coachbook: A Guide to Organizational Coaching Strategies and Practices

This book addresses itself to the executive corporate Coaches who support leaders on their journey of achievement. Coachbook provides the most comprehensive survey for the practicing organizational coach and those who coordinate coaching programs within organizations. It updates and contextualizes the thinking of the experienced coach, and provides a well-researched foundation for the newer coach. The field called organizational coaching emerged at the same time (during the 1990s) as many organizational analysts began identifying and describing a postmodern world of complexity, unpredictability and turbulence. In this world, leaders (and their coaches) find the edges of their personal and professional abilities constantly challenged by flatter, networked, global workforces and vertiginously changing business landscapes. Equipped with personal leadership and business experience as well as scholarly backgrounds in organizational psychology, philosophy, linguistics and executive development, Bergquist and Mura have 50 combined years of working as coaches throughout the world. Interweaving theory and practice, they have constructed a framework of masterful organizational coaching strategies that address the most frequent and delicate coaching scenarios. In Chapter One, the authors describe multiple ways in which an appreciative approach may be applied as a powerful coaching strategy that not only doesn't dull the results-focus of the coaching but actually maximizes its chances of success. They then turn in Chapter Two to the sophisticated interpersonal communication tools needed by anyone who wishes to provide effective organizational coaching. In Chapter Three, Bergquist and Mura differentiate between three clusters of coaching models and offer a comprehensive taxonomy of organizational coaching that provides an invaluable map for the professional coach. The authors focus in detail on each of these three coaching clusters in the following three chapters of Coachbook: Specifically, in Chapter Four they describe Behavioral coaching, the processes by which coaches help leaders refine or transform their one-on-one as well as team interactions. Decisional coaching focuses on dealing with the choices and dilemmas facing leaders in modern working life; it is described in Chapter Five. Chapter Six concerns the cluster of models that relate to Aspirational Coaching as it addresses more values and purpose based coaching issues. The last section of the book includes over 30 ready-to-use Coaching Resources - tools that have been carefully selected and have repeatedly proven useful and appropriate in a vast variety of challenging coaching engagements. The authors expect to interact with their readers in order to improve and expand this collection in the future.…