Evidence Based Coaching Handbook: Putting Best Practices to Work for Your Clients

The first reference to bring scientifically proven approaches to the practice of personal and executive coaching

The Evidence Based Coaching Handbook applies recent behavioral science research to executive and personal coaching, bringing multiple disciplines to bear on why and how coaching works. A groundbreaking resource for this burgeoning profession, this text presents several different coaching approaches along with the empirical and theoretical knowledge base supporting each.

Recognizing the special character of coaching-that the coaching process is non-medical, collaborative, and highly contextual-the authors lay out an evidence-based coaching model that allows practitioners to integrate their own expertise and the needs of their individual clients with the best current knowledge. This gives coaches the ability to better understand and optimize their own coaching interventions, while not having to conform to a single, rigidly defined practice standard.

The Evidence Based Coaching Handbook looks at various approaches and applies each to the same two case studies, demonstrating through this practical comparison the methods, assumptions, and concepts at work in the different approaches.

The coverage includes:

• An overview: a contextual model of coaching approaches
• Systems and complexity theory
• The behavioral perspective
• The humanistic perspective
• Cognitive coaching
• Adult development theory
• An integrative, goal-focused approach
• Psychoanalytically informed coaching
• Positive psychology
• An adult learning approach
• An adventure-based framework
• Culture and coaching

DIANNE STOBER, PHD, consults, teaches, and conducts research in the areas of coaching and adult learning. She is on the faculty of the Organizational Management/Organizational Development Master's Program at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California. Trained as a clinical psychologist, she maintains an active coaching practice with individuals and organizations, while also consulting on designing and providing executive and managerial development programs. She can be reached at dstober@fielding.edu.

ANTHONY M. GRANT, PHD, is the founder and Director of the world's first university-based Coaching Psychology Unit at the School of Psychology, in the University of Sydney, Australia. His PhD is in coaching psychology and he is a registered psychologist. He is both an academic and a practitioner and his coaching research and practice have been frequently featured in the national and international media.