Best Practice Leadership Coaching and Mentoring

The coaching and mentoring activities in any organization can enhance morale, motivation and productivity, and reduce staff turnover as employees feel valued and engaged in both small and large organizational changes. They add value to an organization by focusing the human performance elements of the implementation of change initiatives by helping staff recognize the validity of the change, and accepting and adapting to the change in a manner consistent with their personal values and goals. Coaching and mentoring programs are generally well-received by employees as coaching and mentoring strikes a balance between realizing organizational initiatives, goals and objectives and achieving the personal development needs of individual employees. It is a collaborative two-way relationship, with both the organization and the employee gaining significant benefits.

Coaches and mentors can be internal or external. Any organization with a leadership-focused culture already has internal coaches and mentors as it's managers are conducting coaching through "work-with" efforts, and coaching and mentoring through "one-on-one" activities. External coaching and mentoring consultants are increasing available through professional coaching agencies. Their deep scale knowledge of coaching and mentoring techniques is not only valuable for overload situations, but also where the scope of management is transitioning into a leadership-focused organizational culture, and coaching and mentoring skills need to be trained and embedded seamlessly into the changing organization.

Executive Coaching and Mentoring

The most obvious differences between executive coaching and mentoring and business coaching and mentoring are that the target roles for the activity are at board or executive management levels, and the coaching and mentoring activities tend to be focused on improvement of scope capabilities rather than improvement of the already existent scale capabilities that qualified the incumbent for his or her position. Executive coaches and mentors therefore also differ from business coaches and mentors as they most often have scale qualification (often professional) within a singular deficient executive scope capability.

Business Coaching and Mentoring

With business coaching and mentoring, the activities are most often focused on specific scale capability improvements, with the exception being the talent pipeline where scope is an intrinsic component of a company's development, retention and succession strategy. That is not to say that business coaching and mentoring in scope is not critical to all managers, as any change that occurs always results in a change of scope, but that the majority of effort is directed to the core function-specific performances that drive today's business. Learning and Development initiatives, Organizational Development, mergers and acquisitions are examples of changes of scope that require business coaching and mentoring, but in essence the activity is normally directed at adapting and integrating scale expertise into the new scope criteria.

Performance Coaching and mentoring

Many coaching clients will seek coaching or mentoring for performance enhancement rather than the rectification of a performance issue. Coaching & mentoring have been shown to be highly successful intervention in these cases. When an organisation is paying premium rates for development services, performance is usually the key pay-back they are looking for. Even if an executive or manager receives support in balancing work and home life, it will be with the aim of increasing their effectiveness and productivity at work and not for more altruistic reasons. Performance coaching derives its theoretical underpinnings and models from business and sports psychology as well as general management approaches.

Skills coaching & mentoring

Skills coaching has some commonalities with one-to-one training. Skills coaches & mentors combine a holistic approach to personal development with the ability to focus on the core skills an employee needs to perform in their role. Skills coaches & mentors should be highly experienced and competent in performing the skills they teach. Job roles are changing at an ever increasing rate. Traditional training programmes are often too inflexible or generic to deal with these fast moving requirements. In these instances one-to-one skills coaching allows a flexible, adaptive ‘just-in-time’ approach to skills development. It is also possible to apply skills coaching in ‘live’ environments rather than taking people away from the job into a ‘classroom’ where it is less easy to simulate the job environment. Skills coaching programmes are tailored specifically to the individual, their knowledge, experience, maturity and ambitions and is generally focused on achieving a number of objectives for both the individual and the company. These objectives often include the individual being able to perform specific, well-defined tasks whilst taking in to account the personal and career development needs of the individual. One-to-one skills training is not the same as the ‘sitting next to Nelly’ approach to ‘on the job training’. What differentiates it is that like any good personal or professional development intervention it is based on an assessment of need in relation to the job-role, delivered in a structured (but highly flexible) manner, and generates measurable learning and performance outcomes. This form of skills training is likely to focus purely on the skills required to perform the job function even though it may adopt a facilitative coaching approach instead of a 'telling' or directive style.

Differences between Coaching and Mentoring

Coaching

Mentoring

Job related - Helps an employee to do their job better

Personal growth related - Helps an employee to develop as an individual

Structured in nature and meetings are scheduled on a regular basis

Informal in nature and meetings take place when advice, guidance or support is needed.

Immediate focus - Targeted to improve performance in a current role

Future focus - Targeted to grow skills for a future role

Commonalities between Coaching and Mentoring

•	Although many people try to differentiate coaching and mentoring by directive and non-directive interaction components, performance interventions are often situation dependent and both activities require (non-directive) questions and (directive) experiential answers.

•	Both activities focus on performance and therefore include both organizational and individual goals.

•	Both activities require quantitative performance measurement to target goals and facilitate objective feedback.

•	Both activities are conducted on a one-to-one basis.

The mentoring and coaching activities become the support structure for the learning environment, but the vehicle for learning leadership still remains situational and experiential. Both mentoring and coaching are best practice transfer activities. Mentoring transfers strategic best practice experience, and coaching transfers specific tactical and situational best practice options.

The obvious problems with mentoring and coaching relate to scope and scale. As leadership and talent performances exist across the whole of a company, there is a large scope of positions to which a learning support structure needs to be applied. The differing specifications of these positions engenders a similarly large scale of operation. To deal with the cost and logistical implications of the scope and scale parameters, coaching and mentoring activities are most commonly divided into two categories:

•	External support for executive and senior management.

•	Internal scheduled management intervention for subordinates, structured around an appraisal matrix.

External support is normally delivered in a one to one situation by coaches operating from outside the organization and is targeted at improving the performance of the most influential people within the organization. There are numerous anecdotal reports of direct bottom line results from this activity, which are credible because the coaching is performance behavior focused, but more work is required to innovate a truly quantitative cause and effect analysis to determine a factual return on investment measurement. Suffice to say that performance coaching will always have a qualitative positive effect on an organization, despite the fact that a quantitative evaluation structure has yet to be designed.

Internal support does not suffer from the same quantitative shortcomings, and has an established procedural methodology in the forms of "Work With" and "One on One activities." As the coaching and mentoring efforts are targeting performance, a value for performance increase (or lack of) can be determined from existing corporate reporting systems. (Did the monthly sales increase? Has absenteeism decreased? Has the safety record improved? etc.) Other qualitative value-adds of this internal support process also occur in the form of talent and best practice identification and the facilitation of succession planning. As the difficulty and cost in recruiting for leadership vacancies is inversely proportional to its position in an organization hierarchy, the identification of front-line performance leaders for succession can also have a substantial quantifiable corporate impact.

The problem with attempting to provide this internal support is the labor-intensive nature of leadership and performance development. There simply is not enough time in the day for a manager to effectively coach every subordinate on a one-to-one basis when they need it, and, in an increasingly global operating framework, where they need it. This is the essential flaw in the strategy of regular structured coaching activities. What is needed is the ability to target specific timely interventions only when needed, and that requires a fundamental strategic change in the delivery of coaching activities. To free up the time for targeted interventions, some of the coaching activities need to be performed using Distance Learning. The Best Practice Transfer Ltd. training course authoring and deployment software was designed specifically to facilitate this distance learning capability using situational simulation.