Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Coaching for High Performance: How to develop exceptional results through coaching
    Coaching for High Performance: How to develop exceptional results through coaching
    Coaching for High Performance: How to develop exceptional results through coaching
    Ebook209 pages1 hour

    Coaching for High Performance: How to develop exceptional results through coaching

    By Sarah Cook

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    If you are an IT manager and work with IT professionals on a regular basis, Coaching for High Performance will inspire you with practical advice and tips on a range of soft skills areas to help you create the ideal coaching environment for your department. Use your easy to apply coaching skills to get the best out of all of your interactions from five minutes chats, direct reports, one-to-one meetings, performance reviews, to IT project meetings.

    LanguageEnglish
    Publisheritgovernance
    Release dateJan 27, 2009
    ISBN9781849281041
    Coaching for High Performance: How to develop exceptional results through coaching
    Author

    Sarah Cook

    Sarah Cook is the Managing Director of the Stairway Consultancy Ltd. She has over 20 years’ consulting experience specialising in team building, leadership and change. Prior to this, Sarah worked for Unilever and as Head of Customer Care for a retail marketing consultancy. As well as having practical experience of helping to create high-performing teams across the globe, Sarah is a business author and has written widely on the topic of team building, leadership, management development and coaching. She also speaks regularly at conferences and seminars on these topics. Sarah is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and a Chartered Marketeer. She has an MA from Cambridge University and an MBA. Sarah is an accredited user of a wide range of psychometric and team diagnostic tools. She may be contacted via sarah@thestairway.co.uk.

    Read more from Sarah Cook

    Related to Coaching for High Performance

    Related ebooks

    Leadership For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Do You Need a Coach?

      Sep 21, 2016

      Maybe, if it’s the boss who is becoming the weak link when trying to figure out critical issues

      3 min read

    • Article

      Coaching: What Is It And Does It Work?

      Sep 30, 2020

      Business coaching is big business. Two years ago, the International Coaching Federation had 53,000 members and estimated that there were 100,000 life coaches in the world. Another estimate of note is that it is currently a Billion Dollar business, es

      8 min read

    • Article

      How to Apply Behavioural Insights to Leadership

      May 1, 2017

      NO ONE WOULD EVER DISPUTE that Cal Chambers was the smartest guy in the room, least of all Cal. As Chief Science Officer of Obsidian Pharmaceuticals, Cal holds multiple patents and has been responsible for developing the core biological platform on w

      8 min read

    • Article

      How to Take Your Coaching Skills Up a Notch

      Sep 1, 2018

      Are there any coaches or teachers in your background that you cherish and think of often? If so, I’d be willing to bet that they are from your youth—and not supervisors or managers from your work life. Even in companies that pride themselves on makin

      3 min read

    • Article

      Psychometric Assessments

      Nov 2, 2016

      Are you battling to consistently identify, hire & retain A-grade sales talent? • The cost of a bad hire is staggering. We identified with one client that placement of a poor sales executive cost them over R1,5 million in hard costs and lost revenue •

      2 min read

    • Article

      Finding Your Great Mentor

      Jul 11, 2019

      Marketing Academy founder Sherilyn Shackell says aside from demonstrating superb leadership skills, great mentors usually possess an “unwavering” willingness to share their skills, knowledge and expertise. “Our mentors are also extremely open – wil

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Following Leader

      Jul 11, 2019

      The Following Leader
      7 min read

    • Article

      Can You Teach Leadership?

      Dec 2, 2022

      Can You Teach Leadership?
      9 min read

    • Article

      BUILDING Competencies That Are Critical For FUTURE SUCCESS

      Feb 4, 2019

      Founded in Lyon, France in 1872 by the local business community and is affiliated to the Lyon Chamber of Commerce and Industry, EMLYON Business School is a French leading business school aiming to be more focused on the professional and personal succ

      10 min read

    • Article

      In And Out

      Aug 23, 2018

      In And Out
      5 min read

    • Article

      Nail Your Dream Job

      Jul 28, 2021

      Nail Your Dream Job
      7 min read

    • Article

      Getting The Most From A Mentor

      Jan 16, 2020

      Getting The Most From A Mentor
      3 min read

    • Article

      Make A Difference In This World

      Aug 8, 2018

      Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a professional coach? Coaches help people gain clarity in their situation and needs, formulate a forward direction, get motivated to make the changes they know they need to make and feel better about

      3 min read

    • Article

      AGILE: It Is All About Trust

      Oct 22, 2019

      AGILE: It Is All About Trust
      6 min read

    • Article

      No Bad Teams, Just Bad Leaders

      Jul 11, 2019

      Idon’t know exactly when this happened, but over the last several years the dialogue around leadership has degenerated into a fluffy, abstract conversation about desirable leadership attributes. We seem to spend an inordinate amount of time and energ

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Coaching for High Performance

    4/5

    2 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Coaching for High Performance - Sarah Cook

      978-1-84928-104-1

      FOREWORD

      IT is often seen as a ‘hard-skill’ profession where there is no place for soft skills. Yet the importance of soft skills for the IT professional should not be underrated; they underlie all behaviours and interactions. Both IT and non-IT professionals need to work together and learn from each other for effective business performance. All professionals, be they in IT or elsewhere, need to understand how their actions and reactions impact on their behaviour and working relationships.

