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This paper explores the use of coaching in supporting leadership development in a challenging team context. A case study methodology was used to uncover perspectives on the different coaching interventions incorporated in an 11-month round the world sailing race. The coaching was found to be supportive of contextually embedded team leadership development as skippers transitioned into the team leadership role. The study extends prior research by exploring how team leadership development is supported over time through a dynamic coaching intervention.

Working with people invariably involves managing emotions. This qualitative study examines a coaching intervention designed to help a group of retail support workers in one mobile communications organisation in the UK to articulate and manage their emotions more effectively in order to improve workplace relations and motivation. The paper discusses the concepts of emotion work, emotional contagion and emotion regulation in order to frame an action research study of a coaching intervention. Findings from the study suggest that following the intervention employees dealt with emotional situations in a calmer more measured way and that this impacted both individual motivation and working performance in the organisation.

This article looks at the growth of coaching in the corporate sector and considers the overlaps with training provision. Drawing on the experience of the authors, a conceptual analysis is constructed that culminates in our presentation of a simple learning strategies map that provides a framework for understanding the activities and strategies used when developing others, either through training or coaching.

This paper explores the use of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) as a way of developing the openness needed for successful communication in e-mentoring relationships. Using a case study approach research was undertaken with students participating in an online mentoring module that forms part of a Masters degree at a British university. The module involves students in ‘meeting’ and working online, via e-mail, with a mentor whom they have never met face-to-face. From the research collected to date it is possible to conclude that there is evidence to suggest that the use of NVC, with its focus on feelings and needs, encourages trusting personal relationships characterised by openness. The NVC process appeared to obviate many of the communication issues, such as silence and the affects of a limited sensory environment, that have seen to be restrictive in the development of online relationships.

This paper examines the impact of context on the development of coaching and mentoring practice. Qualitative research was undertaken with mentors working in the voluntary sector in the United Kingdom and this is combined with the author’s own reflections on coaching practice, in order to examine the role that contextual knowledge and understanding plays in the development of standards for coaching and mentoring practice. Theories of knowing, socially constructed learning and the action-oriented nature of knowledge are explored in order to explain the potential for accessing and developing coaching and mentoring ‘know how’ through practice, and to support the argument for a ‘post-technocratic’ model of professional development.