Business Coaching & Mentoring For Dummies

by Marie Taylor, Steve Crabb

Shape the leadership of tomorrow

Business Coaching & Mentoring For Dummies provides business owners and managers with the insight they need to successfully develop the next generation of leaders. Packed with business-led strategies, key concepts, and effective techniques, this book equips you with the skills to transform both yourself and your team. Whether you're coaching colleagues, employees, or offering your skills as a service, these techniques will help you build a productive relationship that leads to business success. The companion website also features eight bonus videos that will further your mastery by showing you what great coaching looks like in action. Navigate tricky situations and emotional minefields with ease; develop vision, values, and a mission; create a long-term plan--everything you need is here, with expert guidance every step of the way.


Understand how mentoring benefits both sides of the relationship
Learn key coaching techniques that develop leadership potential
Adopt new tools that facilitate coaching and mentoring interactions
The modern workplace is a mix of generations, personalities, strengths, weaknesses, and quirks; great leadership can pull it all together toward a common goal, but who leads the leaders? Mentors and coaches fill this essential role, and this book shows you how to be one of the best.

Genres: Business

432 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.