Action Coaching: How to Leverage Individual Perfor Performance for Company Success: How to Leverage Individual Performance for Company Success: 43 (Jossey-Bass Leadership Series) Hardcover – Import, 1 July 1999

I have more than thirty years of successful experience using models of leadership, management, and supervision in training classrooms, and I have passionately absorbed the ideas and content in approximately 400 leadership-related texts during the last 20 years.Action Coaching is to coaching effectiveness what The Supervisor's Survival Kit by Elwood Chapman is to first-line/project lead effectiveness. I've used and advocated the latter book for thirty five years.Action Coaching, and I haven't finished it yet, "begins with the end in mind". The authors define Action Coaching as "a process that fosters self-awareness, resulting in the motivation and the guidance to change in ways that meet organizational needs." The approach is directly linked to organizational goals and an action plan (both of which are dynamic). There are processes to involve the executive's boss in the process. (Good luck, you say, with getting executives to devote time to such a process!?) Feedback on progress toward important goals and leadership development is valued and seen by the CEO.The book is loaded with tips, tools, exhibits, questions, processes, and ideas for helping a manager become a more effective coach, even without the support of the organization. The authors of Action Coaching offer forty helpful, easy- to- understand exhibits that: serve as diagnostic tools, offer suggestions on handling difficult situations, provide checklists of to-do's, feature evaluation and role-playing tools, etc.Wouldn't it be helpful to have a resource where the processes and approach had been successfully field tested in corporations with real executives, with real CEO's who had extremely important strategic challenges ahead of them, and where traditionalist leadership paradigms and behaviors made it impossible to accomplish the articulated goals? That is precisely what these authors did in developing and refining their processes and approaches?What the Action Coaching is not is a lock-step guide, prescribing every important step and nuance along the way toward helping executive leaders grow. It is a particularly interesting, believable, and seemingly sound approach based on the experiences that they have had with major organizations. The process with individuals and with organizations is one that enables both to help themselves, becoming less dependent upon the external coaches, while building coaching expertise internally.This is the best book of coaching I have ever read, and I've read quite a few.Bill ParkerBill Parker AssociatesA Leadership Development ResourceRichmond, VAPS This is the fourth book I have read by David Dotlich and his colleagues within the past six months. I'd recommend every one of them: Action Learning (1998), Unnatural Leadership (2004), and Leadership Passages (2004). Put together, the series represents a longitudinal action-research case study. Readers of Unnatural Leadership can appreciate the need for the ten new leadership instincts when they remember that they grew from strategic goals and leadership development experiences with corporate clients/partners.

Action doesn't seem like it should be part of the title. Managers are looking for simple not 8 steps.

This book has great insights and tips on different coaching styles. I loved that it is usable in the real working world.