Coaching for (a) Change
How to Engage, Empower, and Activate People
The persuasive leadership guide Coaching for (a) Change models helping one’s employees take control of their own growth under the compassionate guidance of a coach.
Greg Giuliano’s empowering managerial guide Coaching for (a) Change emphasizes empathy in driving meaningful organizational change.
Eschewing command-and-control approaches to management, the book first makes suggestions for facilitating a switch toward empathetic coaching in which managers “Aim, Align, and Act.” An imagined exchange with a manager following a script built from the coaching system helps show the three steps—clarifying goals and intentions, creating commitment and accountability, executing and following through with plans—in process, alongside commentary on the positives and potential missteps of the method.
Next, the book introduces its GR8 (“great”) coaching method, a structured model to help leaders adopt a positive coaching mindset. Its numbered steps cover Aim, Align, and Act in succession too. Bullet points listing condensed prompts for discussion or opportunities for reflection, short paragraphs, and a concise summary following each of the three sections make the text useful as a quick reference guide. After the discussion of the GR8 coaching method, self-reflective quizzes with graduated scores encourage processing the method and envisioning how its application could improve relations between managers and employees. Footnotes, URLs, and QR codes make room for further study.
Through personal anecdotes, insights gleaned from International Coaching Federation and Harvard Business Review research, and a collection of practical strategies, the book models helping one’s employees take control of their own growth under the compassionate guidance of a coach. Giuliano recalls being a first-time manager and using the command-and-control approach, which he says led to losing several valuable members of his team. He models the benefits of an evolving managerial style with his stories.
The prose is action oriented and borders on blunt: “If there are meetings and tasks that don’t line up with your [plan], delegate or delete them.” At times, this clashes with the empathetic and otherwise encouraging tone used to introduce the method itself. Further, the GR8 methodology doesn’t address the complexity of keeping the nuances of people’s varying skills and mindsets in mind when managing a team, beyond its repeated encouragement to “empower [all] employees.” Indeed, its claims that people have benefited from implementing the GR8 coaching method are unsupported internally. Instead, the text prioritizes a fictional conversation between a leadership coach and James T. Kirk as an example, moving through the three steps of the process with Kirk responding to a script with formulaic answers. Whether or not Kirk is able to effect change with his employees is also unclear. Still, the book does an effective job of introducing its method with conviction.
Coaching for (a) Change is a practical leadership guide that promotes a workplace culture of trust and empowerment.
Reviewed by
John M. Murray
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
