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The Secret to Uncommon Leadership is Coaching!

This book is a compelling and powerful guide for anyone who wants to transition from being a manager to a leader, or from being a good leader to an extraordinary one.
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Praise For The Book

Knowing how to coach others is a powerful tool. Ruchira Chaudhary's book "Coaching: The Secret Code to Uncommon Leadership" is a clear and crisp guide to a core element of strong leadership: helping others up their game.

Sheryl Sandberg

COO of Facebook, and Founder of LeanIn.Org and OptionB.Org

Today's digitally oriented organisations operate at high speed and complexity - they need leaders who are coaches, not controllers. These leaders in turn have the responsibility of building future-ready leaders who are agile and nimble. A leader needs to encourage his or her team to constantly innovate, think out of the box and deliver transformative change. This book does a great job of illustrating how the best leaders do that through coaching. A timely read for anyone wishing to transition from being a manager to a leader or from being a good leader to a great one.

Nandan Nilekani

Chairman and Co-Founder Infosys, and Founding Chairman, UIDAI (Aadhaar)

At Microsoft, our culture is grounded in a growth mindset: the belief that everyone has tremendous potential to improve and grow. And what we've found is that coaching sits at the foundation of empowering each person to become a successful leader, which is why we included coaching as one of the three core attributes in our management excellence framework - Model, Coach, Care. This book helps unlock the secrets of coaching in a thoughtful collection of learnings, insights and case studies that will guide the leaders of today on how to empower the leaders of tomorrow.

Kathleen Hogan

Chief People Officer, Microsoft

Read this, then Lead this! This book provides a powerful framing of leadership as coaching. Then the book goes beyond that - to how you can embed a coaching culture throughout your organization. This is exactly what today's firms and employees need from our leaders. With this wonderful book, my great student Ruchira becomes my teacher.

Michael Gibbs

Clinical Professor of Economics, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business and co-author of the textbook Personnel Economics in Practice

Coaching is about leading from the front. It is about setting the right example and letting your game do all the talking. It’s also about being a dependable leader that the team can always count on—consistency, continuity and constancy is how I think of my cricketing legacy and leadership style. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to transition from a good captain or leader to an exceptional one.

Mithali Raj

ODI and Test captain, Indian women’s cricket team

This is a highly readable book on a subject that is thought to be specialized but, in fact, is far from being so. The book is aimed at operating managers and not at coaching specialists or HR professionals. Being anecdotal, it holds the reader’s interest. In short, buy it, read it and keep it around.

R. Gopalakrishnan

Book Review, Business Standard

Ruchira Chaudhary's book resonates with me deeply because, in many respects, it
mirrors my own leadership behaviours. It takes a fresh look at coaching, which is the
secret ingredient that distinguishes an average leader from an extraordinary one.

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

Executive Chairperson, Biocon

Real leadership is not just about building a big empire or achieving millions in revenue - its also about the journey and the teams we build along the way. How you develop your people, arm them with opportunities to grow, to flourish and help them discover their own path. Ruchira's book describes this facet in great detail and how leadership today is about asking -not telling others what to do. Coaching helps leaders elevate not just their teams but also themselves as it makes them more capable, creative, confident and self-aware.
A wonderful business book from an ex-TCS colleague.

S. Ramadorai

Former CEO and MD Tata Consultancy Services, and former advisor to the Prime Minister of India for the National Council on Skill Development

The market is full of great books on leadership, talent and coaching, but this book is different. With deep insights and fascinating anecdotes, Ruchira Chaudhary builds a powerful business case for the leader-coach, articulating that one cannot be a great leader, without being a great coach.

Sydney Finkelstein

Professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, bestselling author of Superbosses, and host of the podcast, The Sydcast

“Teach a man or woman how to fish and you give a vocation of a lifetime.”
We have heard that before, and indeed coaching is at the core of this thought! Ruchira’s book captures the essence of the philosophy, rationale, method, practical guidance and satisfying outcomes that coaching can give us all, whether in the corporate world or indeed any walk of life. The book’s publication is timely, in the post-pandemic world, when people and talent who make a demonstrable impact matter, and they too need a gentle nudge to unleash their uncommon leadership which coaching can provide.

Suresh Narayanan

Chairman and Managing Director, Nestlé India Ltd.

Get Your Secret Code to Uncommon Leadership

A Book For Our Times

Businesses are facing a new reality, characterized by a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world. This new reality has forced organizations to depart from conventional command-and-control practices to a completely new model – a model in which leaders support and guide, rather than instruct and control, their team members.
Exploring some of the key ingredients of impactful leadership, Coaching offers tips and tricks, backed by research and incisive insights, on how to become an effective leader-coach. Peppered with interesting anecdotes and analogies, drawn from sports, performing arts and other walks of life, the book is a breezy read. Interviews with corporate leaders and academics further enrich the narrative. Guaranteed to make for a very interesting read, the book will be useful to leaders, aspiring leaders and especially those that wish to transition from being just good leaders to extraordinary ones.