      This series of books aims to provide practical guidance on a range of soft-skills areas for those in IT and also for others, including those who deal with IT professionals, in order to facilitate more effective and co-operative working practices.

      Each book is written by an experienced consultant and trainer. Their approach throughout is essentially practical and direct, offering a wealth of tried and tested professional guidance. Each chapter contains focused questions to help the coach plan and steer their course. The language used is jargon-free, and a bibliography and a helpful glossary of terms are included at the end of the book.

      Angela Wilde, January 2009

      PREFACE

      This book is intended to provide IT managers with practical advice and tips on how to create a coaching environment in their department.

      Coaching is a powerful tool to create high performance in all IT teams. Fortune magazine found that, asked for a conservative estimate of the monetary payoff from coaching, managers who had been coached described an average return of more than $100,000, or about six times what the coaching cost them in time, money and effort.

      Coaching is a forward-focused activity. It helps people improve their performance and enhance the quality of their work. Plus, it is a skill that is readily usable by all. It is a set of behaviours that you can adopt during a five-minute chat with a colleague, in a direct report, during a one-to-one meeting or a performance review, or as part of an IT project meeting.

      In reading this book, I hope that you will be inspired to apply the coaching skills to your IT workplace to help you create an environment of high performance.

      Sarah Cook

      The Stairway Consultancy Ltd

      www.thestairway.co.uk

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      Sarah Cook is the Managing Director of the Stairway Consultancy Ltd. She has 15 years’ consulting experience specialising in executive coaching, leadership and change. Prior to this, Sarah worked for Unilever and as Head of Customer Care for a retail marketing consultancy.

      As well as having practical experience of coaching individuals in public- and private-sector organisations to enhance their personal effectiveness and optimise their performance, Sarah is a business author and has written widely on the topic of leadership, management development, coaching and team-building. She also speaks regularly at conferences and seminars on these topics.

      Sarah is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and a Chartered Marketeer. She has an MA from Cambridge University and an MBA. Sarah is an accredited user of a wide range of psychometric and personal diagnostic tools. She may be contacted via sarah@thestairway.co.uk.

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      I wish to acknowledge:

      Sir John Whitmore, whose GROW model of coaching is widely accepted as best practice. See Coaching For Performance: Growing People, Performance and Purpose (3rd revised edition, Nicholas Brealey Publishing Ltd, 2002)

      Laura Whitworth, Henry Kimsey-House, Karen Kimsey-House and Phil Sandahl for their 3 Levels of Listening model. See Co-active Coaching: New Skills for Coaching People Toward Success in Work and Life (Davies Black, 2007)

      Peter Hawkins of the Bath Consulting Group, whose CLEAR is a model for coaching (www.bathconsultancygroup.com)

      Tim Gallwey, the founder of coaching as we know it today. See The Inner Game of Tennis (Pan, 1975).

      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER 1:

      WHAT IS COACHING?

      In this chapter I provide you with:

      • A definition of coaching and how this is different to training, counselling and mentoring.

      • An overview of the benefits of coaching.

      • An illustration of where coaching may be useful for you.

      • An overview of how coaching is linked to performance management.

      Too much to do, too little time

      Marvin was struggling. Although an experienced IT manager, he was new to the organisation. He had inherited a department consisting of a mixture of ‘old hands’ as well as several graduates and project managers who, like himself, were new to the organisation. The business had an aggressive agenda for change encompassing several major IT projects. The trouble was, although everyone had the best of intentions, no one on Marvin’s team seemed to be pulling their weight. Deadlines were being missed, tempers were becoming frayed and Marvin seemed to end up doing more and more of the work himself in order to keep things afloat.

      Marvin realised that something had to change if his department was going to achieve the Key Performance Indicators it had been set. In desperation, Marvin called one of his former colleagues who was now heading a successful IT team in another firm. How, he wanted to know, had his ex-colleague been so successful in creating a high-performance team?

      And this is how Marvin discovered the benefits of coaching. This book shares Marvin’s journey of discovery; it outlines what coaching is, the benefits of coaching, the process and skills of coaching and how it can be used successfully in an IT environment to bring about sustained levels of high performance, personal achievement and growth.

      My hope is that in reading this book you will benefit from the power of coaching.

      What is coaching?

      There are various definitions of coaching:

      • ‘An ongoing professional relationship that helps people achieve extraordinary results’

      • ‘Helping people to unlock their potential’

      • ‘The process of accelerating an individual’s progress to achieving personal and organisational goals’

      • ‘The partnership between a manager and an individual, whereby the manager helps the individual to learn’.

      In essence, coaching is forward-looking and goal-oriented. The purpose of coaching is to help individuals define desired outcomes for themselves, to create awareness of the options open to them in achieving their desired outcomes and to help them take responsibility for developing appropriate strategies and actions to achieve them.

      Coaching versus other disciplines

      Coaching is different to training as the latter involves teaching something, usually a skill. The coaching process assumes that the coachee has the ability to find the resources they need to achieve their goal. Coaching is about helping people

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1