Coaching and Mentoring

Practical Techniques for Developing Learning and Performance

Melville Leedham, Eric Parsloe

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780749477639
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Personalmanagement

Over the last 15 years, Coaching and Mentoring has become the go-to guide for anyone looking to develop their coaching and mentoring skills at individual, team or organizational level. Clear and accessible, it uses practical tools and best practice to demonstrate how to relate theoretical models to specific situations to gain real benefits. It provides strategies that can be applied to any situation, including life coaching, business coaching and community mentoring.

Now in its 3rd edition, Coaching and Mentoring has been fully updated to cover the latest thinking and developments in this area including extended coverage of coaching supervision. There is also now a brand new section on practical applications of coaching and mentoring for organizations which includes advice on how to align coaching and mentoring strategies to overall business goals and how to provide evidence for its transformational impact on employee performance. Full of practical advice, case studies and examples, this comprehensive guide will be of value to everyone involved in any aspect coaching and mentoring.

PART ONE

The purpose, nature and practice of coaching and mentoring

01

In the mainstream?

When we wrote the previous edition we said you would need a very large removal van to carry all the books, journal articles, news stories and Internet references referring to coaching and mentoring. Since then the volume of publications on these topics has continued to grow, although with the increasing popularity of e-publications perhaps the physical volume is not so daunting.

Over the last decade we have all seen a tremendous amount of change in our working lives. The enormous growth of mobile and social networks has influenced our lives in many ways, not always for the better. The pace of globalization – particularly with the rapid development of the BRIC nations – has accelerated.

Against this, the economic instability of the European region and the Far East has prompted many organizations to ‘batten down the hatches’ and think more carefully about future investment. As a result, we are seeing organizations place much more focus on return on investment and measuring results of any training and development activities, including coaching and mentoring, so those who are doing them are doing them much more effectively.

In the world of work and the broader social community, a rich variety of examples of successful applications of coaching and mentoring abounds. It has become a mainstream focus of interest for many organizations, as well as professional institutes, management schools, corporate and community policy makers and anyone interested in people development. Coaching and mentoring, we believe, have become so integrated into work and community life that they can be described routinely as simply ‘the way we do things round here’.

Despite these activities being considered as a recognized profession, it seems surprising that there is still confusion over definitions and language. Later in this chapter we will attempt to dispel some of this confusion.

Before we look at coaching and mentoring in more detail, we will first attempt to sketch the ‘big picture’ review of the trends, developments and influences of this explosion of activity.

The management and academic ‘influencers’

Our interest in the potential for both coaching and mentoring came from our own experiences of corporate life and the management writers (who were largely from the United States) of the 1980s. It was impossible to read the new thinking on issues like ‘process re-engineering’, ‘total quality management’, ‘customer service excellence’, ‘employee empowerment’ and ‘the learning organization’ without recognizing that the days of the traditional management science of command and control were numbered. The notion of coaching began to enter the language of people management and development literature, either implicitly or sometimes explicitly, in accordance with one of Blanchard’s situational management styles.

The ‘Situational Leadership Model’ was developed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard in the 1970s. The model comprises four quadrants, depicting the simple concept of the four different styles of leadership that a manager may need to adopt in any given situation: see Figure 1.1. One of those quadrants is called ‘Coaching’.

Figure 1.1 Blanchard and Hersey’s ‘Situational Leadership Model’

Hersey and Blanchard’s use of the term ‘coaching’ did not have its current meaning, however: by coaching they meant a way of leading and persuading staff to adopt a manager’s solution to the situation.

The US writer with the greatest early impact on the emerging profession of management coaching in Britain was most likely Tim Gallwey in his book The Inner Game of Tennis (1974). His simple proposition that all great tennis players needed a coach to maintain their high levels of performance was a metaphor and message that was easy to relate to the management of people’s performance at work. Gallwey made this message even clearer in The Inner Game of Work (2000).

Gallwey’s philosophy that ‘Performance = Potential minus Interference’ was accompanied by the message that a coach’s job was primarily to release the self-knowledge and potential that everyone possesses. The key to this was to develop greater self-awareness and a sense of self-responsibility in the performer. Again, these are messages that were in tune with the emerging new thinking about management and organizational performance.

Since 2000, a number of UK universities and some in Australia have pioneered programmes leading to formal academic qualifications. Oxford Brookes University was the first to offer a master’s degree in Coaching and Mentoring Practice and the first to offer a doctorate; Middlesex University offered a master’s degree and a doctorate with a strong psychological emphasis and Sheffield Hallam University also built on its long involvement with mentoring research. Similar academic qualifications are becoming more widely available all the time. Anthony Grant in Australia has been widely published, advocating the need for an evidence-based approach to academic research. One positive aspect of this increasing academic involvement has been a rapid advance in respectable research-based evidence and a recognized body of literature that many consider an essential requirement for the establishment of a genuine coaching and mentoring profession. Qualifications and certification processes and requirements are explained in more detail in Chapter 10 – ‘An industry or a maturing profession?’.

The sport coach ‘influencers’

Not surprisingly perhaps, it has been the famous ‘sports-coaches-turned-management-coaching-gurus’ who were the most visible group in shaping the early thinking and approaches to applying coaching to the workplace. Among the leading exponents were John Whitmore, former champion racing driver; David Hemery, former Olympic medallist; and David Whitaker, former Olympic hockey coach. Towards the end of the 1990s, the former tennis player Myles Downey teamed up with The Industrial Society (later renamed the Work Foundation) to form a ‘School of Coaching’ for high-flying managers. More recently, the former Olympic swimming gold medallist Adrian Moorhouse joined up with the leading sports psychologist Professor Graham Jones and created a successful coaching company. Appropriately named Lane 4, this has helped to further consolidate the connection between sports coaching and a notion of ‘best practice management’.

The medium most commonly used by this group to convey their messages is highly stimulating and memorable training courses. Here practical examples of sports coaching are used to relate to the world of work. The analogy between high achievers in sport and work has fostered the belief that it is possible to develop ‘great coaches’ who can help produce ‘extraordinary results’. However, John Whitmore’s book Coaching for Performance (1997, updated 2002) remains an inspiring call for a change of management philosophy. Like many pioneers before him, he has faced a growing number of other ‘influencers’ who challenge the sports coach approach.

The basis for some of the challenges is that the skills required to be a successful sports person are far narrower than those required to manage, for instance, a busy call centre, the intensive care ward of a large hospital or a pharmaceutical processing plant. Thus it has been claimed that the approaches an...