coaching concepts library

Coaching Books

We have found these coaching books to be particularly worth the time it takes to read and absorb the material within them.  Most of these books are good for anyone interested in coaching to read, but some are focused primarily on life coaching or executive coaching.

All books that are included on this page, have been read from cover to cover by one or both of us.  The review identifies what the writer feels are the strengths of the book and for what audience s/he thinks the book is best.  This list will include new entries when we find a particularly worthwhile book among the several that we complete reading each month.

Reading these coaching concepts books by themselves is not a substitute for working with a coach, nor will they turn you into a skilled coach.  The reading can give you a much greater academic understanding of coaching concepts and the broad applicability of coaching, but you will gain much more personal benefit from the relationship with your coach.  Paraphrasing C. C. Colton: "He who studies books alone will know how things ought to be, and he who works with a coach will know how they are."

Life coaching and executive coaching are very experiential in nature.  In other words, with your coach, you explore your current high priorities, learn how your thoughts and beliefs affect how you approach your priorities and develop new skills to handle your priorities more effectively.  Reading these books will help change your life, but working with a trained coach will greatly accelerate the process and make the learning deeper.  See Why Hire a Coach? for a more comprehensive discussion of this point.

1. The Art of Possibility, by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander

Reading this book is an uplifting and inspiring experience.  Twelve practices to transform your personal and professional lives are presented in an engaging manner by this life coach and orchestral conductor team.  Through parables and personal anecdotes, they weave a tale that can move us to embrace the full world of what we can achieve and who we can be.  This is an excellent book for both coaches and individuals who seek to change their lives and enhance their creativity.  (Jeannine Coyne & Gary Clayton)

2. The Heart of Coaching, by Thomas Crane. 

   This book introduces Transformational Coaching, a hot topic in many university organizational development curriculums.  A great book for managers and executive coaches alike, it explains how employee and executive coaching can be used to create a performance-based, feedback-rich organization that is capable of creating and sustaining a competitive advantage. The Heart of Coaching shows managers how to effectively communicate performance feedback to employees and shows employees how to give upward feedback to supervisors.  Besides giving a clear framework within which to implement Transformational Coaching, the book contains many helpful illustrations and pertinent quotes.   Sample dialogs with an executive coach are used to elaborate on the core message.  In particular, it helps managers understand to process by which coaching can help their organization become more competitive and how they can be more effective role-models for their employees.  (Gary Clayton)

    

3. The Mastery of Love, by Don Miguel Ruiz.

In an age where most knowledge has been created within the last twenty years, Ruiz shows us that the ancient Toltec masters had an understanding of relationships that few people today have equaled.  Ruiz starts by demonstrating that the Toltecs understood how we are “wounded” in our formative years by the misinformation and limiting beliefs of our parents, teachers and society.  These beliefs and wounds are so strong that when you learn new concepts as an adult and try to make your own decisions, you find those beliefs are still in your way.  In many ways, the Parasite is similar to the Gremlin.  Ruiz then explains the Toltecs’ prescription for learning to have a better relationship with oneself and others.  This is a great book for self-help concepts and for increasing one’s life coaching skills. (Gary Clayton)

3. Quantum Leaps: Seven Skills for Workplace ReCreation, by Charlotte Shelton

A thought-provoking book, Shelton shows how the world is not as concrete as we like to think it is and how we and our workplace can benefit from that knowledge.  In recent years, many writers have focused on how our current mechanistic policies and procedures have let us down in our attempts to build great and sustainable organizations.  Quantum Leaps presents a new viewpoint that comes from the emerging science of complexity and chaos.  Shelton presents that workplace changes happen one person at a time.  "Perception is reality" is a phrase that many of us have heard.  We have the power to change our beliefs and in the process, change our reality.  Just enough quantum theory and human neurological research is presented in everyday terms to prove that this is true.

Shelton elaborates on seven workplace skills that enable us to become change-masters and shows how these skills parallel the principles of quantum-mechanics.  Practicing each of these skills opens us up to a world that is more complex and sophisticated than we would ever have dreamed.  Through these skills, we become open to understanding some of the paradoxes that have frustrated traditional management theorists.  We learn that by emphasizing control of one aspect of our organization, we end up having less control over our organizational environment in general; by focusing on numbers, we lose the power of the relationships that make up our corporation; and by not listening to the sounds generated within our corporation, we lose our recognition of how healthy our organization really is. 