Inside The Book

The Leadership Crisis

A Case for Coaching

Good Managers, Bad Coaches

Why Some Managers Are Terrible Coaches

The Cornerstones of Coaching

The 4C+ Model: Capability, Clarity, Confidence and Consciousness on a Foundation of Culture

Preparing for Lift-Off

Taking the First Steps towards Uncommon Leadership

Cracking the Coaching Code

The Overarching Coaching Strategy and Template

The Coaching Construct

The Nuts and Bolts of How to Coach

Culture: The Missing Link in Coaching

Coaching and Culture Are Intertwined

Completing the Coaching Equation

Building Organization-Wide Coaching Mindset and Capacity

Tough Love

Finding the Right Balance between Tough and Love

Cracking the Coaching Code

The Overarching Coaching Strategy and Template

The Coaching Construct

The Nuts and Bolts of How to Coach

Culture: The Missing Link in Coaching

Coaching and Culture Are Intertwined

Completing the Coaching Equation

Building Organization-Wide Coaching Mindset and Capacity

Tough Love

Finding the Right Balance between Tough and Love

The Crisis Coach

Navigating Choppy Waters

Enabling Women Leaders: Finding that ‘Optimum’ Balance

Why Coaching Matters Even More

The New Learning Code

Collaborating with External Coaches

Coach Your Way to Uncommon Leadership

The Master Code: Putting It All Together

Reader Feedback

Yvonne Baranyai-Alexander

A great way to start the working year – check out the 24 best new work-life balance books link below from BookAuthority – helpful insights as we continue to navigate the work from home world!

Everything from working from home hacks, to how to balance productivity! I am also shamelessly plugging book #6, #coachingthesecretcodetouncommonleadership as I know the author Ruchira Chaudhary and she is disrupting organisational management approaches!

Dr. Catherine Wu

I used to think that “the best way to learn is to teach”
I am now convinced that “the best way to learn is to coach.”

When we coach others, we do so much more than sharing knowledge. We practice taking a step back and suspending judgment, challenging our biases and building patience in the process. We practice exploring problems from multiple angles and taking the perspective of unfamiliar others. We practice empathizing with other people’s struggles. We learn to meet them where they really are instead of where we think they are. We learn to help others set goals and support them in achieving them. We learn to cheer others and celebrate their success. And we learn the humility to recognize that we only played a small part in their achievements and that they have all the credit for doing the hard work.

As Ruchira Chaudhary argues in her book Coaching: The secret code to uncommon leadership: “Coaching is leadership’s secret sauce: the secret ingredient that adds the zing to leadership. It’s what makes leadership effective and what creates the difference between an average leader and a fabulous one.”

Usha Sahoo

Is not it always a pleasure to catch up with the author and get your copy autographed.

Had a lovely afternoon chat over coffee with Ruchira Chaudhary, the author of this interesting book , Coaching: The Secret Code to Uncommon Leadership, which talks about the core elements of strong leadership to help others up their game.

Ruchira Chaudhary is an Executive Coach, Author, Educator, Columnist, and the Founder and CEO of a boutique consulting firm (TrueNorth Consulting). She was also facilitated as one of the “21 Women Leaders in 2021” by a leading women’s platform in India.

This piece is a must to add to your collection of books if you want to unlock your leadership potential!

And the favorite takeaway from the book is Tough Love-Leader-Coach.

Chandrashekhar Joshi

Am catching up on my copy of the secret code of uncommon leadership and what an eye opener! It was lovely to meet up and spend time getting to know your views on this. More power to you 😀

Manishankar Prasad

As an entrepreneur and consultant whose work involves a fair bit of coaching i have been searching for this book for a while as this book by Ruchira Chaudhary is often out of stock.

Glad to have found the last copy at Crosswords at R City Mall Mumbai.

Muddasir Irshad

#thankyou Ruchira Chaudhary for this beautiful gift. I want to learn the relationship between #coaching & #leadership from different webinars and podcast’s l came to know about this title and when I go through its extracts online, I became excited to dive in deep. Book was not available in Pakistan, so on my request she makes arrangements & now it’s in my hands☺️. Thanks again.

Shriya Sethi

Thank you Ruchira Chaudhary for the lovely signed copy of your book. I look forward to learning from it.

Gaurav Ghosh

I started working at 22 so to evolve as a human being, reading coaching and help books is one way to learn how others have achieved success.

Sonal Nangia

As we come to terms with the Pandemic and its impact on our personal and professional lives, have we changed our leadership style to lead from an emerging future?

Ruchira in her book very nicely highlights the What, Why and How of Coaching.
An attempt to doodle the 4 cornerstones of coaching whose impact I am experiencing not only at work with subordinates but also in my relationship with my children as a parent.

An amazing read..Thanks Ruchira Chaudhary.

Press + Reviews