Executive Coaching for Results: The Definitive Guide to Developing Organizational Leaders
By Brian Underhill, Kimcee McAnally, and John Koriath
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007
As a coach, I was intrigued by the title of this book. My experiences have shown that there are really two types of coaching: 1) the personal and organizational and 2) the business process. This book is about the former.
Executive Coaching does a good job of explaining the inner workings of setting up personal and organizational coaching within a company. It begins with a “what is” approach to coaching and ends with a “how-to” guide to instituting formal coaching processes. Each chapter presents real-life case examples and interviews with coaches and end users (i.e., leaders). The very last chapter offers guides and forms.
While I found Executive Coaching a bit self-serving—the examples are all taken from the authors’ consulting and coaching experiences—it does provide a good guide for large companies looking to justify and develop processes for implementing coaching in their organizations. The authors, who are coaches themselves, are used to working with either human resources or leadership development departments in large companies. This focus is new to me as I work with smaller organizations that do not have such formal HR processes.
I would recommend Executive Coaching to managers who are considering setting up formal coaching processes in their companies. In fact, I am giving the book to one of the organizations with which I work because I think they could benefit from the authors’ insight on leadership development.
Note: Pepperdine University is mentioned in the book in association with Pepperdine alum, Mary Wayne Bush, PhD, who contributed to the research.
