It is great when you are able to promote members of your teams to more senior positions and give them great opportunities supporting the business and organisations they are working for. However, the downside can often be that the individual does not have the knowledge or experience to be successful in that role without a huge amount of support. This is where external mentoring and coaching can be a solution that prevents time being diverted from existing line management and brings in significant experience to help develop the individual and organisation collectively.
Coaching
Coaching can be short or long term and aimed at improving specific skills or achieving particular goals. This can be used to bring a new manager up to speed with the skills they need at their new level to be successful. This could be anything from understanding how to look for opportunities aligned to their business strategy and develop supporting business cases through to building and executing a successful change plan delivering business benefit.
It really is about delivering a specific outcome and can be measured by the results but also develops the individual so that they can be proficient going forward and this will be seen in personal improvements or improved behaviours.
Coaching can also be at a team level and this can be very valuable when going through a large change program and moving the needle with team performance.
Mentoring
Mentoring is focused on the long term personal and professional growth for the individual. It does this by providing experienced guidance in a safe space through advice and challenges aimed at helping the individual define and pursue their own development in a way that will support them.
As well as the personal development angle, it allows the individual to seek advice about how to handle specific situations that are challenging them with current activities.
When should these approaches be taken?
There are multiple scenarios where external coaching and mentoring are appropriate and here are a few: –
- A newly promoted person into Management who does not have previous management experience. This may be more suited to senior management positions but can be valuable at all levels.
- A manager who is not meeting expectations and basically just keeping their team operating rather than continually improving.
- A manager who just seems like a rabbit in the headlights and has no idea how to move forward. Often happens when a technically competent person with good behaviours becomes responsible for people and organisation output but doesn’t know how to get beyond technology delivery.
- When an organisation becomes a bit stale and is only able to keep the lights on rather than drive “better, faster and cheaper” initiatives.
- When you have a manager that has potential for more senior roles but needs external mentoring as a sounding board to sharpen approaches.