Interview with Georgina Woudstra, author of Mastering the Art of Team Coaching (Second Edition): An emergent approach to unleashing the potential in teams
Georgina Woudstra, author of Mastering the Art of Team Coaching (Second Edition): An emergent approach to unleashing the potential in teams recommends a superb set of books! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Georgina's book:
Description from Bookshop.org: (All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Mastering the Art of Team Coaching (Second Edition): An emergent approach to unleashing the potential in teams
Do you want to take your team coaching to the next level?
Are you looking for an approach that is flexible, forward-thinking, and can make a real impact?
As a coach, you’re well aware of the positive changes that coaching can bring to any team or organisation, big or small. You know that with the right guidance, people can work together to overcome any obstacle. However, the fixed model approach of more traditional team coaching can have limitations in our fast-paced, ever-changing world. Here is where the idea of working emergently comes in.
In this new edition, Georgina Woudstra delves deeper into the art of emergent team coaching, offering fresh insights on guiding teams through stages of team development and maturity. New chapters and refined frameworks equip coaches not with rigid formulas, but with a map and compass to navigate real-world challenges.
With Woudstra’s practical guide, you will learn how to develop your:
Confidence – to fearlessly handle any challenging situation
Competence – to intervene effectively and efficiently as a team coach
Coherence – to bring together concepts and tools into a cogent approach
Congruence – to form a coaching style that is true to who you are and works for your clients
Whether you're a new reader or revisiting Woudstra’s groundbreaking work, this edition offers an adaptive framework that will transform your team coaching.
Buy On:
Bookshop.org UK £27.54
Bookshop.org US $36.99
Blackwells £28.99
Waterstones £28.99
Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization by Robert Kegan, Lisa Laskow Lahey. Description from Blackwells: (All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
One book that has had a profound impact on me is Immunity to Change by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey. It opened up a completely new lens on why we sometimes struggle to change, even when we’re deeply committed to it. As someone highly invested in the art of transformation, this book helped me understand the underlying assumptions and hidden commitments that often block real progress. It resonates deeply with my work as a team coach, especially in guiding teams to become aware of and navigate their own competing commitments. It’s a powerful reminder that sustainable change begins with awareness and honesty about what’s really going on beneath the surface. It’s a brilliant resource for understanding transformation at the intersection of personal, team, and organisational development.
Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization
To make the journey into The Power of Now we will need to leave our analytical mind and its false created self, the ego, behind. Although the journey is challenging, Eckhart Tolle offers simple language and a question and answer format to show us how to silence our thoughts and create a liberated life.
Surrender to the present moment, where problems do not exist. It is here we find our joy, are able to embrace our true selves and discover that we are already complete and perfect. If we are able to be fully present and take each step in the Now we will be opening ourselves to the transforming experience of The Power of Now.
Buy On:
Bookshop.org US $32.55
Blackwells £25.00
Waterstones £25.00
Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
The Team Discovered: Dialogic Team Coaching by Bennett H. Bratt. Description from : (All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Recently, I revisited The Team Discovered by Bennett Bratt. It’s a thoughtful book that challenges prescriptive models of team performance and instead advocates for a more emergent, dialogic approach—very much aligned with my own philosophy of coaching. I’d rate it 9/10, especially for how it encourages teams to find their own language for success rather than fitting into externally imposed frameworks.
The Team Discovered: Dialogic Team Coaching
This hopeful, poignant, and deeply insightful book brings the wisdom of Dialogic OD and the heritage of Diagnostic OD into an expansive view of how to best support teams in a world of immense diversity and attention poverty. Bennett Bratt offers a new approach to team development that meets today’s teams where they in a complex world with intense demands and precious little time. This book challenges widely used approaches to team development that utilize data showing a gap between current and desirable team performance. Most methods presume some kind of evaluative comparison is comparison to other groups, comparison to large data sets, comparison to best practices, comparison to a theoretical ideal. Instead, Ben explains why a dialogic approach to the use of questionnaire data is better at helping teams author their own narrative of effectiveness, one they will own and live into. While showing how to make data useful, Bratt persuasively argues that comparison is at best, a distraction and at worst, debilitating. The book illustrates how to bring the mindsets and tools of Dialogic OD to team coaching through an extended case example. Join a pair of OD practitioners, Ava and Orlando, as they learn about the unique facets of the client team and its VP leader Juliette. On the heels of recent significant changes, including a reorganization, the team and leader discover their unique path to greater effectiveness using Dialogic OD mindsets and tools customized in a team coaching setting.
