A 'must read' book for coaches, mentors and consultants - Rated 
This book discusses the practice, training, skills, capacities and the development and supervision of coaching, mentoring and organisational consultancy. Anyone working in these professions will benefit significantly from reading this book. This includes the areas of self-awareness, self-development and supporting your clients with transformational change.
Seminal Book on our Profession - Rated
This is a book about our profession which has all the right ingredients to help from a practical or philosophical point of view. I read the book from cover to cover, but it's just as useful to pull out the section in which you are interested and use the information.
You can read this book at a few different levels:
As a novice who is seeking a thorough grounding in the main theory underpinning our profession.
As a practitioner who is looking to improve their competence or capability in specific areas.
As an experienced practitioner who is looking to increase their capacity to deliver change in ever more complex and ambiguous environments.
The book has a few dozen approaches and tools, many of which I've used with success on assignments. Several were new to me and I'm looking forward to integrating them into my personal tool bag.
Coach or Supervisor - Buy this book! - Rated
If you're a coach wanting to be a better coach you should read this book. Written in a way that allowed me to truly and more deeply reconnect with the basics was totally inspiring. I found a thirst for the knowledge developing that comes along only very very occasionally. And moving through the book to understand supervision and its place has lifted my coaching to another level of awareness. Thank you for sharing your time and experience with us.
Challenging and Accessible - Rated
Finding good books on coaching can be quite a challenge, but once you find them, you tend to return to them over and over again. For me, this will be one such book: it covers some quite complex coaching and supervision models in a way that is accessible, rather than aimed at showing how much the authors know. Well written and structured, it considers a wide range of topics (perhaps the sub-title "supervision and development" is a slight misnomer as the book is broader than that might indicate (or at least to me!), and avoids the current fad for numerous "lists" of how to do things.
The only encouragement for the authors would be that one of the real nuggets - a chapter on "the deference threshold" is tucked away in an appendix. It deserves to be in a bold chapter, in the centre of the book.
Highly recommended
Stimulating and accessible - if you're a coach, buy this book - Rated
As a fan of Peter Hawkins' previous books and of his coaching supervision workshops, I have been looking forward to reading this book, co-written with Nick Smith, for some time. I was expecting it to be about coaching supervision - which it is - but it ranges much more widely than this as well, exploring team coaching, shadow consulting, organisational coaching, coaching capacities, working with difference and the classic 7-eyed model of supervision (read a summary at http://www.mikethementor.co.uk/classic/7eyed.php#7eyed). This model is not only of interest to people wanting to be coaching supervisors (or receive coaching supervision) - it is also at the heart of transformational coaching, the kind of coaching that leads not so much to a plan of action for the coachee but to a shift in the coachee's state of being. Any coach who aspires to work with leaders should know and be able to use this model - the book is worth buying for this alone. Although its only February, I would be surprised if a more stimulating coaching book is published this year!
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