Coaching and Mentoring

Learning to improve

Mentoring has much in common with coaching: both are about supporting an individual to overcome problems, achieve success and realise their full potential. Coaching emphasises the development of a technique or skill by someone already skilled, whereas mentoring involves offering guidance and support to increase the understanding and effectiveness of another person. Both are leadership skills, important when delegating and for a broad range of other management situations, including team-building, developing people, and managing change.

Common skills for mentors, coaches and counsellors are strong interpersonal skills – including listening (and especially questioning) skills – suspending judgement, giving constructive feedback, checking understanding and providing focus. The value of coaching and mentoring is that they clarify issues, solve problems, create options, change patterns of behaviour (enabling the individual to learn) and support plans and actions to ensure that progress is made.

This toolkit provides an in-depth guide to coaching techniques, for use by professional coaches as well as managers and leaders at all levels. 

Length: 10 pages

Contents:

The Benefits of Coaching and Mentoring

Action Checklist: Coaching and Mentoring

• Coach using the GROW model
• Choose the best approach to mentoring
• Develop your mentoring skills
• Implement a mentoring scheme

Avoiding Problems – this section explains how to avoid or resolve some of the most challenges that can arise when coaching and mentoring, and highlights the value of a questioning approach.

Key Questions

Dos and Don’ts

Things You Can Do

• Develop members of your team
• Manage individual performance Initiate and participate in voluntary activities outside work
• Discuss development activities with your peers
• Delegate responsibility
• Plan for the first session
• Provide focused feedback and deal with reactions

Coaching for Performance – key points from Sir John Whitmore’s ground-breaking book

Further Action

Further Information

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