How to coach your team by Pam Jones, Angela Jowitt, Viki Holton, reviewed

By @SimonCocking. Available from Amazon here.

How to Coach Your Team is a toolkit for working together with your team to achieve success. Many of the questionnaires and ideas can be shared and there are guided opportunities to assess and monitor your progress on a regular basis.

Coaching teams is a challenge, all the more so when potentially some of the team members might be on the other side of the world, on different time zones too. This is a highly practical book with lots of exercises and charts to use in evaluating team performance. The importance of asking open ended questions is always crucial if you are not going to end up hearing back what they think you want to hear. It’s important to really think about how you prepare for activities, and if you give them the space to unfold and take unexpected directions, though of course not everyone is aware that they are perhaps dictating events in a certain direction rather than openly guiding the process.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/how-to-coach-your-team/id1154460764?mt=11

I found it a quick read, good illustrations and a lot of common sense. A times though it did feel a little dry, and I found myself yearning for a few examples and case studies to liven it up a bit, and bring some insights through experiences. As always when reading books like this you always think back to the times we when worked in our own particular multinationals and wondering if the kinda average to poor managers we had would be able to take on board the concepts endorsed here. Change within a large organisation is much more of a challenge, and too many decisions and alliances and allegiances still seem to be driven by clubbable groups of people, mostly male and white within the organisation. Hopefully books like this can break up this inertia, but we still may have some way to go, or perhaps the world wants more Trump-esque types to lead us?

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