GROW coaching skills unlock potential and increase performance by increasing self-confidence and motivation. Asking effective questions in a carefully structured way promotes deeper awareness and greater responsibility which leads to practical steps to accomplish goals and overcome obstacles.
To understand the origins of the GROW Model, we begin in 1979 when John Whitmore and Graham Alexander brought The Inner Game to Europe, with the blessing of Inner Game creator Tim Gallwey. They soon realized the value of The Inner Game for leaders and managers of organizations. As pioneers of coaching in the workplace, they spent much of the 1980s developing the methodology, concepts and techniques for performance improvement in organizations. Wanting to make a real difference to people, they showed how it was possible to grow not just performance but also learning and enjoyment. Individuals become more aware, more responsible and gained a powerful sense of purpose in their work.
Coaching Performance John Whitmore Pdf Download
Our Founder Sir John Whitmore was careful to warn that, like any other model, the GROW coaching model is not the truth, nor is GROW by itself coaching. It is necessary first to develop a coaching mindset and authentic coaching behaviours in order to discover how powerful GROW can be. Focusing on transformational rather than transactional coaching, our experiential coach training programmes show managers and leaders how really to GROW people, performance and purpose.
The purpose of this book is to keep the record straight bydescribing and illustrating what coaching really is, what it can beused for, when and how much it can be used, who can use it well andwho cannot. Contrary to the attractive claims of the One MinuteManager, there are no quick fixes in business, and good coaching isa skill, an art perhaps, that requires a depth of understanding andplenty of practice if it is to deliver its astonishing potential.Reading this book will not turn you into an expert coach, but itwill help you to recognize the enormous value and potential ofcoaching, and perhaps set you on a journey of self-discovery thatwill have a profound effect on your business success, your sportingand other skills, and the quality of how you relate to others atwork and at home. This remains as true today as it did when thefirst edition of this book was published in 1992. The good news isthat coaching did not turn out to be merely the flavor of themonth, or even of the year, as some cynics had predicted. Coachinghas now achieved widespread recognition as being of value,relevance and importance in business. It is championed by the greatand good of the business community. The bad news is that the hungerfor coaching has resulted in hastily and inadequately trainedmanagers, or so-called coaches, failing to meet the expectations ofthose they are coaching. In too many cases they have not fullyunderstood the performance-related, psychological principles onwhich coaching is based. Without this understanding they may gothrough the motions of coaching, or use the behaviors associatedwith coaching, such as questioning, but fail to achieve theintended results. I hasten to reassure the potential coach,however, that the beauty of coaching lies in its depth and impact,and that you dont need a degree in psychology in order to
practice it. This third edition explains more fully theprinciples of coaching in lay terms and illustrates them withsimple analogies, not only from business but also from sport.Deeper principles are often more easily grasped away from thebiases and assumptions of ones own field of application. Thisedition clarifies still further the process and practice ofcoaching by drawing on the experience gained from the thousands ofhours of training that my colleagues and I have delivered to manythousands of participants in the intervening ten years. It hasanother purpose also. Over the years, several books on coachinghave appeared, some focusing exclusively on the application ofcoaching to personal or career development. While this is a hugelyproductive field, it is not, in my opinion, the most importantapplication of the coaching principles; but more about that later.Other books and articles have focused on the coach as the detachedoutsider. Directors of large corporations, and chief executives inparticular, may be gregarious, but they can also be very lonely.There are not many people to whom they can turn for help, often noone in their own organization. Uncertainty about trust andconfidentiality, covert in-house competition and the slipperinessof the corporate ladder often make it hard for a CEO to turn to aboardroom colleague about issues that may concern their own or apeers performance or tenure. Perhaps even more common, however, issimply the wish to consult a fresh mind, someone who brings noinvestment or position of his own, an outsider who is not involvedwith the organization or its culture. An independent coach canreflect ideas, evoke solutions and support their implementation ina way that few insiders could ever do. Senior executives areincreasingly recognizing the benefits and opportunities ofexploring new avenues in consultations with a coach scheduled on aregular basis. The same is true for senior business teams, who mayspend most of their time scattered far and wide. When they doget
