Coaching Supervision at its B.E.S.T.

Coaching supervision at its BEST by Jackie Arnold

Jackie Arnold is clearly an experienced coaching supervisor who brings her practical experience to provide excellent examples of some of the frameworks she is describing. The book is full of useful resources whether you are interested in supervision in coaching, and also supervision in its wider sense. Experienced coaches will find models they are familiar with and at times it’s easy to forget whether the book is about coaching or supervision. That makes this book an ideal read for coaches too.

There is a great deal of emphasis on clean language, clearly a passion of the the author, and she also provides some great insight and examples of using clean spaces, which I think I’ll be using more of in my coaching. Although the book seems to be primarily written with internal coach supervisors in mind the author also draws reference to wider uses of the tools and it is evident how these could be useful particularly for executive coaching, and those working with senior leaders in an organisation.

A great resource, and one I’m happy to have on the shelf for future reference, the book at times feels written strongly from the perspective of supervision of coaches working within an organisation, where conflict with their role may exist, and from time to time that affected the flow of the writing. For me, the BEST brought little additional value to the book beyond an excellent title, and ironically would have been better it if was ‘best’ and not ‘BEST’