During the past decade, consultation activities that focus on managers and senior leaders in organizations have increasingly been referred to as executive coaching. This term has begun to take on a technical meaning within the field of organization development, yet the area of practice has suffered significantly from a relative lack of specific attention to it in the professional literature. The purposes of this chapter are to provide a succinct overview of some of the literature available on the topic, to summarize a way of conceptually understanding the practice of executive coaching, to introduce a preliminary definition of the term as a way of beginning to clarify this practice within the field of.