This book is a very powerful book for coaches and for individuals seeking to understand how to use one's creativity to generate a new and better reality and for executives who wonder why traditional attempts at organizational control so often seem to backfire. (Gary Clayton)

4.  Taming Your Gremlin, by Rick Carlson

Updated in 2003 from the 1983 first edition, this book does a great job of explaining what a gremlin is and how you can work to overcome yours.  The book is based on Carson’s work as a coach in helping individuals understand and gain control over their gremlin.  The book is valuable for individuals wanting to understand what a gremlin is and how to overcome it.  For coaches, it is a valuable tool in helping coachees recognize their personal Gremlin and in providing techniques for helping to gain control over one’s gremlin.  (Gary Clayton)

5. Take Time for Your Life, by Cheryl Richardson

Richardson presents a seven-step program to regain control over your life and to make conscious decisions about the future you would like to create.  Cheryl’s experience as a coach really comes through.  Her book is full of anecdotes and checklists that are usable by individuals and life coaches, alike.  The checklists are equally applicable to executive coaching around life balance issues.  (Gary Clayton)

6. The 36 Hour Day, by Nancy L. Mace and Peter V. Rabins, MD

This book, updated in 1999, is a classic text on recognizing dementia and other related memory loss diseases.  I read this when my mother started showing signs of peculiar behavior.  It was a great help in both understanding how to handle her illness and allowing myself to recognize that I need not and should not get upset with her actions.  After all, she was losing her ability to understand and cope with the world.  I highly recommend this book to all who have to provide care for our aging population.  It is a great value to coaches who have coachees who are trying to understand and care for aging adults with memory loss. (Gary Clayton)

7. Please Understand Me II, by David Keirsey

This is a great book to learn about the 16 personality types underlying the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter.  You can learn a lot about yourself and people with whom you have a relationship.  Especially, you can learn that what you see in yourself and in others is (usually) not something strange and unusual, but something that fits your basic personality type.  You can learn that it is common for people of your personality type to experience challenges when working with – or living with – people of certain other personality types. 

The best use of this book is to learn to how everyone’s differences are also strengths that you should appreciate in them.  The worst use of this book is to pick out certain personality types and label them as people that you can’t get along with.  I recommend this book with caution, as I dislike seeing people use labels on other people as a justification for treating them unequally.  This book is good for anyone who wants to understand themselves and others better and for life coaches and executive coaches who focus on relationships.  (Gary Clayton)

8. Co-Active Coaching: New Skills for Coaching People Toward success in Work and Life, by Whitworth, Sandahl and Kimsey-House

Co-Active Coaching offers an impressive view of the modern practice of coaching.  There are instructive coaching examples and skill-building exercises for coaches to use with clients.   If you are simply wanting to satisfy your curiosity about coaching, this is probably more detailed than what you would want.  It is a great book for life and executive coaches.   Whether the material is as unique as the authors seem to think is open to question (I feel I’ve seen many of the concepts elsewhere in older books), but the coaching model they present is powerful and flexible.  Whitworth, Kimsey-House and Sandahl are co-founders of the Coaches Training Institute, one of the premier coach training institutes. (Gary Clayton)

9. The Innovator’s Solution, by Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor

Finally, a book that hits the mark in explaining why some companies sustain their growth and most do not.  The authors have done a great job of creating a framework for helping to understand a company’s dynamics and determining how to generate and sustain growth over long periods.  Christensen and Raynor explain in convincing terms why most corporations fail to maintain a culture conducive to the innovation that will feed growth.  This book is not a coaching book per se, yet it contains knowledge vital to the long-term success of an organization.  As such, I believe this is a seminal book for leaders and coaches who perform executive leadership coaching.   (Gary Clayton)

10. Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ,  by Daniel Goleman

This is the book that popularized the concept of Emotional Intelligence.  Goleman shows that our emotions play a major role in our decision-making and success at work and at home.  He explains that specific and difference parts of our brain are involved in developing our emotions and our rational thoughts.  Significantly, he shows that a large part of our success in life can be attributed to our abilities to recognize our feelings and modulate them appropriately and to recognize the feelings of others and respond in a way that enhances our control of the situation.  This is a good book for self-development and coach education.    Without ever mentioning the ‘gremlin” or “parasite” concept, it goes a long way to explaining the neurophysical basis for this concept.  (Gary Clayton)

11. Primal Leadership:  Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence, by Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee

The authors argue that it is a leader’s job to create resonance within her organization.  The leader’s emotions are quickly passed among the group.  If a leader resonates energy and enthusiasm, the organization can thrive, whereas if the leader spreads negativity and dissonance, the organization will flounder, especially over long periods of time.  The challenge is for leaders to drive the group’s emotional climate in the right direction for the work that is to be completed.  This is a great book for understanding the leadership styles that support exceptional organizational accomplishment. 

Goleman also introduces many “leadership competencies” and a methodology for conducting EI assessments and training in an organization.  Unfortunately, the methodology contains elements that remind me of the big management consulting firm methodologies used to help inexperienced consulting staff learn at the expense and time of the clients.  Additionally, the 19 leadership competencies seem to be used in the methodology as a way of introducing pre-defined training assignments to the clients, rather than focusing on pure coaching to produce more immediate benefits.  My impression is that the methodology is more appropriate for consultants selling "productized services" rather than for coaches who value holding the client’s agenda.  Such "fill the gap" approaches are more consistent with traditional training than with leadership coaching. 

I believe astute organizations will examine other available approaches before accepting the training orientation of this methodology.  In summary, I believe this book is valuable for people who aspire to become organizational leaders and who perform executive leadership coaching. It is a great help in understanding leadership styles. (Gary Clayton)

12. Creative Intelligence:  Discovering the Innovative Potential in Ourselves and Others, by Alan Rowe

Rowe draws upon the latest research to identify what creative people have in common and documents strategies for unlocking our creative potential.  He shows how most organizations suppress creativity and outlines strategies for unleashing the creativity within your organization.  He also identifies four distinct creative styles (Intuitive, Innovative, Imaginative and Inspirational) and helps identify the challenges in getting people with differing styles to work together.  Rowe presents the major characteristics of each creative intelligence style and provides examples of current and historical figures who excel at one of the styles.

Rowe's key points could easily be points made in support of coaching.  For instance, Rowe presents that "many creative individuals question, explore outside their areas of expertise, and are willing to change their ideas."  By contrast, he writes that experts are often people who rely upon conventional practices in their fields and who may do little to extend the body of knowledge that makes up the field.  He also states that "the truly creative individual willing accepts failure as part of achieving results".  In coaching, we talk about stepping "out of the box" to generate and try unconventional ideas and looking at "failures" as opportunities for learning. 

This book is a good book that provides additional insights on creativity beyond those offered in Primal Leadership and Please Understand Me II.  It is a good book for both individuals and coaches.  (Gary Clayton)

13. Intentional Revolutions: A Seven-Point Strategy for Transforming Organizations, by Nevis, Lancourt and Vassallo

The authors provide very convincing arguments that there is no one "best way" to implement change in an organization.  Executives and their coaches will do well to realize this.  What worked well in one organization will not necessarily work well in another organization.  The authors provide numerous case studies of organizational change efforts that failed - and some that succeeded.  The central message is that creating a fundamental shift or improvement requires a shift in attitudes and behaviors at all levels of the organization.  This is an area that executive coaches can help their clients understand and assess.

Many people resist change.  The authors help us understand this resistance as verifying the existence of multiple different realities in the organization.  They then present seven levers that can be employed to minimize and transform the resistance.  Ones that coaches will particularly relate to include 1) creating a mission that emphasizes the shift in values and behavior, 2) empowering all with the group through increased involvement in various organizational processes, 3) acting in ways that motivate individuals to achieve new levels of excellence, and 4) role modeling positive and inspirational actions.  The book also provides much useful detail in how acknowledging accomplishments can motivate  change and the very real limits of using coercive techniques to create sustained change.

This book is beneficial for all who are interested in handling change within an organization.  It will be particularly valuable for coaches who are new to corporate coaching.  (Gary Clayton)        

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