Coaching and Mentoring

Practical Techniques for Developing Learning and Performance

Eric Parsloe, Melville Leedham, Diane Newell, Diane Newell

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781398601970
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Formazione e tutoraggio
• Index: Business

How can coaching and mentoring approaches be applied in individual, team and organizational contexts to increase performance? Coaching and Mentoring offers a complete resource for developing and implementing the latest theories and models in your organization. Featuring tips, tools and checklists throughout, this book covers all the key aspects of the process, from delivering feedback that builds confidence and success and observant listening to evaluating the effectiveness of initiatives and coaching supervision. Guidance is also provided on how to support people in their learning, getting buy-in from stakeholders and creating a coaching culture. Drawing upon insights from a number of experienced coaching and mentoring professionals, it also features case studies from the NHS and the CIPD's Steps Ahead mentoring programme to show how these approaches have been applied in practice.This fully revised fourth edition of Coaching and Mentoring contains a new chapter on group and team coaching and further material on systemic coaching and how to use coaching for diversity and inclusion. Featuring updates to case studies and wider research, coaches and mentors of all levels of experience and those studying coaching and mentoring will benefit from this definitive text.

08

Stories of coaching and mentoring

In this chapter we share some stories about coaching and mentoring. These aren’t supposed to be ‘exemplars’ for you to follow, they are illustrations, shared experiences from people who like you are exploring this territory. We hope these travellers’ tales will offer glimpses of new destinations, lead you to reflect on your own experiences and to delve into new ones.

The first stories look at individual coaching, then we have a story about team coach-mentoring and finally one about an internal coaching programme in an organization, to connect to the next part of our guide, which looks at how you can connect the transformative power of coaching and mentoring to changes not just in individuals but in the organization and its teams.

Story 1: Stepping onto the balcony

Helen Cresswell, professional coach, leadership and somatics practitioner and Associate Coach-Mentor with The OCM shares a story that illustrates how a coach can add value to a client by helping them to gain an entirely new perspective, and support already successful leaders to realize a fuller potential.

As coach to an NHS leader, who had drawn on deep reserves to deliver against the odds in the most challenging of years, I was expecting to meet with a client facing exhaustion and burnout.

Instead the individual before me was charged with commitment and a deep belief in the power of collaboration and action. She was an incredibly impressive leader and, as can sometimes be the case at an intake session, I wondered how I was going to be of significant service to her.

The goal was a clear one: to prepare her for the most important interview of her career to date, seeking promotion, as the only internal candidate, to the role of chief nurse. It emerged that this was a post of which she’d dreamed since childhood so personal expectations were held at a deeply emotional level and, being a high-performing trust, the external market competition was of the highest calibre, so the stakes were high.

Her preparation for interview questions, scenarios and presentations was impeccable. Her career to date had been laden with significant success and evidence of her achievements was overwhelming. She had a strong reputation for listening to and empowering others. However, despite this, it soon became apparent that the hurdle from deputy to director was an overwhelming one.

Her view of the world was held through the eyes of the nurse she had been rather than the chief she wanted to become. Some of her existing habits of thought were undermining her potential to get the promotion she wanted. So, over an intense few weeks, we worked to reshape and rewire these saboteurs to build alternative strategies.

Patterns of self-belief were creating habitual programmes of thought and response, which were being reinforced by unhelpful self-talk. It was habitual to respond to help others and to be intimately involved with delivering solutions rather than prioritizing directing and taking time to define strategy. Energies were dissipated across a number of projects and her reputation for excellence veiled a sense of self-doubt, which was being fed by overcommitment and her sheer exhaustion from the stress of the previous 12 months.

It was at this point that I invited her to step on to the ‘balcony’ and get a different perspective.

She had never received this invitation before. Instead, she had always been in high-activity mode down on the stage, holding teams and departments together, finding solutions, building connections and rolling her sleeves up. All very impressive actions and qualities, however this would not convince three separate panels of interviewers that she had the capability and presence for success as a director.