In our coaching courses for managers we often include a segmenton life balance. We have managers coach each other to increasetheir awareness of the balance, or lack of it, in their livesbetween work and a number of factors such as their partner,children, leisure, adventure, quiet time for the soul, health andfitness, contribution and community. Business has taken over toomuch of too many peoples lives at too high a personal cost. Toomany executives and managers live to work rather than work to live.Stress, broken marriages, neglected children and poor health arefar more widespread than most business people dare to acknowledge.Coaching is a gentle way of raising awareness of the imbalancesthat exist, and of helping the coachee to find a way forward thatwill benefit their work and their play. This will often involvecreating a vision of the future or an ideal to aspire toward, asopposed to struggling to survive by avoiding problems. Manyexecutives are finding that regular coaching sessions with anexternal coach, even by telephone when necessary, can have atransformational impact on the quality of their performance at workand their relationships at home. While this is an immenselyvaluable proactive application of coaching, it is in one sensecurative rather than preventive. If the predominant managementethos of a company is coaching, the vital factor of balance issimply part of the agenda for good management and performance, andthe problems rarely arise in the first place. One more useful, butstill not the most useful, application of coaching that is oftenbypassed by trainers and seldom referred to in the literature isself-coaching. Anyone who
truly understands coaching will soon begin to coach themselveson everything from career choices to their golf swing, includingthose very personal issues that they would be most reluctant toshare with another. After all, self-coaching is a safe way topractice and develop the skill of coaching, which can then beapplied to others with confidence. So what is the most importantapplication of coaching? Only when coaching principles govern orunderlie all management behavior and interactions, as theycertainly will do in time, will the full force of peoplesperformance potential be released. This third edition of Coachingfor Performance is a further call for the wide recognition andemployment of these fundamental performance principles throughoutthe work place and work time. Although it may contradict someconventional beliefs about performance and challenge some habits ofa lifetime, its common sense will be hard to deny or reject. It isa call for us to come to our senses, both literally andmetaphorically. It is a call for a fundamental transformation ofmanagement style and culture. The inability of so many businessesto move beyond the language of culture change to its practiceremains a major block. In this new edition I have added a section(Chapters 1416) dealing with the recently recognized significanceto performance of emotional intelligence (EQ), the emerginginterest in spiritual intelligence (SQ) and how they both relate tocoaching. Higher workplace expectations of staff and the frequencywith which they seek meaning and purpose at work mean that coacheswill be expected to acquire greater skill in addressing thesedeeper life issues. We will look at what those skills are and howthey can be developed. Companies are also having to accept thattheir values and ethics are falling and in some cases failing underthe scrutiny of their staff as well as their customers. Coaching ishighly effective for uncovering true values and producing thealignment without which business performance can never beoptimized.
1What Is Coaching?Coaching focuses on future possibilities, notpast mistakes. he Concise Oxford Dictionary defines the verb tocoach as to tutor, train, give hints to, prime with facts. Thisdoes not help us much, for those things can be done in many ways,some of which bear no relationship to coaching. Coaching is as muchabout the way these things are done as about what is done. Coachingdelivers results in large measure because of the supportiverelationship between the coach and the coachee, and the means andstyle of communication used. The coachee does acquire the facts,not from the coach but from within himself, stimulated by thecoach. Of course, the objective of improving performance isparamount, but how that is best achieved is what is inquestion.
The teaching of both these sports, and also golf, was tackledover two decades ago by Harvard educationalist and tennis expertTimothy Gallwey, who threw down the gauntlet with a book entitledThe Inner Game of Tennis, quickly followed by Inner Skiing and TheInner Game of Golf. The word inner was used to indicate the playersinternal state or, to use Gallweys words, the opponent within onesown head is more formidable than the one the other side of the net.Anyone who has had one of those days on the court when he couldntdo anything right will recognize what Gallwey is referring to.Gallwey went on to claim that if a coach can help a player toremove or reduce the internal obstacles to their performance, anunexpected natural ability will flow forth without the need formuch technical input from the coach. At the time his books firstappeared, few coaches, instructors or pros could believe, let aloneembrace, his ideas, although players devoured them eagerly inbestseller-list quantities. The professionals ground of being wasunder threat. They thought that Gallwey was trying to turn theteaching of sport on its head and that he was undermining theiregos, their authority and the principles in which they had investedso much. In a way he was, but their fear exaggerated theirfantasies about his intentions. He was not threatening them withredundancy, but merely proposing that they would be more effectiveif they changed their approach. And Gallwey had put his finger onthe essence of coaching. Coaching is unlocking a persons potentialto maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learnrather than teaching them. This was not new: Socrates had voicedthe same things some 2000 years earlier, but somehow his philosophywas lost in the rush to materialistic reductionism of the lasttwo 2ff7e9595c
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