Book Focus – Developing Coaching Skills by Dietmar Sternad
Developing Coaching Skills by Dietmar Sternad is a small book with a lot of stuff. Maybe that’s why it’s subtitled, ‘A concise introduction’. This book will give any first-line manager a good introduction to coaching and in the process give them more knowledge, skills and confidence to have good coaching conversations. The book has just five chapters and in those chapters you will learn about:
- What coaching is.
- Effective coaching conversations and the GROW framework.
- The coaching process (this is more for professional coaches and not managers).
- Essential coaching skills. This section is a must-read for any manager.
- It also has information on coaching tools.
The great thing about this book is that it has just over 100 pages but contains everything necessary to give any first-line manager a good grasp of coaching principles.
Apart from giving managers a good framework to structure a coaching conversation using GROW, it provides a lot of sample questions which managers can learn from. It also delves deep into the skills needed to have good coaching conversation and discusses the following:
- listening skills
- questioning skills
- summarising skills
- feedback skills
- becoming aware of others
- dealing with emotions
In addition to the required skills the coaching mindset is also explored.
Following is a poster of one summary lesson from the book. The lesson is a summary of the GROW framework.
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