Adaptive Coaching: The Art and Practice of a Client-Centered Approach to Performance Management

Adaptive Coaching: The Art and Practice of a Client-Centered Approach to Performance Management Terry R. Bacon and Karen I. Spear Davies-Black Publishing Palo Alto, CA 2003 ISBN 0-89106-187-8 US $39.95

Review DOI 10.1108/09534810410564596

Adaptive Coaching is an excellent practitioner oriented book that belongs in the personal libraries of business leaders and coach practitioners. The book is valuable for the forty thousand people who are identified as coaches in Europe and the US, and supplements the 135 or so books on the subject (p. xiv). Very critical of the sports metaphors in coaching, the authors call most works in the field oversimplifications and bemoan the chasm that exists between the reality and the rhetoric of coaching. They back up their claims by reporting on an extensive survey conducted with recipients of coaching from 1996 through 2002. The survey results reveal that coaches are generally not meeting the requirements of the executives they are purported to be helping. "Coaches consistently fail in the fundamentals of listening, empathizing, probing, and contextualizing even when they think that's what they are doing" (p. xix). The objective of the text is to show coaches how they can overcome some of their failings. The survey is used to prove many points throughout the text.

Based on results of the survey, and as an alternative to the commonly used directive style, the authors propose that coaches move away from a single dominant approach and adapt their style to the needs of each individual client. The recommendation is reminiscent of Hersey and Blanchard's situational leadership theory, which proposes that leadership behavior be selected based on the "maturity" level of the follower (Blank et al., 1990). Adaptive coaching is framed by three concepts:

(1) the two minds model;

(2) taxonomy of coaching styles; and

(3) the use of dialogue.

The concepts triangulate to form a compelling perspective on the work of a coach.

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the process of coaching and conveys its message through three sections. The first section, entitled Assessing Clients' Needs, introduces the reader to the early critical stage of coaching in which the coach discovers the client's needs. This section discusses context. Asserting that effective coaching can only be achieved if the coach understands the context in...