Coaching for Performance : A Practical Guide to Growing Your Own Skills

This handbook helps readers learn the skills and the art of good coaching, and realize its enormous value in unlocking people's potential to maximize their own performance. Coaching is now recognized as more positive, effective and empowering than instruction in business. Now that coaching is both the tool and essence of company culture change, even the most successful managers are seeking to adapt their style accordingly. As John Whitmore writes, "Coaching is not merely a technique to be wheeled out and rigidly applied in certain prescribed circumstances. It is a way of managing, a way of treating people, a way of thinking, a way of being." Adopted by many of the world's major corporations, this easy-to-use title argues for using questions, rather than instructions and commands, and following the GROW sequence - goals, reality, options, will - to generate prompt action and peak performance. It explores the dynamics of team development, and it positions coaching as the essential team leadership skill. This edition has detailed advice on avoiding a "blame culture", and fostering empowered performance. It contains extensive examples of effective questions for general awareness and responsibility - questions which compel the coachee to think and demand high-resolution focus, are descriptive not judgemental, and provide the coach with a feedback loop. There are new sections on motivation and building self-esteem through coaching, feedback and feedforward, and a new chapter on learning and enjoyment - coaching works directly on the senses, so coaching by its very nature enhances enjoyment.