Improving Employee Performance through Workplace Coaching: A Practical Guide to Performance Management

Citation

Carter, E. (2006), "Improving Employee Performance through Workplace Coaching: A Practical Guide to Performance Management", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 20 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/dlo.2006.08120dae.001

Improving Employee Performance through Workplace Coaching: A Practical Guide to Performance Management

A round-up of some of the best book reviews recently published by Emerald.Improving Employee Performance through Workplace Coaching: A Practical Guide to Performance ManagementEarl Carter, Frank McMahonKogan PageLondon2005ISBN 0 7494 4464 9178 pp.£18.99 (paperback)Review DOI 10.1108/00197850610653180

The authors of the book are both Australian consultants who have worked across a number of sectors and have wide ranging practical experience of performance management and performance improvement. While the book is essentially targeted at development of senior and line managers in terms of helping them to address performance issues, the coaching approach and implications of doing so are of obvious interest to training and development professionals.

The text seeks to draw on the authors’ experience in utilising risk management approaches to managing people. As such it covers the implementation of systematic performance management and improvement and proposes simple tools and techniques for doing so.

It is made apparent from the Introduction that the suggested approach to managing people relies on the notion of coaching in the workplace. The Introduction also includes the authors’ nine principles of a performance management system. In the following chapters context is set as regards establishing clear two-way expectations and performance dialogue. These in turn frame approaches towards ensuring early intervention in addressing performance issues, whilst also recognising good performance or planning to deal with performance shortcomings.

In total there are nine chapters within the book. Content includes setting the scene for and preparation for work based coaching; operating on the job as a coach; coaching and formal reviews; developing coaches for managing people (learning and training design); dismissal as the only solution; risk management and people management. The final chapter gives guidance on preparing your workplace.

This book is primarily about improving performance. The no-nonsense, tough minded approach taken by the authors is one whereby as they state “the answer is a good performance management system (here they use their own nine principles) that pushes performance and behaviour away from the sackable zone”. The suggested approach is simple and extremely practical in tackling performance issues on a day to day basis.

The sections on formal and informal “real time” feedback and the step by step approaches to learning design and training design for coaching make easy and interesting reading. The format of the book is simple with tables, diagrams, flow diagrams, notes, questions and summaries which break the text up into easy to read and informative chunks. There are case studies within both the main text and the Appendices. The reader may be distracted by the fact that there are a number of “lists” in the text which after the first few presented tend to have less impact. Notably absent also is a Bibliography, although there are references to limited number of identified authors and current texts within the notes. Academic this book is not, as it is based on the sound practical and relevant experience of the authors. Perhaps the attraction of this book is in its simplicity and the fact that it offers a number of pragmatic solutions for the workplace.

This review, by Alan Cattell, was published in Industrial and Commercial Training, Volume 38 Number 2, 2006.