Sir John Whitmores seminal text Coaching for Performance has been, at various times,

the No. 1 Best Seller in many categories including: Management; Business team
management skills; Business coaching & mentoring skills; and Human resources
management. Over 800,000 copies sold in 23 languages, the book introduced the world
to the GROW Model, created by Sir John and colleagues in the 1980s.
Coaching is more than a skill or a technique for individual and team development. It is
invaluable for task performance and delegation. It can be deployed as effectively for
quick management interactions as it can in a half-hour coaching session.
Coaching is a powerful tool for developing leadership and employee performance
beyond the typical skill and motivational approaches to professional development.

Embedded in the process of ongoing communication and relationship building it delivers

practical, common sense approaches to developing people and services, and is a
powerful way of creating excellent results.
Most importantly it places people at the top of the agenda in action not just in word and
is an essential management style of the high performing company culture of the future.

About the Book

by Sir John Whitmore PhD
This fourth edition of the bestselling coaching book, Coaching for Performance, sees
many changes, additions and updates. It is 50 pages longer than the third edition and
over 100 longer than the first in 1992. This is by far the most comprehensive rewrite
that I have done, and it may well be the last, and I hope the most long lasting.
One of the principle reasons for the popularity of this book, we are told, is that the
language is so easy to read and understand, but I have attempted to refine that further
throughout the whole book and make it even more so. I have also divided Coaching for
Performance into four Parts: The Principles of Coaching; The Practice of Coaching;
Leadership for High Performance; and Transformation through Transpersonal Coaching.
This makes it easier to identify the subject you want and to dip in and out of it.

A New Section on Leadership for High Performance

The new section on leadership is challenging. It begins: This fourth edition of Coaching
for Performance comes at a time when humanity is facing huge challenges in the
economy, in the environment, in the widening gap between rich and poor, and in social
stress and distress and for which coaching has so much to offer.
I go on to explore the huge changes in the type of leadership required for the future,
and the challenges they will have, for example no leader of even a mid-size
organization can afford to ignore global issues any more.
1. Leaders will need far more inner strength, maturity and wisdom which comes from
deep personal development work as opposed to the externalities supplied by academic
business schools.
2. Leadership will be spread far and wide throughout organizations in future, so there
will be far more people in leadership functions and less dependence on an autocrat at
the top.
From that position we then consider in depth how leaders at every level can develop
these deeper qualities such as vision, values, authenticity, agility and alignment with a
greater purpose. This leads us into the fourth part Transpersonal coaching where I
provide a range of methods and models for advanced coaches to use to enable them to
facilitate deeper learning and personal development. This raises question like, What is
your purpose in life? and even what is perhaps the deepest of all coaching questions,
Who are you? The last chapter in this section is entitled, The Future Focus of
Coaching.
Despite these major additions to the book, I have not shied away from those many
people who are now entering this growing maturing profession of coaching. This book
will help them get started and find their way forward. They are much needed not only in
corporations but in all our institutions where the demand is also growing; institutions
such as the civil service, local government, healthcare and education, even the military
and the police are all adopting coaching and seeking coaches.

About the Coaching for Performance Training

Programme

Coaching for Performance, the industry gold standard executive coaching training, is
available as athree-level public programme or can be ordered in-house and tailored to
meet your organizations exact needs (see Coaching for Performance (Foundation) inhouse workshop). We also offer a Train the Trainer option if you would like to develop
an in-house group of coach trainers to spread the benefits of Coaching for Performance
across your organization.