"A life coach does for the rest of your life what a personal trainer does for your health and fitness."
Elaine MacDonald
Coaching and mentoring are development approaches based on the use of one-to-one conversations to enhance an individual’s skills, knowledge or work performance.
What is coaching?
Find You...Be You Coaching aims to produce optimal performance by focussing on specific skills and goals. Coaching may also have an impact on developing personal attributes such as social interaction or confidence. Coaching typically lasts for a defined period of time but may, depending on your requirements, develop into a mentoring or management support relationship.
There are generally agreed characteristics for coaching in organisations which we can tailor to your specific needs:
- It is non-directive form of development.
- It focuses on improving performance and developing an individual.
- Personal factors may be included but the emphasis is on performance at work.
- Coaching activities have both organisational and individual goals.
- It provides the opportunity for people to better assess strengths as well as development areas.
- It’s a skilled activity, delivered by people who are trained to do so.
What is mentoring?
Find You...Be You offers mentoring in the workplace. This is where a more experienced colleague shares their greater knowledge to support the development of an inexperienced member of staff. It calls on the skills of questioning, listening, clarifying and reframing that are also associated with coaching.
A key distinction is that mentoring relationships tend to be longer term than coaching arrangements.
Mentoring relationships work best when they move beyond the directive approach of a senior colleague ‘telling it how it is’, to one where they both learn from each other. An effective mentoring relationship is a learning opportunity for both parties, encouraging sharing and learning across generations and/or between roles.
Coaching Research
The Chartered Institute of Personal Development’s research report L&D: Evolving roles, enhancing skills that coaching is seen as an increasing focus for organisational learning. This is reinforced in more recent research by Towards Maturity which shows that 96% of L&D teams view coaching and mentoring as a priority.
The aims of workplace coaching can include:
- Assisting performance management
- Preparing and supporting people through change
- Supporting learning and development
- Development of a coaching culture within the workplace is becoming increasingly widespread within organisations