Adaptive Coaching

Book excerpt: If every person is unique, why do coaches use the same worn-out methods for everyone? Employees seeking performance improvement require a coaching approach tailored to meet their specific needs and preferences. In Adaptive Coaching, Second Edition, executive development experts Terry Bacon and Laurie Voss draw from over 2,000 case studies of Fortune 500 employees to show how people prefer to be coached — and the powerful results coaches can achieve by being adaptable. This essential handbook offers the key tools and techniques that coaches require to identify clients’ real needs, negotiate expectations, adapt to different working styles, and help clients change. Bacon and Voss also include numerous examples of coaching dialogues that illustrate how to initiate coaching sessions, build rapport, ask probing questions, give feedback, challenge clients, and effectively close coaching sessions. With four new chapters, Adaptive Coaching, Second Edition explores new coaching techniques for encouraging transformative change in your clients. It is the perfect companion to your creative, unique coaching sessions, teaching you to master the on-going and ever changing dialogue between coach and client.