ABSTRACT
The replacement of the word 'leadership' with 'coaching' in the quotation would be a fair description of what in my experience has become the prevailing approach to coaching taken on conventional leadership development programmes. In encouraging leader-managers, as participants on leadership development programmes, to engage with coaching, it was neither my intention to develop them as coaches, nor to suggest that they might coach the people who reported to them. R. D. Stacey contends that a coach who 'follows rules and step-by-step procedures when working with leaders and managers is in fact using the tools and techniques of instrumental rationality'. The traditional use of coaching on leadership development programmes involves the participants working directly with a coach in order to identify and support their personal development. On traditional leadership development programmes, psychometrics is used as a means of developing self-awareness in addition to self-reflection.