From the balcony she took a deep breath and saw her world from a very different perspective. She saw a reflection of herself too, and what a refreshing and enlightening experience that was. She observed the busy ‘self’ and recognized how far she’d come yet also how much she’d left behind, how much of herself she was giving away. She found herself stepping back cautiously into the very power that had unconsciously driven her to this point in her career. She had not valued so much of herself up to this point. Everything that came naturally was being discarded in throwaway lines like ‘I just do that’. This vantage point on the balcony was now offering a power source she could consciously control, direct and utilize, not only for herself but also to infinitely greater benefit for the organization to which she had been so loyal.

Three weeks and several practice sessions later, she was radiant in front of the interview panels. She had reconnected with what she wanted to deliver, how she would approach it and, most compellingly, why she would excel in this role.

Taking the metaphor of the balcony, she had woven her story into the transformation she was offering, bringing departments together like sections of the orchestra, and eloquently impressing upon the interviewers the essence of who she was and the future she could create for them.

The impact of this authentic and wholly embodied performance was to move the chair to tears and she was complimented by the chief executive for giving a ‘breathtaking’ presentation. Any assumptions that the character who shone at operations could not now step up to a strategic director role were lost in that moment. She had assuredly stepped onto that balcony and into the truest version of herself, becoming the only possible candidate for the role.

In doing so she delivered on my invitation as her coach – to reconnect with her essence and her potential, show the world an unexpected version of herself, push through crippling fear and step into the very qualities and gifts she’d taken for granted. This would be the creative fuel to inspire the next chapter of her career.

Story 2: The value of listening

Helen Franklin, professional coach, facilitator, trainer & OD consultant and Associate Coach-Mentor with The OCM shares how reflecting on her work with a senior leader and on a common concern of coaches to ‘be of value’ helped her to get deeper insight into the value of listening.

This reflection relates to a session in mid-February 2020, at which point my client and I had been working together for almost 18 months. He holds a senior role in a large organization and is a member of a global leadership team. This was an ambiguous time for many a few months into the Covid-19 pandemic and I was particularly aware of my own vulnerabilities as I dealt with my own uncertainty around the pandemic. I took time before the session to reflect on what I was thinking and feeling, not to put to one side but to show myself care and to be sure that I was sufficiently centred to be there for my client and to connect with him where he was.

In this session, my client had a lot of emotion linked to a feeling of unfairness around some events in the past month, which he described as the worst month of his career. He is an extremely extroverted thinker and my sense was that he needed to tell his narrative to be able to process some of the emotion as well as start to be able to step outside of the narrative and view it with greater perspective. This required me not only to listen to the content and to look for connections to what I knew of him as a leader but to quieten my fear that I was not adding value by only listening. It was a situation requiring organizational agility for him and I was concerned for him in light of my understanding that he had a fear of not being good enough, which could mean that he then put in many hours, and worked to deliver to even the most demanding of stakeholders but at a cost to himself.

Once he reached a point where I felt it was timely for me to intervene, I decided to ask a question that would help him see that he had some agency in the situation. I asked him ‘What are you doing or not doing that contributes to the situation?’ I have found that this question helps those who are finding themselves in a victim narrative to recognize they are playing a role in the situation without them feeling that I am judging them. My client reflected on this and recognized that he could have some courageous conversations; in our very first session he had talked about how he wanted to be an authentic leader and this gave him motivation to address the situation. In addition, he had said that the situation had made him feel paralysed and made it difficult for him to progress with his work. In order to help him ‘free’ himself to move forward I asked him ‘What will you do differently in order to protect your ability to get on with your work?’ and this led to him putting forward several tangible actions he wanted to take before our next session.

In addition, my client is skilled at finding his own insights once he has heard himself describe his situations although he recognizes himself that he can take a lot of time talking and from our very first session encouraged me to interrupt him if I felt this was appropriate. At the end of the session on 18 February I asked him what worked about it for him and whether there was anything he would like to be different. He appreciated the time to structure what was in his mind and to ‘reflect on what caused a one-month process of worrying’. I’ve found over the sessions from this point until now that he has become more open to me asking questions to move from narrative to sense-making and that I have become increasingly confident about managing the ebb and flow of our conversations accordingly.

