Business Coaching and Mentoring For Dummies

by Marie Taylor, Steve Crabb

Don't fall behind--Coach your business toward success! Business Coaching & Mentoring For Dummies explores effective coaching strategies that guide you in coaching and mentoring your colleagues. With insight into key coaching concepts and an impressive range of tools, this easy-to-use resource helps you transform your team--and yourself in the process! Written from the perspective of a business coach, this comprehensive book explores the practical coaching skill set, tools, and techniques that will help you along your way, and explains how to identify who to coach, what to coach, how to coach, and when to coach. Whether you have experience in a coaching and mentoring role or you're new to the coaching game, this is a valuable must-have resource.

The right approach to business coaching can take your company from good to great--it can also improve employee satisfaction, employee loyalty, team morale, and your bottom line. The trick is to approach business coaching in a way that is effective and flexible, ensuring that you achieve results while meeting the unique needs of your team. This comprehensive text will help you:


Understand the foundational concepts of business coaching and mentoring Discover how proper coaching and mentoring methods can help get a business on the right track Identify and leverage tools to develop your business leadership mindset Create a successful personal and business identity with the support and guidance of a coach Business Coaching & Mentoring For Dummies is an essential resource for business owners, business leaders, coaches, and mentors who want to take their skills to the next level.

Genres: Business

400 pages, Paperback

First published April 11, 2016

About the author

Marie Taylor is an experienced international coach and organisational leadership consultant. Marie facilitates insight in others and particularly in leaders who want to successfully manage themselves and their teams. She speaks on a range of subjects including coaching, thinking, mentoring, personal resilience and organisations leadership. Her consultancy trains leaders to use practical coaching and mentoring skills and in aspects of organisational leadership and team development including change, team dynamics and outcome delivery. She coaches leaders to gain clarity and be even more successful. She runs exploration retreats for busy professionals who need to stop, reflect and think. Her style is often described as "challenging, laser like, witty, quick and thoughtful" Marie is a student of the enneagram.

She lives in London and travels a lot.

The author of four books.Business Coaching and Mentoring For Dummies, Get your Career in Gear, Purposeful Thinking and What's My Type?( A book about the Enneagram and types rather than matchmaking for life)

Marie writes a blog at http://marietayloronline.com/

Follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com

You can find out more about Marie's coaching work at http://tayloredcoaching.com/

and About her corporate work at http://www.marietaylorconsulting.com/

Reviews

[Ghassan Samaha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the book a bit challenging to read, but I appreciated the new perspective on the Drama Rectangle that was presented. I particularly enjoyed the following chapters/sections:

1. Understanding the value of the business story.
2. Changing the internal world by external means.
3. Recognizing that inflexibility sometimes leads to extinction.

Also, I want to express my gratitude for the Mentoring Plan Form.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary: A detailed overview of the nature of business coaching and mentoring offering resources for assessing potential client opportunities, working with mind-sets, vision and planning processes, and marketing oneself as a coach.

For those who follow this blog, you may have noted I've been reviewing books on coaching periodically, an area I am reading up on. As part of the "Dummies" series, you might think this would be the first I would read, and that it would be fairly elementary. Rather, I found it a fairly comprehensive resource on business coaching. I highlight "business" here because there are different kinds of coaching--life coaching, performance coaching, etc. and this book focuses with working with those in executive positions in the business world, in start-ups, small companies, and larger corporations.

The book is divided into five parts, each consisting of several chapters:

Part 1: Getting Started with Business Coaching and Mentoring
Part 2: Developing the Business Leader's Mind-Set
Part 3: Coaching and Mentoring to Get a Business on the Right Track
Part 4: Creating a Successful Business Identity with the Support of a Coach
Part 5: The Part of Tens

I found the material in Part One the most helpful. Particularly key is the distinction drawn between coaching ("the art of co-creation") and mentoring ("the art of imparting wise counsel"). Both can be valuable but need to be distinguished and often may be confused in the mind of a client. Throughout the book, the authors make a point to maintain the distinction while offering material for both situations. This part also dealt with professional training of coaches, making the case for coaching, assessing the potential needs of clients and contracting (including what goes into a contract). One of the most valuable pieces of advice is to know your limitations and don't be desperate. Several models of coaching are also introduced including the CLEAR model (Contracting-Listening-Exploring-Action-Review).

