Coaching and Mentoring are
Critical in Today's Flat Meritocratic Organisations
Understanding the organisational requirements and developing
the personal skill sets for a coaching culture are both things
Predaptive can help with.
Why Coach?
Is coaching on your list of priorities? If it isn't, it should
be. All organisations know that their success depends on
having great people doing a great job. This sounds a simple
objective, but as we all know, it is not necessarily easy to
put into place.
By addressing the organisational context in which coaching
takes place, coaching will have a high impact on
organisational and individual performance, giving you:
- A more motivated and empowered workforce
- Greater job satisfaction as people feel more in control
of their learning and development
- A more consciously competent organisation which makes
the development of best practice much more achievable
- Improved learning velocity (people learn more, quickly)
and reduced learning attrition (people remember more and use
what they have learnt for longer periods).
Coaching Culture v Command and Control
If your management style is one of command and control, a
teacher-pupil relationship, coaching struggles to move beyond
the classroom. When people are used to telling and being told
rather than asking, finding out and sharing learning then a
simple coaching course will have limited impact on your team.
Command and control cultures employ managers to do just that,
give commands to employees, hand out work, tell employees what
to do and when to do it, then control their performance
through careful monitoring of activities. Mike Baldwin at
Underworld is perhaps the ultimate command and control
manager!
Coaching cultures employ managers to get the best out of their
people and to increase rather than control their capacity. It
can take a more confident manager to be a coach as the coach
needs to be as open to learning as the 'coachee'. By
definition, coaching is a closed loop feedback model. Coaching
will only be of value if we learn from the feedback we are
given and change our behaviour as a consequence.
Coaching v Mentoring
Coaching is the process of facilitating the performance,
learning and development of another person. Coaching in a
business context directs the outputs in line with
organisational goals. The coach leads the development of the
coachee and has (at some level) the skills that they are
seeking to build in the coachee. Coaching is a critical part
of a modern manager's role.
Mentoring is led by the learner and is less skills based. A
good mentoring relationship is identified by the willingness
and capability of both parties to ask questions, challenge
assumptions and disagree. The mentor is far less likely to
have a direct line relationship with the mentee, and in a
mentoring relationship this distance is desirable. Mentoring
is rarely a critical part an individuals job role, rather an
extra element that rewards the mentor with fresh thinking as
well as the opportunity to transfer knowledge and experience
(wisdom) to a new generation.
At Predaptive we will help you ensure coaching is a
sustainable source of competitive advantage. Coaching will
only become truly embedded within your organisation where
there is knowledge of:
- What is it that we have to do to be the best
- What are the competencies our people need to be the best
- How coaching excellence will be rewarded
Where Coaching Fails
For an organisation that is purely focused on outputs,
coaching will be viewed as another transactional activity,
rather than an instinctive and normal process. Many
organisations cannot escape the vicious circle of trying to
embed coaching through a series of coaching courses one after
another, rather than the virtuous spiral of a coaching
mentality driving learning opportunities that produce best
practice, which is reinforced and developed through further
coaching.
If you would like to pick up on any of the themes in this
overview or talk more specifically about any organisational
change issues facing you please contact:
Lynn Joy
e: lynnj@predaptive.com
t: +44 (0) 1789 734333
f: +44 (0) 1789 734401
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