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What is Coaching?

Coaching is helping someone to focus on specific goals and encouraging and supporting them in working out how to achieve those goals. A good coach will provide extrinsic feedback to the learner during this process, but at the same time stimulate the learners own intrinsic feedback as well.

Benefits of Coaching
It is increasingly recognized that individuals and groups perform better with coaching and that this performance translates into business results:

Coaching for leadership increases productivity, improves communications, increases staff commitment and loyalty, and decreases levels of stress and tension within companies. Coaching assists individuals to remain loyal and committed to the new company in the face of demanding global business hours, language barriers, differing work ethics and economic fluctuations. Coaching can help prevent executive derailment. Some studies suggest this can be as high as 33 percent for senior executives. Coaching helps managers to develop better interpersonal skills. Some common reasons for interpersonal conflict include executives that are too abrasive, too controlling and too isolated. Coaches work with individuals to explore these behaviors, and to recognize and modify their self-defeating beliefs, assumptions and actions. Coaching helps leaders to think and plan more strategically, to manage risk more effectively and to create and communicate vision and mission. Coaching aids in developing a culture of trust and personal responsibility within the organization and with clients and customers. Coaching enables executives or managers to use their personal power more effectively. Coaching can develop those leadership qualities that have been empirically proven to be associated with success. These include cognitive capacity, social capacities, personality style, motivation, knowledge and expertise.

Inspiring and motivating people to grow their self-awareness and identify their unique abilities are such a powerful process.

What is Mentoring?
Mentoring is a two-way learning relationship, which is concerned with developing and unlocking the potential, but also provides learning and development for the mentor. It supports the mentee in determining which goals to pursue and why. It seeks to build wisdom the ability to apply skills, knowledge and experience in new situations and to new problems. It provides a sounding board, where the mentee can explore alternative approaches.

Mentors can be role models to their mentees, peers or even individuals in more junior positions, where reverse mentoring relationships can be designed to inform more senior executives in a mentee capacity. Mentoring is an off line relationship, so a line manager would not mentor his direct reports.

Benefits of Mentoring:

Supports employee retention and improved recruitment Improved morale, motivation and relationships Helps build a learning culture Improved implementation of change Improved communication, particularly across organizational divisions, eroding the silo effect Releases potential and improves productivity Sharing of tacit knowledge Cost effective, mutual development Creates a talent pool for succession planning

Conditions that indicate an organization could benefit from mentoring and coaching: 1. Talent shortages or retention problems
A large organization became aware that one division had 10 times the normal drop off rate for employees and subsequently was lacking in suitably experienced individuals for management positions in that department. They set up a mentoring programme to retain and grow individuals in to management roles.

2. During times of organizational change


Another large organization made coaching and mentoring available to key personnel in a time of significant change to supply the level of personal and professional support that was required to manage both themselves and those around them through this critical phase of the organisation's development.

3. Changes in job role

One public sector organization uses mentoring to support new managers in the first 6 months of their new role . Mentoring is increasingly being incorporated in to management induction training processes and the benefits of regular mentoring are embedded from day one.

4. When the organization expects that behavior can be changed in a short period of time
Mentoring and coaching accelerate professional development and learning so are especially useful when organizations need individuals to make significant shifts in culture, values or modes of working.

5. Developing the skills of valuable' technical experts


One large organization has designed a yearlong induction process for new graduates who are moving in to key technical roles. This involves 5 job rotations around different parts of the business and mentoring from the corresponding managers associated with that business unit. The managers receive mentor training plus professional mentoring themselves to develop their own mentoring skills.

6. When there is a need for leadership development


One organization put all of its managers through a series of leadership development modules and when they discovered that individuals were not putting the new skills in to practice, set up leadership mentoring groups to support the transfer of training to the workplace. Many leadership programmes have incorporated regular mentoring for all participants and have also set up peer learning groups that often exist well after the programme has finished.

7. When jobs require people to use themselves as the instrument of the work
Police, teachers, nurses and managers are good examples of jobs that rely on personal skills and attributes to fulfill the role. These occupations are well advised to provide professional mentoring sessions to individuals on a monthly basis to promote ethical practice, quality standards and to ensure people are sustained in the role. The recent changes in the Occupational Health and Safety Act identifying stress as a workplace hazard have led employers to relook at the use of mentoring and coaching as a stress management intervention.

Reason to Coach and Mentor Actions to Take A)Building Skills: 1.Set up opportunities for new skills to be learned and practiced. 2.Use coaching and mentoring to break up large-scale tasks into smaller ones, gradually introducing new skills.

3.Before selecting a training program, coach and mentor your staff to identify performance targets they want to achieve.

B)Progressing Projects: 1.Oversee progress and monitor any problems on projects. 2.Link coaching and mentoring sessions with progress reports over the life of the project. 3.Work through problems that could hinder the successful completion of the project.

c)Developing Careers: 1. Prepare staff for promotion or show them a clear career path. 2.Work on coaching and mentoring goals that could result in recognition for staff achievements. 3.Focus on long-term projects that are challenging and bring out potential, rather than small-scale jobs.

d)Solving Problems: 1. Help staff to identify problems and possible routes to a solution. 2.Encourage staff to define the problem and to come up with their own route to a solution. 3.Remain sympathetic to your staff's difficulties, while encouraging them to deal with problems robustly. 5.Brainstorming: 1. Direct the creative input of the team to keep projects on track. 2.Accentuate the generation of creative options rather than getting bogged down in problems. 3.In team coaching and mentoring, take a lead by offering creative ideas of your own, and then invite the team to assess them. 6.Overcoming Conflicts: 1.Diffuse disagreements among team members. 2.Coach and mentor staff to develop greater insights into others' perspectives and

therefore avoid misunderstandings. 7.Remotivating Staff: 1.Restore enthusiasm and commitment within the team. 2.Establish people's needs and aspirations and link these to performance targets. 3.Be prepared to dig for the issues that really concern the employee and be ready to talk them through.

Conclusion:

Coaching takes many forms. In a basic sense it is a method of training, directing or instructing a person or group of people to do a specific task, achieve a goal or develop certain skills. A coach seeks to impart information by any one or any combination of methods including: motivational talks, seminars, workshops, clinics and supervised practice. Often coaching involves monitoring the performance of the skill or task and giving feedback on how to improve. This feedback cycle can be performed multiple times. Coaching is appropriate for specific skills and short-term goal-oriented situations.

Mentoring is a relationship built on trust, and one of its primary goals is to make a young people (or persons new to a field of endeavor) more confident in their abilities and talents. Traditionally mentoring involves an older member of the same profession--a person with more experience and connections--helping a newcomer to the field. Rather than focus on a particular skill, task or goal, mentoring is a long-term, ongoing process. It is usually a more personal relationship, based in shared experience

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