When I reflected on this session, I recognized that my internal battle on whether I should intervene and when I should intervene was a healthy one. I recognized that I needed to manage the tension between creating space and helping the client to progress in the time available – not just for this client but for all clients. I have since been mindful with other senior leaders of making sure that I do give space to process emotions and to make sense of a complex situation through me giving clients attention and space (in line with Nancy Kline’s Thinking Environment), which they may otherwise not get in heavily pressurized work environments. This is something that I’ve noticed leaders needing more of in the last 12 months.

Story 3: Not enough emotion?

Jenny Whitfield, professional coach and Consultant Coach-Mentor with The OCM tells us about some learning for her about exploring emotions in coaching – her own and her client’s.

I was working with a leader who was transitioning from a middle manager to a senior leadership position. A few sessions into the coaching programme I felt that, while they were practical and action focused and he reported that they were useful for him, they weren’t really having the deeper impact that I knew coaching could create. I had been facilitating a number of highly impactful and particularly emotional group coaching sessions at the time and felt that perhaps my client was not sufficiently tapping in to his emotional reaction to situations and it may have been this that was the issue.

The next coaching session continued in the same pragmatic and practical fashion until the end when my client asked me why I seemed to be far more interested in what he had to say when he responded emotionally than when he came up with practical solutions. I felt a little ‘caught out’ and embarrassed that my feelings must have been so evident. I reassured him that I was interested, and supported him as a coach, in whatever felt helpful to him.

I took this to supervision and reflected on the following: for my client, was there something about how he reacted when faced with something that felt emotional to him in a work context; for myself as a coach, I reflected on my own need for the coaching to feel useful to me (rather than the client!) and I had mistaken the expression of emotion in coaching as being the way to determine that the coaching had been of real use and had deep impact.

I took this back to the coaching and had an honest conversation with the client, who acknowledged that he did struggle to express any emotion with his team. We began to have a deeper conversation about the impact that this might have, and came up with some practical actions for him to take around it!

I learnt from this that impact can take many forms, and that not only do I need to notice my own feelings as a coach but that there can be value in sharing those with the client to reflect on together.

Story 4: Keeping it real

Helen Franklin, professional coach, facilitator, trainer & OD consultant and Associate Coach-Mentor with The OCM speaks about how supervision helped her to keep focused on building trust and connection in a new coaching relationship that had sparked some concerns for her, and how she took the learning into her practice elsewhere.

The particular situation that I brought to my supervision session was that I had been selected by a new client with whom I had not yet had a session but who had let me know prior to our first session that she had recently been promoted and would be moving from Poland to a new role in Luxembourg on 5 April 2021. She was to move to the HQ of her organization, where she said that there would be a lot of different nationalities and cultures represented, with employees originating from Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Slovenia, Romania, Belgium, the Netherlands, Russia, India, Turkey, South Africa and many others. She wanted to enter a coaching relationship in advance of her imminent move in order to be prepared so she could be successful in such an international and multicultural environment.

Before I had my supervision session, I started to be concerned about how best to help my new client and, with hindsight, can see that I was getting caught up in needing to feel that I had some expertise to offer in relation to how to interact with different cultures. Not only was I getting ahead of myself (trying to find a solution to support the client before I had even met with her to explore her context, coaching focus and desired outcomes) but I was losing sight of what I already knew about building relationships, adding value, listening, empathy, etc.

In my supervision session, I shared what I knew of the client and her situation with my supervisor and she reflected back to me what she was hearing in a way that helped me to see it with fresh eyes. I reflected in the session on what I thought might be potential factors in enabling the new client to be successful; I hypothesized that, as she was already considering that it would require preparation from her to be successful because of the multicultural environment, she may have some assumptions, either about herself and her culture and/or about her approach to relationships, influence, and getting work done with and through others, and it could be important to raise her awareness of these. I also considered what I knew from my own experience about factors in being successful in multicultural environments, such as recognizing that we are all shaped by many social identities and how looking for common ground can be helpful, particularly when we share a little of ourselves to create the possibility of connec...