12 Essential Books for Leaders Who Coach
Getting started with the Coaching Leadership Style
There are a lot of great books out there for leaders interested in adding coaching skills to their leadership practice. The 12 books below are the best place to start, but if you’d like a full and up-to-date list of coaching books for leaders, check out the Leader as Coach Library.
Difficult Conversations
Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen
“Interpretations and judgments are important to explore. In contrast, the quest to determine who is right and who is wrong is a dead end.”
Difficult conversations are an inevitable part of life. When we learn how to approach them from a place of openness and learning, rather than defensibility and fear, our relationship to them is transformed. What I appreciate most about this book, other than the invitation to treat difficult conversations as learning conversations, is the acknowledgement that each person will have a different experience of the same situation — none more true than the others — making it critical to honor, understand, and find the overlapping realities in order to have mutually respectful and productive conversations.
Time to Think
Nancy Kline
“The quality of a person’s attention determine’s the qualities of other people’s thinking.”
In order to improve our actions we must improve our thinking, and the most important factor for good thinking is how we are being treated by the people around us. This seemingly simple insight can transform organizations, but to give our attention in ways that unleash powerful thinking requires self-awareness and unconditional positive regard. Time to Think is a guide for leaders who want to learn how to increase their quality attention so that those around them think more clearly and creatively.
Quiet Leadership
David Rock
“Doing the thinking for other people is not just a waste of our own energy; it also gets in the way of other people working out the right answers.”
How do we manage people and teams when thinking is the dominant activity that creates value? Quiet Leadership answers this question through the lens of neuroscience and looks at how managers can improve thinking by understanding how the brain works. This book pairs well with Time to Think — both authors believe that improved thinking is the most important way to increase performance and business outcomes. Focus on thinking first, and everything else will follow.
Good Authority
Jonathan Raymond
“You can choose wonder over certainty, now instead of later, and see fear not as a reason to shut down but as a reminder to open up.”
Jonathan Raymond cuts to the chase in the introduction of Good Authority: solving your teams problems is not only not the solution, it is the source of many of those problems in the first place. Leaders who coach know this, and work with others to support them in finding their own solutions. A highlight of this book is the Accountability Dial, a simple framework that can be used to have clear, respectful conversations that put accountability at the center of personal and professional growth.
The Art of Possibility
Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander
“The history of transformational phenomena — the Internet, for example, or paradigm shifts in science, or the spread of a new religion — suggests that transformation happens less by arguing cogently for something new than by generating active, ongoing practices that shift a culture’s experience of the basis for reality.”
This delightful book, from the minds and hearts of a psychologist and a orchestra conductor, invites the reader into a world of possibility. If the source of what seems to block us in our daily lives is actually the set of assumptions we carry about the world, then creating new frames for our thinking will open new pathways for ourselves, our teams, and our organizations. Through a series of practices, paired with charming stories from real life, the Zanders invites us to engage in personal evolution that will enhance our lives both personally and professionally.
Thanks for the Feedback
Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen
“Nothing affects the learning culture of an organization more than the skill with which its executive team receives feedback.”
Giving clear and grounded feedback is an essential part of coaching others, but if the receiver isn’t willing to receive where does that leave us? Rather than “pushing” feedback out, Thanks for the Feedback shows leaders how to create a culture of “pull”, where learning about ourselves (leaders included) is central to how we engage with feedback for personal and professional growth. Written by the authors of Difficult Conversations, these two books work well together for leaders who want to be more effective (and less stressed) when it comes to giving and receiving feedback.
Helping People Change
Richard Boyatzis, Melvin Smith, and Ellen Van Oosten
A high-quality coaching relationship amplifies both job engagement and career satisfaction, and can be leveraged to help organizations develop and retain their best and brightest talent, especially among special and at-risk groups such as emerging leaders, minority groups, and women.
Full disclosure here — Melvin Smith and Richard Boyatzis were professors of mine in the Weatherhead EMBA program at Case Western University. So I might be a little biased in my positive regard of the book, but based on the reviews I read online I am clearly not alone. Helping People Change introduces leaders to Coaching for Compassion, a strengths-based approach to lasting transformation. Packed with real world examples, backed by neuroscience, and corroborated with ongoing research, this book illuminates the mindset of a coach and includes reflection and application exercises to help leaders put the lessons into practice.
Simplifying Coaching
Claire Pedrick
“Coaching is different from other conversations, and it is useful to make that difference clear by the way in which we ask questions. Coaching questions need to enable the thinker to think. They are not about what you think you need to know, or indeed want to know.”
This book is intended for professional coaches, but leaders working in the Coaching Leadership Style will get a great deal from it. The fundamental idea behind coaching is to become an attentive presence willing to reflect, mirror, and challenge another person to build awareness, gain perspective, and take new action. For leaders accustomed to having all the answers, giving space for another person to think can feel radically uncomfortable. But when leaders realize they can achieve more by doing less, the value of coaching becomes crystal clear. Simplifying Coaching is a guide to how to begin, explore, and end a coaching conversation. While simple isn’t always easy, it does lead to powerful results.
A Manager’s Guide to Coaching
Brian Emerson and Anne Loehr
“A coach is someone who helps another person reach higher effectiveness by creating a dialogue that leads to awareness and action.”
The title of this book says it all — this is an essential guide and reference manual for managers who want to utilize coaching in their leadership practice. Written specifically for managers, it covers everything from when to coach, how to coach, and how to get started. Especially useful are the practical chapters on common work issues and questions for any coaching situation.
Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
Lisa Feldman Barrett
“… your brain’s most important job is not thinking. It’s running a little worm body that has become very, very complicated.”
I am a big fan of Lisa Feldman Barrett’s ability to share complex neuroscience research with humor and clarity. Before we consciously think, our brain and body unconsciously act. Understanding what the brain is doing and why can help a leader decipher between intentional action and unconscious conditioned tendencies. Seeing human behavior as the result of prediction patterns based on past experiences opens up possibility for lasting change and long term excellence.
Emotional Agility
Susan David
“Emotionally agile people are dynamic. They demonstrate flexibility in dealing with our fast-changing, complex world. They are able to tolerate high levels of stress and to endure setbacks, while remaining engaged, open, and receptive.”
Emotions are essential for surviving and thriving in the world. They are our body’s responses to signals from the outside, and keep our inner state and outward behavior synced with what is going on around us. They keep us safe, tell us important things, and play a crucial role in decision making. Susan David offers a science-based approach for navigating life’s twists and turns with self-acceptance, clear-sightedness, and an open mind by working with our emotions instead of surpressing them.
Not Knowing
Steven D’Souza and Diana Renner
“The problem with knowledge is in the very fact that it is so useful. We cling to it even in situations when it has the potential to limit us — to paradoxically get in the way of new learning and growth.
The more we know, the less we see. Powerful coaching comes from a leader’s ability to embrace the unknown and see the world in new ways. Not knowing is a choice to open up to new experiences and learning, to see ourselves and others in new ways, and to build the capacity to sit in discomfort in service of something greater than ourselves. If you are ready to step to the edge, push beyond the known, and tap unto unimagined possibility and potential, this book is for you.
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