to write about a leadership model; review the research that supports that model; and then set out how that model can be used by a coach working with a coaching client.
As such, it is a good one-stop shop for coaches wanting a quick introduction to some leadership models with which they might be less familiar.
Key themes and ideas
As the book is a collection of different models, offered by a range of experienced contributors, there are no unifying themes. The individual contributions that I found most useful were those by Jonathan Perks and Professor Reuven Bar-On (Coaching for Emotionally-Intelligent Leadership); Stuart Duff and Ceri Roderick (The Leadership Radar); Declan Woods (Strategy coaching); and Katharine Tulpa and Georgina Woudstra (Coaching global top teams).
Useful gems
- The chapter on Emotionally-Intelligent Leadership sets out a worksheet based on the Bar-On model of emotional intelligence, with clear and simple definitions of each of the factors that constitute emotional intelligence in this model. This would be a useful basis for a conversation with a coaching client
- The chapter on the Leadership Radar suggests that the leadership role is made up of three areas of focus, or radar “screens” - task leadership, people leadership and thought leadership. This categorisation is supported by research into how leaders actually spend their time, which broadly divides the activities that leaders have reported into delivering results, managing people and providing future direction. The authors then go on to look at how coaches can work with the Leadership Radar to help a client to identify where he/she is actually spending time; what implications this has for his/her ability to keep an active eye on all three “screens” of the leadership radar; and what practical actions he/she might take for changing the balance of where he/she invests leadership time. The radar is a very simple and readily accessible categorisation of leadership activity and I expect that it will have significant face value with coaching clients
- The chapter on strategy coaching introduces a number of well-known writers at a necessarily superficial level. However, coaches who are less familiar with some of the key writers on organisation strategy will find this chapter useful as a stepping off point from which to undertake further research. I particularly like the inclusion of Gary Hamel’s point that an organisation’s strategy-making process, associated as it tends to be with the top team, often leaves out three critical groups of people – the young (who are closer to emerging trends), those remote from HQ (who have less access to central resources and – in my experience – whose day-to-day reality of what it is like to work in the organisation is very different to that of the senior strategy makers), and new joiners (who are still able to see things afresh and to ask naïve and probing questions). This is really useful for senior coaching clients who have responsibility for leading strategy creation and change management initiatives
- In the chapter on coaching global teams there is a pair of invaluable lists (probably my favourite things in this entire book) of what top global executive teams do and do not want in a coaching programme that is designed to work with the whole top team. These two lists ring very true for me! I also liked the very pragmatic step-by-step guide to working with a top team as part of a whole team coaching programme.
Why I rate this book
- It has a lot of different models under one roof. Some of them will be very familiar, some less so. I doubt that any coach will find a revelation in every chapter, but there will probably be a couple of different useful finds in the book as a whole for most coaches nonetheless
- The summary of relevant research for each model is useful as well as highlighting further avenues the coach can explore if a particular model sparks his/her interest
- I didn’t find the case studies particularly useful as many of them suffered from being a bit short and bland. However, descriptions of how to work with each model are on the whole refreshingly simple and practical.
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Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Kogan Page (3 Feb 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0749455322
ISBN-13: 978-0749455323
Product Dimensions: 15.9 x 2.5 x 23.7 cm
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