BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
MENTORING COACHING
Let’s start with coaching. This is a work activity that rates highly amongst progressive people at all levels. It seems that many of us really enjoy developing the skills of new and improving staff. In fact many regard passing on skills and advice to ‘learners’ as one of the most fulfilling parts of their job whether they are in a supervisory role or in an expert role.
No problem anticipated here then. Maybe you just need to let the boss know that you want to start coaching or spend more time doing it. The more you do the more widespread will be your legacy of good practice in your profession.
On the days when you take someone to a higher level or stop someone doing something wrong you are ‘changing’ the future for that person. Indeed it might be said that you are changing the future - one person at a time.
Let’s move on now to mentoring. Speaking personally I can only coach people in my areas of experience and expertise e.g. management, team building, negotiating, presentation skills etc. However over the years I seem to have acquired more and more ‘mentoring’ clients i.e. people who want the magic of one-to-one learning sessions as well as, or instead of, the classroom experience.
I am usually a mentor to professional, technical and scientific people because I cannot really coach them to perform their individual calling. I am not on the premises, like you might be, to coach them, to run behind them or sit alongside the individual who wants to do his/her job better, or inspire a group of disgruntled people at a meeting.
What you and I can do in the mentoring role is listen carefully to the individual’s concerns and then bring a lot of good experience into play in a discussion about a problem that is really vexing an individual or his/her employer.
Again I can only speak for myself - but the type of problems and work situations I have helped people tackle successfully through mentoring include career issues at junior and senior levels; dealing with demanding people, performance issues at junior and senior levels and a wide range of other thorny management questions.
How is this done? Typically the mentoring I do is face-to-face at a convenient location, or on the telephone (in an emergency). I increasingly mentor on-line with e-mail messages going back and forth.
RESULTS
Results as far as I can tell seem to have all been positive to date. This is in no small part down to the honesty and realism that comes from a one-to-one session. For example a middle manager in a highly successful company, seeking a £25k per annum pay rise immediately, became more realistic following our telephone mentoring session he was able to quickly secure an extra £20k per year – with the increase spread over three years.
In recent times I spent a day mentoring a young and untrained supervisor who had reading and writing difficulties of his own. He confided that he would never attend conventional management training courses because of the (continuing) pain and embarrassment he had suffered since his school days. However, one to one
www.windenergynetwork.co.uk 19 Frank Newberry
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mentoring sessions, that involved a lot of walking around his premises and talking about his job, helped him to transform his performance and his employer now recommends mentoring wholeheartedly.
Again in recent times an outgoing manager sent his replacement (his deputy) for a series of half day mentoring sessions. After each session workplace goals were set for the coming week and the individual would then report on his results at our next half day session. the outgoing fellow was able to monitor results, which exceeded everyone’s expectations, and by using the quieter half days disruption to normal working was minimised.
So if you are looking to add even more satisfaction to your role then think about mentoring as a way to boost the performance and confidence of your people. It is cost-effective use of your time and you can customise it to the needs of the individual and the requirements of your employer.
Good luck with changing the future – one person at a time. In the second part of this article I will look at how you can change the future by making presentations to people – standing up and speaking up!
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