This is the book that started my collection of old coaching books.  In the late 1990s I was helping my sister move her family across country.  As we were packing her books, I came across this among those she was sending to charity.  She said she had attended a course on this in the 1980s where this book was given to the attendees.  After admitting she had never opened it, she gave the book to me.

What interested me from the beginning was that coaching as described by the author, Ferdinand Fournies, has been presented to thousands of managers in seminar form before the book was published.  According to Fournies, the book “deals with certain specific beliefs managers have about their subordinate workers, about themselves as bosses, and about the seemingly undefinable process called management. . . . [as well as] the techniques you can use as a manager to solve people-performance problems.” (pp vii-viii).

 As with other coaching books from this period, the focus is on coaching as part of a performance appraisal process and a way to deal with problems.  Fournies five step coaching “face-to-face discussion” model includes:

1.  Getting agreement that a problem exists.

2.  Mutually discuss alternative solutions.

3.  Mutually agree on action to be taken to solve the problem.

4.  Follow up to insure that agreed upon action has been taken.

5.  Recognize any achievement.

In 2000 Fournies published a revised and updated book where his five step model were the same as in 1979 with the exception of step five where ”recognize” was changed to “reinforce”. The purpose of this revised book was to “help managers do better what they get paid to do, to improve their employees’ performances, quantitatively and qualitatively, through specific, face-to-face interventions called coaching.

The type of coaching presented in Fournies book is for people who use coaching in the performance of their day-to-day job responsibilities. The message for professinal coaches is that the skills of coaching can be effectively used by anyone. It is our responsibility to be inclusive and collaborative with others who are using coaching skills for the betterment of others.

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