Coaching and Mentoring
…leaving a legacy of enhanced potential in others
One of the greatest gifts we can give another human being is to help them achieve their true potential in life, to awaken and free their latent talents. This is the real legacy of breakthrough coaches and mentors. As such, it is totally enriching for both parties.
What is Coaching and Mentoring?
Some see a coach or mentor as a teacher or wise counsel, someone who offers knowledge, insight, advice, perspective or wisdom to another person, usually by someone who is older and with more experience.
Our philosophy on coaching and mentoring is not this “teacher and guide” approach.
To us, coaching and mentoring is:
- Helping a person unlock their own true potential to achieve fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives
- A mutual relationship of positive influence
- A proactive, collaborative learning partnership, focused on the coachee
- Helping a person to learn, rather than teaching them
- Enhancing and unlocking the skills, talents, resources, and creativity the coachee already has
- Learning, change, and transformation – re-inventing oneself
- A conversation, or dialogue, between the coach and coachee within a productive, results-oriented context
- About learning, and achieving sustained change breakthroughs – in thinking, beliefs, attitudes, behaviours
- A long-term journey of mutual discovery – helping the coachee discover who they are and what their potential is, and likewise for the coach
- Leadership in action
Coaching focus and challenge
Coaching has been shown internationally to be one of the most cost effective means of developing people, with returns on investment quoted of 700% plus. These days most organisations are seeing the value in coaching, are investing in it, and see it as a primary responsibility and activity of managers.
However, most coaching is organisation centric, aimed at extracting greater value and performance from an individual, and obviously is what is needed with lower performers.
The greater sustainable coaching breakthroughs are coachee centric, aimed at instilling greater value in the individual by enabling and inspiring them to achieve their true potential and their own aspirations. This is particularly true for average and high performers.
Our challenge is to develop a coaching culture and practices within organisations that have managers seeing this as a critical activity and practice to enable others to achieve their true potential.
The coaching needs to be coachee centric and help them achieve their own true potential and aspirations, rather than the common ‘coaching for performance’ focus which leaves coachees feeling it is only about the organisation’s needs, and if I need coaching then I must have a problem and be under-performing.
Learning to be a great coach and mentor
To be effective a coach needs a deep understanding of the psychology of adult learning, development and change, and be able to assist others to grow through a genuine relationship of influence, mutual trust, and emotional depth.
Our coaching and mentoring development programmes include:
- Intensive workshop based learning
- Application of learnings with real coachees
- One-on-one coaching sessions
- 180° feedback from coachees and managers, and self-assessment
- Personal assessment tools for use both with the coaches and the coachees
We offer coaching development at several levels :
- For managers and leaders, as part of their role in developing their people
- For technical coaches who have a role in developing the technical / professional competence of people, who may or may not report to them
- In certifying coaches and mentors in our Breakthrough Coaching and Mentoring
Contact us for more information about our Coaching and Mentoring programmes, or for us to design a programme for your specific needs.