Leadership Coaching – from personal insight to organisational performance: Graham Lee

Written by a coach with a background both in psychotherapy and in business, the book focuses on how coaches can help clients to achieve better performance at work by understanding who they are as people. Lee aims to blend psychological and business concepts to help coaches to help clients to achieve sustainable change.

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Key themes and ideas

• Tension exists between the individual’s desire to lead in a way that is true to him/herself and the organisation’s desire for employees who can get things done by being true to the organisation. Authentic leadership arises when personal convictions and organisational goals are attuned. The purpose of leadership coaching is therefore to make the client more consciously aware of who he/she is, so that he/she can develop his/her own authentic leadership style and balance it with the needs of the organisation
• Lee then offers a framework to support individual change – ACE FIRST – for coaches to use to shape their coaching work
• As part of his LASER model (which I was less persuaded by), Lee offers a very good chapter on assessment work, with a summary of possible information sources for the client and coach and some really nice sample questions
• The final chapter is a thoughtful piece on the skills and abilities needed by coaches.

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Why I rate this book

• I too believe that aligning personal goals with organisational expectations is key to helping clients to find a sustainable and successful way to be a leader in an organisation, so this book’s underlying philosophy is dear to my heart
• The ACE part of Lee’s model draws heavily on Cognitive Behavioural approaches to individual change and I have found CBT tools to be very effective in coaching
• It’s written in a very accessible style
• It’s practical - it includes mini case studies to demonstrate the points being made
• It makes it easy for coaches to go a bit deeper in their conversations with clients.

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Paperback: 184 pages
Publisher: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (1 Oct 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 085292996X
ISBN-13: 978-0852929964
Product Dimensions: 24 x 17.6 x 1.6 cm

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