Topic 3 Coaching and mentoring
What is coaching and mentoring?
Coaching helps to shape performance and increase the likelihood of results meeting expectations. It encourages engagement and getting to know people as individuals, it helps to make people feel valued. It can also help to retain talent and save costs.
Mentoring is a relationship between two people with the goal of professional and personal development. The “mentor” is usually an experienced individual who shares knowledge, experience, and advice with a less experienced person, or “mentee”. Mentoring programmes in the workplace have been proven to reduce high turnover rates, tackle diversity problems and improve employee engagement.
The purpose of coaching is to guide and support oneself or another to:
Clarify a current, important priority that you want to work on
Identify relevant and realistic actions to address that priority
Take the actions in your work or personal life
Learn by reflecting on the coaching and the actions identified
Coaching can be done in one conversation or as part of an overall coaching programme.
Reflect on the key differences in this video between a good and bad coaching conversation:
Reflect on your own experiences in light of this example.
A mentor can provide advice and guidance to a less experienced colleague.
Tips on creating a successful mentoring programme
- Be clear with expectations
- Set goals
- Develop a regular meeting schedule
- Respect each others’ time
- Set a timeline for length of mentorship
- Have policies in place for behaviour or conduct of participants
- Initiate participants with some basic training
- Solicit feedback
- Create and review regular programme reports
