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Title | The Psychology of Coaching, Mentoring & Learning |
Author | Ho Law, Sara Ireland & Zulfi Hussain | |
Publisher | Wiley | |
ISBN | 978 0 470 02844 5 | |
Usefulness | 4/5 | |
In this book, Law and his colleagues illustrate the connections between coaching, mentoring and learning, with evidence of impact and explanations of cause and effect.
The highlight for me was the second chapter, which reviews the emergence of coaching psychology in the 1950s and explores the popularity of coaching from the late 1990s. It is the first serious attempt to help explain the learning processes at work in coaching. Chapter three focuses on the links between coaching and mentoring and learning. Chapters four and five look at definitions and the development of learning with organisations, respectively. Chapter six offers the authors’ own cross-cultural coaching model, building on the work of Rosinski, with pertinent points about the role of emotional intelligence. The remaining chapters look at tools and techniques, resources, case studies and the future of coaching. The book is relatively short, given the breadth of the title and the authors’ expertise. I felt some of the case studies could have been left out, and a fresh approach to old models would have been useful, such as in the section on evaluation. Overall, though, the authors have succeeded in bringing evidenced-based thinking, a strong research base and interesting new ideas together. |