Enterprise-wide Coaching
The Ten Commandments
- John Hoover - University of Colorado at Boulder, USA
Executive coaching is one of the most expensive investments organizations make in leadership development. Yet, conducting executive coaching engagements as individual, disconnected assignments with nothing to guarantee alignment, continuity, and cultural consistency is an expensive mistake at best.
In Enterprise-wide Coaching, Dr John Hoover skillfully uses his decades of experience in consulting organizations and coaching individuals to suggest how and why coaching leaders should be aligned with organizational goals and must keep the voice and interests of the organization alive in all coaching engagements.
The Ten Commandments will also help managers of coaching functions in organizations and the coaches they hire to design and structure organizational coaching engagements through an organization development lens. This will ensure that the coaches paid for by an organization for the purpose of developing, correcting, or enhancing management or leadership skills and behaviors in individuals and groups will work in tandem with the organization’s talent, leadership, and global business strategy, thereby producing maximum return on the coaching investment.
‘In Enterprise-wide Coaching: The Ten Commandments, John Hoover continues to advocate applying the craft of coaching through an organizational lens to maximize the value and benefits of coaching for both Your client leaders being coached and the entire enterprise. Dr Hoover advocates and explains how taking a strategic approach to coaching executives requires a systems perspective. John’s book will prepare executive coaches and those who manage coaching functions in organizations to use the 11 Core Competencies of the International Coach Federation (ICF) to align
what individual leaders do best with what their organizations need most—all in a cultural context that will ensure coaching consistency and continuity wherever in the world the coaching takes place’.
‘John Hoover and Enterprise-wide Coaching: The Ten Commandments are planting a flag in the ground for taking a systems approach to coaching across global enterprises to strengthen the fabric of their leadership tapestries’.
‘Implementing leadership coaching interventions in corporations requires large investment in terms of money and time for planning, execution and monitoring. However, the desired outcome from such coaching engagements often does not translate into results at the desired level since the organization could not derive significant benefits from its large investment. The reasons could be many, and hence it cannot be generalized in defining critical success factors for such engagements for different types of organizations. However, Dr John Hoover’s latest book Enterprise-wide Coaching: The Ten Commandments rightly identifies the missing link. On the basis of his vast experience in organizational transformation through executive coaching, along with a strong academic background in behavioural science and experience of cutting-edge practices in human resource functions, Dr Hoover strongly advocates making the organization a co-client in coaching engagements to ensure the voices of both the leader and the organization are heard and honoured in coaching engagements. This book is a great resource for organizations with a strong belief that leadership coaching is not a one-off event but needs to be conducted enterprise-wide. I am confident that the reader of this book will gain new insights on how to effectively deploy coaching throughout the enterprise as well as challenge some of the dysfunctional processes’.
‘Innovation is both essential and messy. Disruptive professional coaching for leaders inside organizational systems is innovation. Dr Hoover’s book cogently describes the reason coaching is hard to be explicitly clear about as a standalone professional practice. A focus on the nature of human development for leaders means we must consider the systemic influences upon an individual leader and his or her teams. The organization is the first client, the individual leader candidate for coaching is the second client and the system-wide relationships for that leader are the third client. The discipline of coaching is rigorous and sustaining the role of a coach requires tenacity rather than presuming to know more than the leader of the organizational system about what serves the strategy and performance outcomes best. This book provides clarity about the purpose, the scope and the process of coaching partnerships when effective, as well as a direct pathway for organizational leaders to create a generative partnership with dedicated and professional practitioners’.
‘Contextual coaching clearly positions the organization and the individual as co-clients with equal responsibilities as well as potential gains. In an increasingly complex world, this collaborative approach most efficiently maximizes the benefits of a coaching engagement and provides a framework for an ethical partnership with the coaching provider. Dr Hoover’s model offers his substantive, well-grounded and systemic approach in straightforward language with clear reasoning and specific tools’.
”This book by John Hoover is planting a flag in the ground for taking a systems approach to coaching across global enterprises to strengthen the fabric of their leadership tapestries.”
