Here’s a selection of books I regularly recommend to managers who want to develop their skills as coaches for their teams.
Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.
He goes on to show how the real value of coaching skills such as listening, asking questions and giving nonjudgmental feedback is in enabling coachees to develop their awareness and responsibility through decisions and action. The book also introduces the GROW model, which is now a widely adopted framework for coaching in business.
This book offers a fascinating account of his experience of coaching tennis players to overcome the mental obstacles to success. He describes human beings as divided into ‘Self 1’ (rational, controlling, judging) and Self 2 (spontaneous, present, instinctive). Left to its own devices, Self 2 can learn easily and reach peak performance – but Self 1 typically interferes, making the player tense up by trying too hard and judging his/her own performance instead of focusing on the ball.
What has this got to do with creative work? Well Gallwey wrote the book for tennis pros, not creative pros – but anyone who has experienced the ‘almost automatic, effortless’ state of creative flow should have no problem relating to Gallwey’s Self 2 and adopting some of the principles of the Inner Game approach.
In Gallwey’s later book The Inner Game of Work
If you feel overwhelmed by managerial responsibility and feel as though nothing will get done unless you supervise it personally, I highly recommend this book – I’ve lost count of the number of managers who have told me it has removed a huge amount of stress from their lives.
One of several sequels to The One Minute Manager, this excellent book has two main virtues: 1. It’s short – 130 large-type pages. 2. It makes a powerful idea very memorable and easy to apply in practice.
The Monkey is the responsibility for the next move on any given task. As a manager, you are accountable for everything, so it’s only human nature to want to take responsibility for everything people are doing in your team – i.e. to ‘pick up the Monkey’ and start making decisions for them and telling them what to do. Unfortunately you are not superhuman, so you can’t do everything. You have plenty of Monkeys of your own, without trying to deal with other people’s. And when you take away people’s capacity to decide for themselves, you’re likely to demotivate them and/or train them to depend on you for everything.
This book does an excellent job of showing how you can reverse this cycle, empower your people by delegating tasks and decisions – and ‘insure’ yourself and your team members against failure.
Unfortunately, most of the ‘obvious’ answers to the question – ‘because they’re difficult, lazy, stupid, prima donnas’ etc. – actually make your problem worse. After all, if someone is plain lazy, what can you do about it? Probably not much.
Fortunately, as Fournies points out, to be an effective manager you don’t need to rebuild their personality – just influence their behaviour. To help you do this, he gives 16 answers to the question that actually give you practical options for solving the problem.
Some of my favourites are ‘They think they are doing it, ‘They think their way is better’ and ‘They are rewarded for not doing it’. This is fairly typical of Fournies’ direct and prescriptive writing style, which some people find annoying. Personally I find it entertaining, and he’s got the ideas to back it up. This is a book that has saved me a lot of frustration – hopefully it will do the same for you.
It begins with a survey of the origins of coaching – in sports, psychotherapy, academia and the corporate world, and situates coaching as an essential catalyst for the learning organisation, which in turn is key to success in a knowledge economy.
The book then introduces the main styles, models and theories of coaching, before giving practical advice on three core coaching skills – giving feedback, observational listening and asking questions.
I particularly like the final sections of the book, where Parsloe and Wray emphasise the value of simplicity in coaching: ‘Success comes from doing simple things consistently’. Simple things like ‘make sure you meet’, ‘keep it brief’ and ‘ask don’t tell’.
Buckingham and Coffman did this via their research with Gallup, which focused on the questions ‘What do the most talented employees need from the workplace?‘ and ‘How do the world’s greatest managers find, focus and keep talented employees?‘. This led them to for key principles for facilitating outstanding performance:
