Coaching and Mentoring in the Asia Pacific

Anna Blackman, Derrick Kon, David Clutterbuck, Anna Blackman, Derrick Kon, David Clutterbuck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317245759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Coaching and mentoring as management approaches have spread rapidly across the Asia Pacific region. Basic concepts of supporting people in their learning, in their career journeys, and in the acquisition of wisdom are deeply rooted in all cultures, yet today, there is little agreement about what constitutes good practice.

Coaching and Mentoring in the Asia Pacific is the first book to put coaching and mentoring into an Asia Pacific context – exploring the challenges, benefits and differences in application, both in concept and practice. Opening with a foreword from Anthony Grant, this book provides commentaries and practical case studies from a wide variety of countries, sectors and perspectives. The authors show how organizations in the Asia Pacific Region can make effective use of this powerful developmental tool, in cost-effective, culturally relevant ways.

This book will be invaluable reading for students and practitioners based in, planning to work in, or curious about coaching and mentoring in the Asia Pacific.

Part I

Setting the scene

1 A brief history of coaching and mentoring

David Clutterbuck and Tammy Turner

Overview

In this chapter, we provide a brief history of how coaching and mentoring have developed internationally and how this has influenced the Asia Pacific. We highlight the foundations of the models and schools of coaching and mentoring, along with well- established and emerging applications. We also review some current themes and trends relating to the continued evolution of coaching and mentoring.

Where do coaching and mentoring come from?

The ‘untrained’ person uses the terms coaching and mentoring interchangeably, although both scholars and practitioners tend to insist that there are fundamental differences. Our investigation shows that there is little agreement on what the differences are, though amongst the ‘trained professional’ the nuances of both creates passionate debate!

There is agreement, however, that the terms coaching and mentoring are of European origin, that the word mentor originated almost 3,000 years ago in Ancient Greece, and the word coach in England in the 19th century (a relative neologism!) adapted in both form and meaning from the Eastern Europe word koc, meaning a high- class horse- drawn carriage (Garvey, 2011) – yes, it was a joke that stuck! Many of the core concepts, which underlie coaching and mentoring, also emerged independently in many cultures of the Ancient World, most notably in China and India. The earliest account with echoes of coaching and mentoring is the Mesopotamian Epic of Gil- gamesh dating from about 2100 bc, in which Gilgamesh, King of Uruk embarks on a learning journey, accompanied by Enkidu, sent by the gods to help him become wiser.

A short history of mentoring

In Homer’s The Odyssey, the goddess Athena guides King Odysseus on his 20-year journey of self- discovery. His son, Telemachus, who sets out to find his father, takes with him an old courtier, Mentor, who is actually an incompetent old fool. Fortunately, Athena impersonates Mentor and also appears as a traveller Mentes. She engages both father and son in dialogues that make them reflect on their actions and choices, learning from experience. She also, on occasion, intervenes on their behalf – for example by hiding Odysseus under her aegis or cloak of invisibility. Some 2,500 years later, the French cleric Fenelon (1699) carried on the story with a book of further dialogues between Athena and Telemachus.

The Odyssey was a product of its time – violent, superstitious and in a world where slavery and cruelty were the norm. It’s therefore not appropriate to adopt all of the precepts presented in the dialogues and actions. And, indeed, different Western cultures have taken different aspects of the story, on which to base their understanding of what mentoring is. In the US, the emphasis has been on Athena’s role as the goddess of martial arts, as the sponsor of Odysseus and Telemachus and as their protector – hence the term protégé (literally, one who is protected) for the learner. A pedagogic model of mentoring emerged, which emphasises doing things for a younger person, one- way learning and the power of the mentor to exert influence on the part of the protégé. This appears to be compatible with what might be expected from a highly individualistic culture (Hofstede, 2001). For example, the teacher who has knowledge to impart to the student has followed suit and is the model that has traditionally been used in primary education.

In Europe, with its stronger roots in philosophy, psychology and with cultures that place more emphasis on collectivism (though not necessarily to the extent that many Asia Pacific cultures do) it was Athena’s role as the goddess of wisdom that influenced the concept of mentoring. The idea of the mentor intervening directly on the mentee’s behalf is seen as inappropriate within an egalitarian society as, generally, mentoring is between boss and direct report where the power dynamics can distort the learning process. Mentoring relationships in Europe tend to be based on two- way learning.

Of course, when we talk of ‘European’ and ‘US’ mentoring models, the terms encompass a wide variety of localised perceptions and expectations – just as in the Asia Pacific region. However, it can be a helpful short- hand to think of the US model as sponsorship focused and the European model as developmentally focused, accepting that examples of both can be observed on each side of the Atlantic and indeed within the Asia Pacific region. Examples of both models can be seen across Asia Pacific and, particularly, in Australia.

Kochan and Pascarelli (2003), in a review of mentoring programmes funded by state or national governments and aimed mainly at disadvantaged or excluded groups, found that culture appeared to have an impact on “how the projects were funded, their purposes, and the level of control exerted over them by the funding source” (p. 418). This issue of control seemed directly related to the societal ideas about the role of the government in people’s lives. Governmental programmes were most often initiated in countries that tended to have formalised social services for their citizens – meaning they had a notion of the collective – thus viewing mentoring as a way to provide support within the social structure of the 20th century, where the target audience was disadvantaged youth in inner cities. Towards the end of the 1970s, Ted Levinson (1978) described mentoring as a significant phase in the developmental life of adults. He describes the generative effect, in which men in their later middle age feel the need to pass on their experience to younger people and gain self- fulfilment through the achievements of these younger persons, as much as or more than through their own accomplishments. Kathy Kram, a researcher in Boston, built on these insights at the beginning of the 1980s to capture the essence of a sample of informal mentoring relationships. She identified a number of psychosocial and career functions that these mentors played for their mentees and a series of phases that these relationships typically went through. At roughly the same time, some US corporations began to experiment with formal mentoring as a means of supporting young professionals entering the workplace.

