Business Coaching & Mentoring For Dummies

Marie Taylor, Steve Crabb

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781119363927
• eBook ISBN: 9781119363958
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Gestión de recursos humanos

Shape the leadership of tomorrow

Business Coaching & Mentoring For Dummies provides business owners and managers with the insight they need to successfully develop the next generation of leaders. Packed with business-led strategies, key concepts, and effective techniques, this book equips you with the skills to transform both yourself and your team. Whether you're coaching colleagues, employees, or offering your skills as a service, these techniques will help you build a productive relationship that leads to business success. The companion website also features eight bonus videos that will further your mastery by showing you what great coaching looks like in action. Navigate tricky situations and emotional minefields with ease; develop vision, values, and a mission; create a long-term plan—everything you need is here, with expert guidance every step of the way.

• Understand how mentoring benefits both sides of the relationship
• Learn key coaching techniques that develop leadership potential
• Adopt new tools that facilitate coaching and mentoring interactions

The modern workplace is a mix of generations, personalities, strengths, weaknesses, and quirks; great leadership can pull it all together toward a common goal, but who leads the leaders? Mentors and coaches fill this essential role, and this book shows you how to be one of the best.

Part 1

Getting Started with Business Coaching and Mentoring

IN THIS PART …

Discover the distinctions between different models of coaching and mentoring, and understand how a coach can train to meet the differing needs of a wide variety of clients.

Find out how to demonstrate added value to clients and ensure that they understand that coaching is a worthy investment.

Adapt coaching and mentoring for individuals, groups, and organizations.

Explore some of the best coaching methodologies and how to work with a wide range of differing business categories and business needs.

Chapter 1

Navigating the World of Coaching and Mentoring

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding why businesses need coaches and mentors

Distinguishing coaching from mentoring

Knowing how to develop as a business coach or mentor

Looking at professional requirements

Business is about people, organizations are complex systems, and business and people are codependent. We need to move fast to deliver effectively and efficiently. Our digital world is connected in real time 24 hours a day. This reality takes its toll on the capacity of business leaders’ ability to think and reflect. When human beings don’t take the time to think things through, we make poor decisions, become less effective, and can become lousy managers. We can lose perspective on what’s important in our personal lives, too. We start communicating with colleagues, family, friends, and associates like we’re speed dating, taking just long enough to get the bite-size essentials to filter for yes or no. Constantly matching our relationships to the speed at which we receive information and are expected to respond isn’t sustainable. We’re a social species — we need to relate, to be motivated, to create, and to have our contribution acknowledged by ourselves and others.

Coaching and mentoring are a late twentieth-century preemptive gift from the gods, designed with twenty-first-century living in mind. The value of business coaching is well documented, with studies on return on investment (ROI), engagement, motivation, and innovation linked to coaching and mentoring. Businesses that have used coaching over a number of years see it as an integral part of their talent development strategy with both disciplines weathering the storm of recession. It’s lonely at the top, and when people are lighting fires under your feet, you want someone you trust to help you gain clarity and perspective. This input is the added value that a coach or mentor brings.

In this chapter, you discover some of the professional fundamentals of coaching. We outline the roles at play in organizational coaching and mentoring, filling you in on the distinctions between these and other helping professions.

Spotlighting the Business Benefits of Coaching and Mentoring

In her research looking at 106 studies on organizational mentoring, professor Christina Underhill found that organizational commitment, job satisfaction, self-esteem, work stress, and perceptions of promotion or career advancement opportunities were statistically significant for those who had been supported in their careers through informal mentoring compared to those who had not. Mentoring in this context refers to ongoing career support from a more experienced colleague.

Similarly, a study conducted in 2011 by the Institute of Leadership and Management asked 200 organizations why they used coaching. Here’s what they said:

• To support personal development (53 percent)
• To improve a specific area of performance (26 percent)
• As part of a wider leadership development program (21 percent)
• To provide development for senior management (19 percent)
• To enable progression within the organization (12 percent)
• To support achievement of specific organizational objectives (12 percent)
• To address a specific behavior issue (8 percent)
• To provide support after a change in position or responsibilities (6 percent)
• To provide support to new employees (5 percent)
• To support organizational change (4 percent)
• To engage with individual employee concerns (2 percent)

The strongest individual benefits were increased self-awareness, increased confidence, and improving business knowledge and skills. The report highlights that the key organizational outcomes were improvements in leadership, conflict resolution, personal confidence, attitudinal change, motivation, and communication and interpersonal skills.

In short, coaching and mentoring make a tangible difference in how leaders lead in business.

Defining Coaching and Mentoring

At their simplest level, coaching and mentoring are conversations where insight and learning take place. The offer a space to slow down and make time to think, and they give leaders time to open up to possibility and maybe think differently.

A few nuances are apparent in the definitions of coaching and mentoring. In reality, a lot of overlap is evident, and the boundaries can get fuzzy in the business context. The following sections describe just a few definitions to help you understand the nuance.

Coaching is the art of co-creation

Coaching as we know it has been informed by a raft of disciplines, including psychology, sports training, organizational development, behavioral science, sociology, and therapy. Sports coaching had the biggest influence in developing leadership and business-related coaching with early coaching looking at the concepts of focus, developing excellence, and high-level personal and team competence in the late 1970s and 1980s.

There are myriad definitions of coaching. We define it as follows:

Coaching takes place on a spectrum from short and medium shifts in performance to significant life transformation. This sometimes requires a metaphorical demolition truck to pull down old patterns of belief and behaviors before co-creating new thinking and building blocks for growth. Oftentimes consistent, regular, focused dialogue with a sprinkling of gentle challenge and a bag full of coaching tools is enough.

We see the role of a coach as

• A co-creator — a facilitator and thinking partner who helps clients develop, appraise, and crystallize ideas
• An unconditional supporter who deals with a client’s real-time life issues without judgment
• A sounding board when a client needs a listening ear
• The holder of the mirror when a client finds it difficult to see himself clearly

Coaches help clients to

• See possibility
• Gain clarity
• Develop clear intentions
• Work on specific aspects of business to create great business
• Work on what they want to create in living a successful life “on purpose”

Key professional bodies maintain this holistic view of the whole person. They mostly embrace the personal and professional.

According to the Association for Coaching, executive coaching is

A collaborative solution-focused, results-orientated, and systematic process in which the coach facilitates the enhancement of work performance, life experience, self-directed learning, and personal growth of the coachee… . It is specifically focused at senior management level where there is an expectation for the coach to feel as comfortable exploring business-related topics as personal development topics with the client in order to improve their personal performance.

Business owners often expect a coach to provide solutions and have all the answers. When you’re considering recruiting a coach, remember that no one knows your business better than you do and no coach or businessperson knows all there is to know about business. Think of the coaching relationship as a collaboration where the coach is there to question, to guide, to challenge, to chide, and to assist you in achieving your desired outcomes. The coach is not there to do the work for you. Be open-minded to being ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Getting Started with Business Coaching and Mentoring
• Part 2: Developing the Business Leader’s Mind-Set
• Part 3: Coaching and Mentoring to Get a Business on the Right Track
• Part 4: Creating a Successful Business Identity with the Support of a Coach
• Part 5: The Part of Tens
• About the Authors
• Advertisement Page
• Connect with Dummies
• End User License Agreement