Masterful Coaching Fieldbook: Grow Your Business, Multiply Your Profits, Win the Talent War! - Review - Brief Article - book review

HR Magazine, Sept, 2000

Robert Hargrove

Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer Publishers, 2000, 347 pages,

In this update of his 1995 book Masterful Coaching, Robert Hargrove offers a fieldbook as more of a teaching guide for coaching. The hands-on guide shows readers how to attract and retain top talent, elicit maximum performance from employees and encourage employees to think and work better together. Hargrove is the former director of the Harvard Leadership Project and a consultant to major multinational corporations.

ISBN: 0-7879-4755-5.

In Part I, the author presents a coaching mindset as well as some basic coaching conversation skills. He shows how to establish a business case for coaching, defines coaching and helps readers establish a culture of coaching in their organizations. "Coaching is about continuously expanding your personal (organizational) capacity to perform and learn," Hargrove writes.

Part II lays Out a five-step coaching model, described in detail in chapters six through 10. Step 1 is to develop a personal coaching mission and teachable point of view. This involves thinking about what your personal coaching mandate is--business growth, product innovation, faster cycle time, etc. And then how to communicate that mandate through ideas, stories, metaphors and so on.

Step 2 is to invest in relationships. Do this by finding out employees' goals and aspirations, the author writes. Also, coaches should keep the opportunity for coaching conversations open at all times.

Plan goals collaboratively in Step 3. Coaching is not about telling others what to do but engaging people in a collaborative inquiry about what they need to achieve. There are three questions a coach asks in this step: Where are we now with respect to the mission or performance expectations? What would be a goal that would foster performance and development? What's missing that, if provided, would make a difference?

Step 4 is to forward the action. Often people get overwhelmed about reaching goals, so it is a coach's responsibility to break down larger actions into smaller ones.

Finally, Step S is to provide feedback and learning. A coach should be a keen observer of intended and unintended results. He should ponder how people need to be different, think differently and act differently. Feedback should be framed so that it builds esteem, corrects and stretches. And he should customize experiences that foster accelerated learning and development.

Part III showcases interviews with six coaches who have experience in the areas of product design, project management, marketing, sales and ecoaching. For instance, Tony Jimenez, an internal consultant for Chevron Oil, has a knack for coaching busy executives on the run. Tom Sudman is an expert on e-coaching and offers solutions for global companies on how to assemble teams and work on issues independent of time and distance. And Hubert Saint-Onge shows how to leverage your position as an HR manager to a strategic level by following a model for integrating structural, human and customer capital.