coach-and-couch Title Coach and Couch: The Psychology of Making Better Leaders
Author Manfred F R Kets de Vries, Konstantin Korotov and Elizabeth Florent-Treacy
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978 0230506381
Usefulness To executive coaches: 2/5
To those running leadership development programmes: 4/5
assumed from the title that this book was about a psychoanalytic approach to leadership coaching. Indeed, I was intrigued in chapter 1 by the authors’ “Clinical paradigm – a way of exploring a person’s inner theatre”.

Although these are fairly mainstream psychological principles, further sub-sections on defence mechanisms and narcissism in leadership development indicated they were pushing the boundaries. However, I was disappointed by the book being primarily about Insead’s leadership development programme – interesting if you do this work but not radically new.

The material is presented in a series of essays so you can read in any order, the connecting thread being elements of their clinical
paradigm. It has very good topic overviews, especially chapter 3 – “Developmental coaching from a systems point of view” – and is full of great illustrative case studies and generous insights into their learning from failures.

In contrast to many of the unremarkable concepts in the book, I was delighted to come across three terminologies new to me: “liminality” (chapter 7), “mentalising” (12) and “authentizotic” (18) – grandiose business school jargon or language of the future? As they say in a number of chapters, “Given the space available I am unable to give further explanation”!