Financial Times Guide to Business Coaching, The (Financial Times Series) Paperback – 10 Aug. 2020

This is an indispensable book for any coach. It covers an impressive, up-to-date breadth of coaching topics, tools and approaches, ranging from ‘Do you have what it takes’ (to be a Coach) to advanced topics such as Coaching and Diversity, and Group Coaching. There is enough theory and background to spark reflection, though topics are always firmly grounded in practical application. Scoular is generous with her deep expertise and passion for business coaching and the tone throughout is at once illuminating and inviting. Lots of tips, gentle humour and some excellent contributions from guest experts combine further to make for a hugely informative, practical, engaging and pleasurable read.

As a disciple of Anne Scoular, The FT Guide to Business Coaching provided my first grounding in coaching techniques. I can now heartily recommend this second edition to anyone who is thinking of training as a business coach, whether your ambition is to apply coaching approaches to an existing day job or to forge a new career as a professional coach. This compact and readable book anticipates and answers all the questions you might have. Beginning with explaining what coaching actually is – a surprisingly often misunderstood concept – and whether it is for you, it continues by setting out your training options. Succinctly, Anne summarises the principal coaching methods and tools and how they can be applied to different scenarios such as career coaching (likely to be more topical than ever given the current economic upheavals). Throughout, Anne focuses on how you will make the most of your new-found skills and, drawing on her experience working with thousands of trainee and experienced coaches, how you can make a living from coaching whilst being open about the reasons why some people fail to do so. This edition contains a raft of new case studies and guest contributions. The advice from Liz Gooster on digital marketing is well worth reading as is the totally new chapter, written in collaboration with Sheldon Daniel, on coaching and diversity which provides a very valuable addition to our understanding of a crucial subject that, having long been overlooked has now come to the fore. Highly recommended!

For anyone who knows Anne Scoular, this book will delight in that her familiar, compelling voice sparkles from every page. For anyone who doesn’t know her (yet), but who has an interest in coaching, grab this book with both hands! Packed full of wise words, sound advice and a deep passion and knowledge for the field, the FT Guide to Business Coaching is a tour de force in its astonishingly comprehensive coverage of all things coaching. The first edition was already rich in content and insight. The new edition has been updated throughout and has a welcome and timely new chapter on diversity, co-authored with Sheldon Daniel. Full disclosure: I published this book first time around and have contributed a short section to the revised edition: this doesn’t detract from the fact that it represents a gold standard in coaching guides and has much to offer both novices and experts alike.

I have recently become interested in the field of executive coaching. Anne’s book was recommended as a key book to explore all aspects of coaching. I found the book a refreshing insight which was written in very accessible language. The examples are well considered and useful and Anne’s depth of experience shows through as does her deep love for the coaching craft. She has clearly tried to make the book relevant to current business leader challenges and the chapter on diversity by Sheldon Daniel was the first I have read that tried to deal practically with how difference plays out in the coaching relationship. This was a useful base text for someone like me who wanted a helicopter view of executive coaching. Highly recommended.

I’m on a coaching course in anticipation of becoming a full-time coach, so I read a LOT of coaching text-books. This is absolutely one of the best of them. A lot of coaching books are useful introductions (e.g. The coaching habit by Michael Bungay-Stanier), or very academic resources intended for degree/ masters study. And then there’s books like this, which span both how to get to grips with this broad subject, how to practice across the full range of coaching activities - contracting, GROW model, monitoring impact of sessions, providing feedback, managing challenges - e.g. ethics, confidentiality, equality and diversity, stakeholder management). And it manages to dispense this sheer volume of information with a lightness of touch and a sense of humour that I really admire. I bought both the first edition and the second, and the second is a considerable improvement, with a particular focus on equality and diversity which I think even my tutor learned from. Alongside Julie Starr’s coaching manual and Johnathan Passmore’s Coaching for Performance, this is one of the coaching books I draw on most often when writing assignments. I can’t speak highly enough of it.

For anyone even vaguely considering business coaching as something to do for a living, or otherwise, this is a must-read. It is still the best book on this topic that I’ve read, as a comprehensive overview but with enough depth to help you work out if this something you want to explore. The second edition has an excellent and timely chapter on coaching and diversity. The writing style, as ever with Anne Scoular, is easy to read, as if she is talking to you, in a way that just drew me in and made me keep turning the pages. But it’s also a great reference book to come back to in the future. I can’t praise it highly enough - it is one of the most important introductory reference books in the arena of coaching, and probably the most reader-friendly.