Business Coaching & Mentoring For Dummies Paperback – Illustrated, July 17, 2017

Did you ever wonder what those executive coaches really do? Two of the best, Marie Taylor and Steve Crabb tell all in "Business Coaching and Mentoring for Dummies." I know them both and was eager to see what they came up with. Wow! With their years of experience to draw from. they pack an abundance of useful information into this comprehensive guide. Caution! Just looking at the Table of Contents may take your breath away. I have one big disagreement. It is not for dummies, but for bright, resourceful leaders who want to get the best out of their careers and help their teams, colleagues and employees to thrive and succeed as well.

I highly recommend this book to those seeking to have clear and direct instruction on the topics therein discussed.

Coaching and mentoring is a relatively recent phenomena in the business world. In my youth, it wasn’t called coaching, it wasn’t called mentoring: it was called “management training”. Proctor & Gamble and IBM and other large companies would bring in levies of fresh college graduates each year and begin them with a general introduction to the ways of big business. Management trainees were closely watched and their efforts channeled into the areas where they seemed to fit.For decades the system worked, but them came changes in social outlook, mores and laws. The earlier groups of trainees were largely white, largely male – and that became evidence of discrimination. The human potential movements of the 60s and 70s latched onto this and began selling their programs into the corporate market.All of thuat has morphed inito the concepts of coaching and mentoring as ways to maximize opportunities and performance.I have reservations on the validity of the underlying theories, but this is a good, workmanlike exposition of the goals, techniques and tools of an effective coaching and mentoring program for business managers. Will it turn every employee into a champion? No. Will implementation help businesses improve their overall productivity? I think so.Will it hurt to try these techniques and implement philosophies? I don’t think so. In fact, I think many managers- not just people offering coaching and mentoring services – will benefit from the understanding this book provides. It’s a solid and informative read for business people.Jerry

I obtained this Dummies book because I wanted to know more about coaching, something I have done many times professionally, but I wanted to know more and obtain some different ideas and opinions. My experience with the ‘For Dummies’ series has been uniformly excellent and, as many articles and short books on the topic that I’ve read, I now feel like I’ve got a through grounding in the subject. My opinion of the 'For Dummies' series remains intact and may have moved a few notches higher with this book.I’ve always been skeptical of the coach/consulting business as a business, despite my having coached many professionals over the years. My coaching was never my professional title, it was what I did as a manager and mentor of professionals. In my opinion, many of the 'professional coaches' that I’ve met were very good at manipulating language to their advantage (ie House of Lies) without adding much value. In many cases, when dealing with outside coaches, my experience has been that whatever I was seeing was bait to see if they could get extended gigs working to help while adding little of substantial and immediate value. I've always been very focused in coaching to make sure the value and take-aways were clear and large, there so long as the subject was willing to accept coaching. There's a great section talking about this in the book entitled “Addressing Willingness to Learn before Teaching” which was on page 88 in my edition of the book.Often, books about coaching are buried in Dilbert-speak. This is NOT one of those. Clear, sharp and well written, the book begins by talking about coaching in general, styles specifically and delves into tools to get a business back to growing, establishing emotional intelligence goals in leaders, supporting the identity and establishing programs to ‘train the trainers.’ In short, it is pretty much everything I can imagine needing in a roughly 350-page book. What’s more, what is here has been pared down to essentials. An old quote (Einstein I think) says to simplify everything as much as possible but not more. There isn’t a spare word in the book. Even the stories (the Greek mythology story cited about Odysseus, Telemachus and his coach, Mentor, may become a part of my story catalogue.)My favorite sections are the Developing Vision, Mission and Values, which ordinarily I’d be somewhat skeptical in reading about. In this book, it is smart and actionable: Identify the locus of control, “What do you want” and consolidating content. Very well informed, very well written. From there, it works to help develop vision into workable plans.As usual, in the ‘For Dummies’ there is a section, the Part of Tens, that serves as an excellent supplement (to the point where I usually scan this prior to reading.) In the case of this book, it could be (usually it can be) referred to “Do you want to know more?” In most ‘For Dummies’ books, including this one, the Part of Tens lists additional sources of information and references on the topic. ‘The Ten Tips for Leader Who Coach or Mentor People in Business’ could be a separate publication all by itself…amazing advice.All in all, an excellent guide, a strong recommendation and a thank you to the Wiley Corp for their series and to the authors for doing an excellent job on a topic that is ordinarily fluffed, puffed and lacking more than basic information.Thank you for a great read!

I'm a life coach and am interested in adding business and career coaching to my skill set. I've had Dummy books before so I admit to not having high hopes for this book. I am so surprised and pleased! This book offers information that can be applied to all coaching niches. There's information explaining the differences between coaching, mentoring, and therapies. Many areas of business coaching are included here, including group coaching and executive coaching, word choices and their potential effects, and so much more. I'm mining this book for my own coaching business as I'm finding tips here that I don't recall from my training, which is really exciting. It also touches on neuro-linguistic programming. I recommend this to coaches who are only a few years into their coaching practice.

I have been a learning coach (mainly coaching professionals and students through licensing exams) and educational consultant for about 15 years, but I wanted to up my game a little bit so I picked up this book to see what I could learn. And it has been a very valuable book and giving me ideas on building up my own practice from just "helping out friends" into an actual business. The book is so jam-packed with information that I'll need to go through it a couple more times, but it really seems to be great information and is giving me a lot to think about.