David Clutterbuck began to research and write about mentoring as a result of reporting on Kram’s initial findings. Focusing on formal mentoring within European and wider international programmes, he quickly found that both the functions of a mentor and the phases of the relationships were different in a number of respects that replicate the sponsorship- developmental model split. Clutterbuck and Kram published their seminal books almost simultaneously in 1985. Other academics in North America (notably Belle Rose Ragins, Lillian Eby and others) and in Europe (notably David Megginson and Bob Garvey) contributed to the development of theory, concept and practice, increasingly underlining the cultural difference between the sponsorship and developmental models.

A key factor in the rapid explosion of interest and practice in mentoring was the development from informal ad hoc relationships to formal or supported programmes. This appears to have happened in three simultaneous and largely unconnected spheres (business, education and community) at the beginning of the 1980s, first in the US and Europe, then across the rest of the world. In business, the primary motivator was attraction, development and retention of talent. In education, programmes addressed issues such as supporting new faculty (and particularly female faculty) and doctoral students, or the needs of disadvantaged schoolchildren. Community programmes addressed issues of deprivation or the rehabilitation of ex- offenders.

Early initiatives in Asia Pacific included Tata Consultancy Services’ introduction of career mentoring in 1990, as an element of employee engagement and strengthening communications between leaders and talent at other levels. Mentoring has been relatively commonplace in the Indian IT sector since the turn of the century, although it appears that the term is applied to a wide range of developmental and supervisory activities, which are more about instruction and tutoring than mentoring. Manju George, reporting a case study of IBS Software Services, describes a shift from a heavily bureaucratic approach to much more informal learning partnerships.

International organisations have contributed a great deal to introducing supported mentoring to the countries in which they operate. For example, in the 1990s, Shell demonstrated the effectiveness of mentoring as a means of supporting indigenisation (replacing expatriate with local talent) in Brunei and Malaysian oil company Petronas, which created an extensive in- house mentoring capability to support the development of high potential staff. The Petronas programme was highly innovative in that it offered mentees two mentors – one in their own company or function (but not in the reporting line) and one in another company within the group. More recently, Youth Business International’s mentoring programmes have reached tens of thousands of young entrepreneurs, from China to Sri Lanka.

Unlike coaching, which we shall explore next, mentoring did not develop a truly global and influential body to promote good practice. Even today, the International Mentoring Association remains a largely US- based organisation, with very little presence overseas at all; and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council has only recently started to have an influence in the region.

A short history of coaching

The modern origins of coaching lie in philosophy, psychology, sports, self- improvement and academia. In the 19th-century novel Pendennis (by William Makepeace Thackeray), a comparison is made between the horse- drawn coach, in which the characters are travelling, and the role of a tutor at Oxford University. Other references to coaching in England during the 19th century (Garvey, 2011) describe:

• tutoring for academic attainment;

• improvement in performance in boating and rowing;

• teaching the defence of the wicket in cricket;

• developing subject matter expertise, particularly in science;

• teaching parenting skills.

Some academics have linked coaching to the stone age under the premise that early humans must have helped each other to thrive by sharing knowledge of fire and/or making axes (McDermott & Jago, 2005; Zeus & Skiffington, 2000) and the skill of coaching to classical times and, especially, Socratic dialogue (de Haan, 2008; Hughes, 2003; Neenan, 2009). As previously mentioned, the link to the performance nature of coaching has historical references from cricket and rowing in the 19th century (Starr, 2002; Wilson, 2007) though more contemporary coaching concepts did not arise until the mid- 1970s, when Timothy Gallwey’s (1974) Inner Game of Tennis incorporated elements of psychology and self- insight into the development of tennis skills.

These modern coaching concepts were quickly adapted to a wider audience, lending themselves to more universal appeal. In business, as a tool for managers, Megginson and Boydell (1979) describe coaching as “a process in which a manager, through direct discussion and guided activity, helps a colleague to solve a problem, or to do a task better than would otherwise have been the case” (p. 5). In 1988, Sir John Whitmore published the seminal book Coaching for Performance (Whitmore, 2002) with its omnipresent GROW model (Goal, Reality, Options, Will), although at least two other people claim that they were its original source. In recent years, Whitmore has openly recognised the limitations of the GROW model, which has utility primarily in the context of short- term performance, relatively simple, explicit and non- transformational objectives. These concepts spawned trainee and apprentice programmes, still in practice today.

There are also many, many definitions of modern coaching, which we won’t go into here. As a result, the coaching industry has yet to agree on a single universal definition and many coach training institutions and associations maintain that their definition is the most comprehensive. Regardless of the definitions, the authors of this book agree that adult learning principles are at the heart of coaching and underpin what makes coaching work:

• andragogy, the theory of adult learning introduced by Malcolm Knowles in the 1970s;

• experiential learning as propounded by David Kolb (1984);

• the transformative learning theory of Jack Mezirow (1990).

As it has matured, coaching has borrowed concepts from psychology, adult learning, philosophy and mentoring, which have evolved into a range of coaching approaches … just to name a few! Each of these presents a differe...