Executive Coaching: Building and Managing Your Professional Practice

Citation

Rigg, C. (2009), "Executive Coaching: Building and Managing Your Professional Practice", Journal of European Industrial Training, Vol. 33 No. 7, pp. 673-675. https://doi.org/10.1108/03090590910985426

Book synopsis

This book is a practical guide for people who want to develop as executive coaches. Its starting point is that people will be moving, or “transitioning” into coaching, from a variety of backgrounds. They may be in human resource development or management; they might have experience of management consulting or life coaching; they may be a mental health professional or have run a business. Whatever the starting point, the book aims to provide practical direction on the essentials and pitfalls of developing professional coaching practice. It starts with the provocation of Chapter one, “Is executive coaching right for you?” This is designed to help clarify how executive coaching contrasts with other developmental practices, such as counselling and psychotherapy and distinguishes between contexts for coaching, ranging through high potential, remedial and team situations and offers a checklist of steps involved throughout coaching stages.

Chapter one challenges the reader to consider why they want to coach and what their own needs, interests and abilities are. This is built on in Chapter two, which explores the core competencies required by a professional coach. It provides a self‐assessment checklist for the reader, supplemented by templates for a 360‐degree feedback survey and a professional development plan, as well as a series of practical suggestions for developing coaching abilities.

Chapter three provides guidance on acquiring clients, advocating a “consultative selling” approach, which the author argues means the coach does not start with asking general questions about what the market needs, but rather they try to learn about prospective clients and their individual needs. His steer is that this has to start from the coach themselves and an articulation of their own “value proposition” – their rationale for coaching, their particular value and services. The remainder of the chapter poses questions for the reader to explore what their own personal, career and business goals are, before offering guidelines for building marketing materials.

In Chapter four Stern offers seven building blocks, which he argues are essential to building and managing executive coaching practice:

1. 1.

   The network (of others who can be consulted).

2. 2.

   The toolbox (of well‐founded theories and models).

3. 3.

   An efficient office infrastructure of responsive systems.

4. 4.

   A project management system.

5. 5.

   Peer or mentor supervision.

6. 6.

   Research and publication – learning from others' practice and committing to reporting your own.

7. 7.

   Contributing back through community service.

The final two chapters bring the book to a close. Chapter five raises issues and pitfalls for professionals to consider as they make the transition from other backgrounds to coaching. Chapter six contains an extended template for preparing a business plan. This is all rounded off by an Appendix of resources – books, articles and contact organisations.

Evaluation

The title of this book is intriguing – Building and Managing Your Professional Practice. Does that mean growing the business or does it mean advancing practical proficiency?

Stern's book certainly is a very readable, practical guide to setting up an executive coaching practice. It is clear, challenging and useful, with a number of checklists and templates that would help a person contemplating executive coaching think through their ideas and develop workable plans. The chapter sequencing provides a workable guide through the issues to consider and practicalities to address. As such the book is a welcome addition to the market, as well as being based on Stern's years of experience. My only major criticism would be that the resource bank in the Appendix, despite the odd exception, is overwhelmingly North American.

However, is this book a good guide to developing practical proficiency as a professional coach? No, I don't think so. Several coaching tools are listed in Chapter four, but with only passing instruction to the Appendix for follow‐up references. There are 14 pages in the Appendix, so this isn't great guidance for where to go for what tool? The section on how to manage coaching projects provides the most practical guidance on staging conversations throughout a coaching assignment. This is helpful, but compared to other coaching books on the market it isn't comprehensive or presented in a particularly clear or user‐friendly way.

So overall, buying and using this book would depend on what you want it for. For developing practice in executive coaching, there are others better on the market. For guidance on establishing as a professional executive coach, thinking through the practicalities of creating a business, this book is immensely useful.

Author quote

The book is a practical, how‐to guide for people from diverse backgrounds who are interested in exploring, building, expanding, or better managing their professional practice in executive coaching (p. xi).

If you are looking for an academic treatise on research and standards, I encourage you to look elsewhere. This book is for the practical professional with a passion for helping leaders do great things through executive coaching (p. xiv).

About the reviewer

Clare Rigg has 20 years' experience designing learning programmes to enable working professionals develop their leadership and management abilities. She has worked with practitioners from diverse sectors and her work has taken her to India and China to contribute to leadership development programmes. She is particularly interested in the use of action learning for development and has researched and written a number of texts in the area, including edited books on Action Learning, Public Leadership and Organisational Development (with Sue Richards, published in 2006 by Routledge) and Critical Human Resource Development (with Kiran Trehan and Jim Stewart, published in 2007 by Pearson). Previously at the University of Birmingham's School of Public Policy, where she led the design and delivery of leadership programmes for the Employers' Organisation for Local Government and worked on the highly valued Public Service Leaders Programme across Britain, she is currently based at the Institute of Technology Tralee, County Kerry, where she leads their innovative, leadership practice focused MBA.