PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

Motivation: Toward a Better Way

Every so often—perhaps once in a lifetime—we have a chance to anticipate a radical and pervasive change that is truly fundamental in nature. This book exists because we are at this very moment at the pinnacle of such change in the world of work. With the passage of every business day, yesterday’s “management” approach becomes less relevant while we struggle to find better way.

Peter Drucker’s “knowledge worker” is replacing the factory worker at such a rate as to become today’s stereotypical worker. The flatter, shamrock organization typified by Charles Handy is evolving as modern networks are becoming as familiar as traditional pyramids. Whereas in the past we were taught how to work with managers, now we must ask: How can we learn to work with peers?

Ideas stemming from Edgar Schein’s “process consulting” are escaping from the closed professional consulting world to reach a much wider group of practitioners—that growing number of people doing all sorts of work who now recognize themselves as leaders. Business is going global. Work is more turbulent and stressful. The “job for life” has disappeared, thus challenging each individual to take care of career and personal development—paradoxically at a time when organizational memory, knowledge, and learning are becoming more valuable and sought after. Consumers are pressing for products that deliver more value and continue to demand more service. Even the “office” is redefining itself in new places, allowing us to work at all times of the day as technology offers to make our style of work more flexible. The “better way” must somehow accommodate all these major shifts and offer some answers to the really hard questions.

We were motivated to write this book because we could see that a number of individuals and organizations had found a better way. At a time when managers were being urged to re-engineer the processes of their businesses, we noticed that some organizations were making even greater strides by focusing on people. Their approach is coaching. It is far too easy to dismiss coaching as yet another technique in the management toolbag. The editors see coaching quite differently. For us, a leadership attitude is essential if individuals and organizations are to flourish in the new business world: good coaching offers both dialogue and etiquette, which together provide the structure and process in which leadership can work well. For us, coaching is the style of choice that rehumanizes the modern worker.

The goal of the editors, then, was simply to bring together the thinking of the world’s greatest coaches at a critical time when leaders and managers need to learn about good coaching. This need has been met in this book with tested guidelines that promote responsible and effective coaching. We feel we have a duty as a progressive group to articulate our experiences, ideas, theories, and practices into one book that consolidates and positions the coaching subject into mainstream leadership and management topics.

Our Audience

Naturally, there are many audiences for this book. Those who already recognize themselves as leaders will find valuable reference material to help develop and improve their own leadership style. All those who see themselves as “managers” will find here a route along which to explore and experiment in leadership activities. Our book is for those who sponsor coaching, those who provide or receive coaching, the designers of coaching programs, and anyone who will integrate coaching into his or her own personal style whenever relating to others in the workplace.

Our Authors

We did not expect to write this book alone. At the outset it was clear that we needed to consolidate the thoughts, experiences, and insights of the world’s greatest coaches and thinkers on management and leadership. We feel that their generosity in contributing chapters and their enthusiasm toward this ambitious project has validated our own beliefs about the importance of coaching. We take this opportunity to thank our authors warmly, for their willingness to share, for their perseverance in keeping to deadlines, for working with us on making changes to their chapters, and for their unanimous encouragement and support. Their response has built this book into a unique collection of chapters offering an entry point into our subject to readers from all backgrounds.

We have read and edited all the chapters. In areas where we have found different authors writing about the same idea, we have tried to adjust the language so that the same word or expression in one place will refer to the same idea in another place, in a uniform way throughout the book.

We have been editors, never censors. While we have diligently applied a uniformity of language, we have deliberately avoided any insistence on a uniformity of ideas beyond a commitment to coaching. Ours is an emerging subject in which specific situations can be as important as tested techniques in determining outcomes. Practice concepts that today might appear to us as ambiguous, paradoxical, or even contradictory will compete in the real world of experience; they will synthesize, and our collective thinking will make progress into the future.

Our Subject

In order to describe our subject area, we make a few general comments. There is something fundamental about coaching that enables it to fit into organizations of all kinds. Coaching is a behavioral approach of mutual benefit to individuals and the organizations in which they work or network. It is not merely a technique or a one-time event; it is a strategic process that adds value both to the people being coached and also to the bottom line of the organization.

Coaching establishes and develops healthy working relationships by surfacing issues (raw data gathering), addressing issues (through feedback), solving problems (action planning), and following through (results)—and so offers a process in which people develop and through which obstacles to obtaining business results are removed. Coaching can also be looked at as a peer-to-peer language expressed in a dialogue of learning.

Coaching is transformational. Through a behavioral change brought about in individuals, a leader may transform the organization and gain commitment. Coaching can offer a new propellant to organizational change. In coaching, people are offered the chance to align their own behavior with the values and vision of the organization. By helping people understand how they are perceived when they are out of alignment—and then putting these individuals back into alignment, one person at a time—coaching can make real impact and build healthy organizations—top-down, and from the grass roots up.

As to a formal definition of “coaching,” how it relates to “leadership,” and questions such as the difference between coaching and “mentoring,” or whether the “sports metaphor” is appropriate—here we have let our authors speak for themselves. Of course, each of us has a personal view, and we take the opportunity to share this in our own individual chapters, which open the book.

Our Hope

Our hope is that, through the reading of this book, the reader will gain an understanding of the importance of coaching as a preferred and tested route to achieve leadership; the dramatic impact that can be achieved through coaching; why managers need to develop into leaders; and how coaching fits in with other techniques and approaches (consulting, therapy, organizational development, and so forth).

You will gain a thorough grasp of how—and for whom—coaching should be applied in your own organization and in your career, and also how to perform in your role as a coach, a person being coached, a sponsor, or as a buyer or supplier of a coaching service. Last, you can return to this reference work when you need to see how the world’s top forty-five leading professionals have successfully responded to difficult coaching problems and successfully applied their own ideas in diverse situations.

Ultimately it is you—our reader—who we hope will complete the quest of this book by bringing good coaching practice into the world of work for the benefit of all.

May 2000