Part exploration of the Dialogic OD mindset and part illustrative story, this book brings empathy not only to the impossibly difficult circumstances teams and their leaders all too often find themselves in, but also to the OD practitioners who enter into their dynamic world with their own narratives of what “good” means. Join them as they negotiate towards solutions with the greatest possible utility and take up the mindset and tools that bring Dialogic OD to life in the world of teams.
Buy On:
Abe Books £10.76
Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. Description from Bookshop.org: (All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame remains a timeless favourite. It’s a story about friendship, loyalty, and the sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant interplay of very different personalities. On the surface, it’s a gentle, whimsical tale, but beneath it lies a rich exploration of group dynamics, loyalty, and the interplay of diverse personalities. Mole’s curiosity, Ratty’s steady wisdom, Badger’s quiet authority, and Toad’s exuberant impulsiveness- they each bring their own dynamic to the group, and through their adventures and conflicts, they learn to relate, adapt, and grow together. As a team coach, I find it a beautifully metaphorical reflection of what it means to support a group of individuals in becoming more than the sum of their parts and how differences can both challenge and enrich a collective.
What strikes me now, particularly as someone who works with team development, is how this little band of woodland creatures mirrors the dynamics we often see in teams: competing needs, unspoken loyalties, miscommunication, and ultimately, the potential for growth and harmony when there's genuine care and mutual respect. It’s a gentle, symbolic lesson in human relationships, and one I appreciate more with each rereading.
The Wind in the Willows
Discover the joy and wonder of Mary Poppins in the classic adventures!
This slipcase, using original artwork, contains all six original Mary Poppins stories: Mary Poppins, Mary Poppins Comes Back, Mary Poppins Opens the Door, Mary Poppins in the Park, Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane / Mary Poppins and the House Next Door (2-in-1 edition).
When their new nanny, Mary Poppins, arrives on a gust of the East Wind, greets their mother, and slides up the banister, Jane and Michael’s lives are turned magically upside down.
You can now read all six of these wonderfully original tales about Jane and Michael’s adventures with the magical Mary Poppins. In each book Mary takes the children on the most extraordinary outings: to a fun fair inside a pavement picture; to visit Uncle Andrew who floats up to the ceiling when he laughs; on a spectacular trip to see the Man-in-the-Moon! With her strict but fair, no-nonsense attitude, combined with amazing magical powers, things are never straightforward with Mary Poppins! But she has only promised to stay until the wind changes…
Beautifully presented in a slipcase with original artwork, this is the perfect gift to be enjoyed all year round.
Buy On:
Bookshop.org UK £9.49
Bookshop.org US $19.99
Blackwells £20.00
Waterstones £25.00
Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
These days, I lean toward audiobooks. I love to immerse myself in a novel during a long car or train journey, and I find that my morning dog walks are the perfect time for listening to inspiring work-related books - especially those that explore individual, group, and societal effectiveness. It’s a way to let ideas seep in more intuitively and often sparks fresh insight for the day ahead.
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
The Winchester Bookshop
I really enjoy browsing in secondhand bookshops; there’s something special about the mix of unexpected finds and well-loved stories. Winchester, where I live, has a few great ones. The Winchester Bookshop is a favourite - it’s tucked away down a little side street and has three floors packed with all sorts of books. I love the slower pace of wandering through and seeing what catches my eye. It’s a lovely way to find books that aren’t always on the mainstream shelves, and I like the idea of giving an old book a new home.
Many thanks to Georgina for recommending a superb set of books! Please don't forget to check out Mastering the Art of Team Coaching (Second Edition): An emergent approach to unleashing the potential in teams.
Daryl
Image Copyrights: (Mastering the Art of Team Coaching (Second Edition): An emergent approach to unleashing the potential in teams), Harvard Business Review Press (Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization), BMI Publishing (The Team Discovered: Dialogic Team Coaching), Walker Books Ltd (The Wind in the Willows).
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