Match: The Situational Coaching® Approach to Meeting Leaders Where They Are

How do you know your coaching is actually helping someone get better?

That is the goal of coaching, after all. Help someone improve. Help them strengthen their leadership, performance, and behavior. Help them move forward with greater clarity, confidence, and effectiveness.

But how do you ensure that the way you’re coaching does that?

As coaching has grown, so have the methodologies and competing opinions about the “right” way to coach. Yet experienced coaches rarely describe their success in terms of rigid formulas. They talk about awareness, adaptability, and understanding what the person in front of them needs in the moment.

That’s what Marshall Goldsmith and Suzie Bishop call “making the Match.”

In Match, they introduce the Situational Coaching® Model, a framework built around a simple idea: Effective coaching depends on matching the coaching approach to the person, opportunity, and moment. In interviews with top coaches across the industry, they heard a consistent theme: This is what the best coaches do.

Drawing from decades of coaching experience and the principles behind the Situational Leadership® Model, Match translates those ideas into a practical coaching framework. Readers learn how to identify coaching opportunities, assess what a coachee needs, adapt their approach as situations change, and adjust alongside the coachee’s growth.

Over time, the framework becomes much more than a process; it becomes a mindset for recognizing what people need and helping them get better.