Becoming a Coaching Leader

Our Main Take-Away:

This book is an excellent read for those who looking for insights on how to lift your game to become a more intentional coach of your people. Whether your circle of influence is small or large, the framework this book provides will be a great set of tools to add to your toolbelt. It has tools, downloadable resources, many examples and inspiring philosophy of coaching. 

Reasons to Read:

This is one of the book resources we use in any leadership development class or leadership coaching process.  Directed toward both coaches and business leaders who want to coach those under them, Becoming a Coaching Leader is a great discussion on how to create a coaching culture within an organization. With culture being the focus of our work at Fired Up Culture, equipping leaders to be change-agents and influencers is key.  This book provides some nice frameworks and philosophies to bring a coaching culture to life.

The book targets business leaders with the idea that as a manager, success and fulfillment come by investing in the people who work under you – in other words, you’ll succeed as you help them succeed. 

In the author’s experience, most business leaders come to him for priority management: to get control of their time, schedule, and task list. Harkavay’s approach is to refuse to work with tasks and schedules until you’ve defined strategic objectives: where are you going, and what do you want in business and in life? The process he lays out includes four steps:

1. Developing a Life Plan: Figuring out your overall objectives in life.
2. Creating a Business Vision: your ideal picture of where you are going in business.
3. Developing a Business Plan: a simple, one-page overview of what you need to accomplish by when to reach your vision.
4. Priority Management: Using your vision and plan to define your schedule.

This kind of system helps you define your key tasks as a coaching-manager and equip your people to do the same. 

Amazon Summary:

As a coach to some of the country’s highest-profile executives, Daniel Harkavy has witnessed the transformation–both professional and personal–that comes when leaders utilize coaching to turn their paycheck-driven teams into vibrant and successful growth cultures. Since founding his company in 1996, Harkavy and his team have coached thousands and shared their knowledge by certifying coaching leaders across the country. Now, in this strategic and thought-provoking guide, he shares his proven strategy for improving your team’s performance while raising quality of life inside and outside of the office. You’ll learn the core four foundations to every coaching strategy, the most powerful leadership tools you can and should leverage, and the key behaviors and disciplines of successful coaching leaders. Coaching makes developing people a high-payoff activity. Complete with quick leadership quizzes and a quick-reference road map for implementation, Becoming a Coaching Leader shows you how to leverage coaching techniques to equip tomorrow’s leaders and pave a lasting leadership legacy.