Coaching for Professional Development

Coaching is widely used to develop managers and executives, but many practitioners feel its performance-focused methods leave out imagination and creative thinking. Christine A. Eastman proposes that literature can help shift coaching culture. Drawing on examples from major literary works, she shows how fiction can sharpen coaches' skills, suggest answers to workplace difficulties, and help people give clearer shape to their own ideas. Her central case is that stories about loss, failure, alienation and suffering can deepen a coaching conversation and produce real gains for organisations. Reading fiction, she argues, allows us to picture lives unlike our own, and attention to language can draw out what lies unspoken in ourselves and others.

Eastman describes how she used literary texts with her students to show them that reading could strengthen their coaching practice. Each chapter takes a different work as its starting point. Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener illustrates the role of metaphor in coaching, and Cather's Neighbor Rosicky examines emotion. Cheever's The Swimmer is used to explore failure, and Miller's Death of a Salesman shows how family relationships shape behaviour at work. Lampedusa's The Leopard is compared with Personalisis, a conventional personality tool, and Shakespeare's The Tempest serves as a way into questions of power and manipulation. Throughout, Eastman applies coaching models to these fictional situations to show how coaches, HR professionals and students can extend the scope of their practice and test their understanding of coaching theory.

The book joins higher education and industry, and it includes case studies throughout. It is aimed at practising and trainee coaches who want to bring more creativity into their work, at tutors and advisors on coaching courses, and at HR and learning and development professionals who are trying to build a coaching culture in their organisations.