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", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 14 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/hrmid.2006.04414eae.001

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

A round-up of the best book reviews recently published by Emerald.

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

Earl Carter and , Frank McMahon,Kogan Page, 2005

The authors of this book are Australian consultants who have wide-ranging practical experience of performance management and performance improvement. While the book essentially helps senior and line managers to address performance issues, the implications of using coaching will also interest training and development specialists.

The text draws on the authors’ experience in using risk-management approaches to managing people. It covers the implementation of systematic performance management and improvement and proposes simple tools and techniques.

The Introduction 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 dialog. These frame approaches towards ensuring early intervention in addressing performance issues, while also recognizing good performance or planning to deal with performance shortcomings.

There are nine chapters. Content includes: 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 the workplace. The no-nonsense, tough-minded 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, notes, questions and summaries that break the text into easy-to-read 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 is a bibliography, although there are references to a limited number of identified authors and current texts in the notes. Perhaps the main attraction of the book is its simplicity, and the fact that it offers a number of pragmatic solutions for the workplace.

Reviewed by Alan Cattell.

A version of this review was originally published in Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 38 No. 2, 2006.