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How Coaching and Mentoring can support business growth

The benefits of coaching and mentoring in the workplace

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There are many benefits of coaching and mentoring in the workplace. Whether you're mentoring an employee, a colleague, or someone keen to learn from you as they set out on their career path, you should both gain something valuable from the experience.

Coaching and mentoring can be great ways to improve performance, but they don't just help people reach their workplace objectives. As a mentor, having a two-way collaborative partnership with a mentee could be just what you need to help you become a more effective manager.

Across the organisation, having coaching and mentoring schemes in place can lift the working environment and sharpen everyone's communication skills. Before you set up any programmes though, it's important to understand some key differences between coaching and mentoring.

 

The differences between coaching and mentoring

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Coaching is often more short-term than mentoring and may be used to achieve a specific aim. It might focus on 'hard' skills, such as using PowerPoint or getting to grips with new IT. Leadership site Mindtools explains that coaching can be used for solving problems, helping with goals and objectives, and improving performance.

Mentoring, on the other hand, is likely to evolve over a longer period. In some cases, that can mean many years spent helping their mentee along their chosen career path. That relationship might be more focused on 'soft' skills such as communication and support with making choices. It's more likely to be a one-to-one arrangement, and a mentor will bring a new perspective and will share knowledge and wisdom.

 

The benefits of coaching

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Employees expect to be coached, and for their place of work to take an interest in their development. Increasingly, senior leaders and managers are expected to be able to coach formally through training sessions or in everyday conversations with their teams. If coaching forms part of your organisational culture, you'll be viewed as a great employer, and it can have a significant boost on staff engagement.

According to UK Business Training and Development team Effective, one of the main benefits of coaching is that it puts the learner at the centre. Coaching assumes that the learner has the answer and draws it out of them. Instruction, by contrast, provides the answer. Coaching rather than instructing encourages someone to find their own solution to a problem and so helps them develop skills and confidence that they can use again in future.

Staff who are coached are generally more confident taking responsibility, while a coaching programme can help you as a business owner or manager to identify talent and see which areas of your business need improvement. It also demonstrates that as a business you are committed to developing your people. In turn, your team will become more self-reliant, gain job satisfaction, contribute to the business, and communicate better with those around them.

Statistics from an International Coaching Federation survey show that 80% of people coached at work reported increased self-confidence, while 70% recorded improved performance.

 

The benefits of mentoring

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Mentoring is not just about teaching recent recruits or junior staff new skills; it’s about giving them somewhere they can turn to for support when it’s needed. Business adviser Brandon Gaille says that a support network can be the difference between talented people staying or leaving.

At an organisational level, mentoring can turn good managers into great leaders because they are accessible and visible. Getting feedback from a mentor they admire, and trust can be a crucial driver of employee performance, while for the mentor there’s a real satisfaction to be gained from knowing their protégé is achieving. Mentoring is an excellent way of ensuring the future success of your business, too. Through it, you can transfer valuable skills and knowledge to the next generation of your company, helping to protect against the loss of experience when people move on or retire.

According to employee engagement agency Higher Logic, there are five steps to setting up a formal coaching or mentoring plan in your business:

Set a framework: Decide how long your programme will last and how often and where people will meet.

Get buy-in across the organisation: Try and include staff at every level and every department. Make sure you fully explain the benefits.

Take time to match coaches/mentors and employees: List potential mentors’ skills and interests and take time to match them with people’s needs. This pairing doesn’t need to be kept within departments – in fact, there can be benefits to having a coach or mentor from another department as they may bring a more objective point of view.

Empower the coach/mentor and mentee: Let them set their own objectives and goals.

Provide opportunities for feedback: Give participants space and freedom to feedback honestly.

With both mentoring and coaching, aligning senior management is key so that they understand the value of the programme and can have input into any syllabus. The following points might be useful when designing your coaching programme:

Plan: What areas do your employees need help in? What are the goals and timelines? Identify your coaches and ask them whether their leadership development can be enhanced with additional training.

Launch communications: Who will be the leader of the programme? Make sure communications come from that person’s office.

Schedule: Make sure time is built into everyone’s schedules, so coaching sessions become regular, valued, and worthwhile.

Measure success: It might be a practical result – such as a percentage of employees being able to use a new IT system – or your people might tell you they feel more supported in their work via internal surveys. Either way, determine some tangible measure that you can use to assess the success (or otherwise) of your programme.

With both coaching and mentoring, by implementing a programme in your business you’ll be putting your people’s needs on the agenda and will help build loyalty, trust, and empowerment in a workplace where everyone will be able to give their best.

 

Contact us

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If you have any questions or require any help please don't hesitate to get in touch with us at t2 group. Simply complete the following form and we will be in touch with you shortly.

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