Part Two focuses on the business leader's mind-set. We are introduced here to Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a coaching approach one of the authors is trained in. Various exercises are introduced in this and the next two parts that seem to be versions of mindfulness training. One of my friends who has worked in business mentioned the relevance of the Enneagram, a tool used extensively in spiritual formation circles, to the business coaching world. Low and behold, a whole section of one chapter in this part was devoted to the Enneagram, particularly in dealing with the "I did it my way" leader.

Part Three focuses extensively on the vision, mission, values, and planning of a business, beginning with the stories businesses tell of themselves. There are extensive grids, sets of questions and guides for a variety of different clients one works with here.

Part Four was all about branding, both for the client and for the coach. For businesses, the grid offered on managing stakeholder relationships was helpful. For coaches, much of the advice might be summed up in the six-step model they offered:

1. Identify the desperate needs of your potential clients.
2. Identify your needs.
3. Create a coaching solution to the desperate needs of your clients that satisfies both your needs and theirs.
4. Position yourself as a niche specialist in providing the solution.
5. Market and sell your services.
6. Charge appropriately for your services.

Part Five consisted of several chapters of "tens"--online resources, tips for leaders who coach or mentor, tips for hiring a business coach, and ten questions for keeping a business on track.

Like any "Dummies" book, there are icons throughout highlighting particular types of information: Business owners, tip, remember, example, warning (very useful!), and technical stuff. Here's one good warning:

"Coaches who are new to the profession often go looking for problems to fix. Don't go looking for what's not there -- that's making coaching about your own personal needs and not the needs of the client." (p. 94).

I've highlighted some of the resources in each section I found helpful. I found the book chock-full of tools and resources and insights that probably make this a good basic reference for those engaged in business coaching or mentoring. You won't be able to keep it all in your head. The writers emphasize how good coaches keep growing themselves, keep developing new skills, and access new tools. This book is a good place to start and worth having on the shelf.

[Dan Sumption · Rating 1 out of 5]

The writing style of this book is summed up by this short passage from the introduction: "There are myriad definitions of coaching. We define it as follows: Coaching takes place on a spectrum from short and medium shifts in performance to significant life transformation. This sometimes requires a metaphorical demolition truck to pull down old patterns of belief and behaviours before co-creating new thinking and building blocks for growth. Oftentimes consistent, regular focused dialogue with sprinkling of gentle challenge and a bag full of coaching tools is enough."

So, if I am to become a coach then I will need a bag of tools and, possibly, a metaphorical truck?

In my experience there are two types of "for Dummies" books. Firstly, the ones which set out the basics of their subject in a logical, easy to follow manner, and which really do enable novices to acquire some understanding of those topics. And secondly, the ones in which the authors try to shoe-horn all of their knowledge into hundreds of bullet-pointed lists. This is the latter type. The book actually kicks off with tips on how to sell your services as a business coach, which strikes me as putting the cart a long way before the horse. When we actually get into the topic of what coaching is and how to do it, the information is poorly ordered, poorly written (see sample above), and seems that the authors have tried to include everything including the kitchen sink. The meat of the book is in a number of coaching exercises, which seem to have been draw from all over pop-psychology. Some of them may prove useful.

[Nancy Byerly · Rating 3 out of 5]

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[Steve Friedman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked various sections re Coaching and found it a helpful foundation.

[Robert Schulz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Es gibt wirklich schlimme Business Coaching-Literatur und das gehört dazu.

[Eric Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wealth of information from beginning to end. Application is the key to success with any Dummies book and this one is no exception. There is a newer 2nd Ed. so check it out.