Coaching for Professional Development: Using literature to support success

Coaching has emerged as one of the most significant aids in developing managers and executives in the professional world. Yet there is a degree of dissatisfaction with performance coaching models and a desire to connect more with creativity and the imagination. In Coaching for Professional Development: Using Literature to Support Success, Christine A. Eastman suggests that literary works have a part to play in bringing about a change in coaching culture. Using a series of examples from key literary texts, she argues that literature can help coaches enhance their skills, find solutions to workplace problems, and better articulate their own ideas through innovation and imagination.

Eastman argues for literature as a coaching tool, detailing how using stories of loss, failure, alienation and human suffering in a coaching dialogue bring positive results to organisational coaching. Coaching for Professional Development considers how reading fiction helps us to imagine lives outside our own, and how this sensitivity of language brings out the unconscious within us and others. Eastman discusses how she guided her students to embrace literature as a positive influence on their coaching practice through literary texts. Chapter 1 begins by exploring how reading Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener allowed her students to understand the importance of metaphor in their own coaching, with Chapter 2 illuminating how Cather’s Neighbor Rosicky addresses the role of emotion. After this, Eastman considers how John Cheever’s multi-layered story The Swimmer provides rich stimulus for coaching students in understanding failure, how Miller’s Death of a Salesman shows how our family relationships are reflected in our office dynamics, and how the reactions of her students engaging with Lampedusa’s The Leopard are more effective than the traditional coaching tool, Personalisis, in revealing their personality. She finally looks at Shakespeare’s The Tempest for exploring themes of power and manipulation in a coaching context. By applying coaching models to fictional scenarios, Eastman demonstrates that coaches, HR professionals and students can successfully extend the boundaries of their coaching, strengthen their interventions and enhance their understanding of theory.

Coaching for Professional Development: Using Literature to Support Success is a unique approach to coaching with engaging case studies throughout that brings together higher education and industry. It will be key reading for coaches in practice and in training who wish to enhance creativity in their work, advisors and teachers on coaching courses, and HR and L&D professionals working in organizations seeking to implement a coaching culture.

Dr Christine A. Eastman is a senior lecturer at the Institute for Work Based Learning, Middlesex University, UK and winner of the Universities Association for Lifelong Learning trophy in recognition of teaching excellence. She has worked with national and international businesses such as the Halifax, Toshiba, SAP, SONY and Nationwide (USA).