In This Chapter

Understanding why business needs coaches and mentors

Distinguishing coaching from mentoring

Knowing how to develop as a business coach or mentor

Looking at professional requirements

Business is about people and organisations are complex systems and they’re co-dependent. We need to move fast to deliver effectively and efficiently. Our digital world is connected in real time 24 hours a day. This reality takes its toll on the capacity of business leaders’ ability to think and reflect. When human beings don’t take the time to think things through, we make poor decisions, become less effective and can become lousy managers. We can lose perspective on what’s important in our personal lives too. We start communicating with colleagues, family, friends and associates like we’re speed dating, taking just long enough to get the bite-size essentials to filter for yes or no. Constantly matching our relationships to the speed at which we receive information and are expected to respond isn’t sustainable. We’re a social species who need to relate, to be motivated, to create and to have our contribution acknowledged by ourselves and others.

Coaching and mentoring are a late 20th-century pre-emptive gift from the gods, designed with 21st-century living in mind. The value of business coaching is well documented with studies on return on investment (ROI), engagement, motivation and innovation linked to coaching and mentoring. Businesses that have used coaching over a number of years see it as an integral part of their talent development strategy with both disciplines weathering the storm of recession. It’s lonely at the top, and when people are lighting fires under your feet, you want someone you trust to help you gain clarity and perspective. This input is the value-add that a coach or mentor brings.

In this chapter, you discover some of the professional fundamentals of coaching. The roles at play in organizational coaching and mentoring are outlined, together with the distinctions between these and other helping professions.

Spotlighting the Business Benefits of Coaching and Mentoring

In her research looking at 106 studies on organisational mentoring, professor Christina Underhill (University of Memphis, 2005) found that organisational commitment, job satisfaction, self-esteem, work stress and perceptions of promotion or career advancement opportunities were statistically significant for those who had been supported in their careers through informal mentoring compared to those who had not. Mentoring in this context refers to ongoing career support from a more experienced colleague.

Similarly, a study conducted in 2011 by the Institute of Leadership and Management (creating a coaching culture) asked 200 organisations why they used coaching. Here’s what they said:

• Support personal development (53 per cent)
• Improve a specific area of performance (26 per cent)
• As part of a wider leadership development programme (21 per cent)
• Provide development for senior management (19 per cent)
• Enable progression within the organisation (12 per cent)
• Support achievement of specific organisational objectives (12 per cent)
• Address a specific behaviour issue (8 per cent)
• Provide support after a change in position or responsibilities (6 per cent)
• Provide support to new employees (5 per cent)
• Support organisational change (4 per cent)
• Engage with individual employee concerns (2 per cent)

The strongest individual benefits were increased self-awareness, increased confidence and improving business knowledge and skills. The report highlights that the key organisational outcomes were improvements in leadership, conflict resolution, personal confidence, attitudinal change, motivation and communication and interpersonal skills.

In short, coaching and mentoring make a tangible difference to how leaders lead in business.

Defining Coaching and Mentoring

At their simplest level, coaching and mentoring are conversations where insight and learning take place; a space to slow down and make time to think; and time open up to possibility and maybe think differently.

A few nuances are apparent in the definitions of coaching and mentoring. In reality, a lot of overlap is evident, and the boundaries can get fuzzy in the business context. The following sections describe just a few definitions to help you understand the nuance.

Distinguishing Business Coaching from Other Types of Coaching

You can find many niche areas of coaching, and the profession is constantly developing. Niches even exist within niches. Whatever your bag, understand that a significant difference exists between personal coaching and business coaching.

Working with business requires a whole different level of relationship management, particularly if you’re working in corporate organisations rather than with small, founder-led businesses. Managing triangulation becomes an art form as you navigate your way through dialogue with the client and sponsor (manager or person responsible for talent management) and sometimes a fourth player if the manager and talent manager are both involved in contracting and monitoring. The operations director or finance director (FD) may want to get involved in the contractual monitoring too if the budget is significant.

This situation is fine as long as everyone remembers what his role is and can maintain his boundary. As the coach, you not only have to manage the complexity of those relationships, you also need to act like a member of MI5 or the CIA in terms of confidentiality. Be prepared to be mentally water boarded by people who want to know the details of what’s happening in the conversations with your client. Develop the art of answering a question without answering the question, of being really clear that you will report back into the organisation on the process of coaching and the delivery of the contract outcomes but not the content of coaching.

Empowering your client includes that you ensure that your client disclosures belong to your client, subject of course to the usual rules that apply if he’s a danger to himself or others or has committed an illegal act or intends to. (See Chapter 4.)

Equipping Yourself to Help Other People in the Business Context

The global coach training industry is thriving. In any profession, this results in some great training programmes, some mediocre programmes and some downright awful programmes bordering on fraudulent. Some training schools promise that anyone can have a six-figure coaching practice in a month. Coaching flying pigs wearing grass skirts and playing the ukulele are not usually an option on the syllabus but wouldn’t look out of place. Others suggest that professional coaching is a dark art requiring several rites of passage, years of inner soul searching and the ability to demonstrate 25 models of best practice before you can truly call yourself a coach or mentor. If you’re looking to train or want to hone up your skills, do your research on the training available. Be clear and specific about what you want to learn and research the quality of the course and experience of the trainers.

Choose training that encourages you to coach for a significant part of the training. Have clear outcomes, practise standard and supervision/mentoring to help you notice your own practice and get support when you hit issues that are beyond your experience.

To be a great coach or mentor in business you need

• To come from a place of
  • Growth mind-set
  • Respectful engagement with a client even when he’s not at his best or respectful towards others (including you)
  • Emotional resilience and a willingness to recognise when you’re out of your depth
  • Accountability for your own personal well-being
  • Empathy and sympathetic understanding without joining in with the emotional roller coaster of your client’s journey
  • Self-reflective assessment and the desire to experiment, play and do more of what works
  • Absolute focus on your clients and a desire to serve them
• To understand
  • People learn and develop self-mastery in different ways, and you need to adapt to them
  • Motivation theory is about belonging, not bucks
  • How business works and the context of that industry
  • Processes and functions involved in running a business and the language that business uses
  • How personal change and transformation happen
  • How organisations develop and change
• To be able to
  • Give feedback in a constructive way to help your client rather than look clever and insightful
  • Define clear outcomes and be flexible enough to move with your clients’ needs as they change
  • Manage your personal boundaries with a number of players
  • Maintain confidentiality even when the person paying the fees really, really wants to know what’s going on inside the coaching
  • Think big picture and small chunks
  • Challenge in order to help the client, not just for the sake of it
  • Think purposefully and creatively
  • Be comfortable with ambiguity and conceptual thinking
  • Use the coaching skill set flexibly and be prepared to keep adding to the toolkit to resource a range of client needs
  • Know when you’re not the right person to support the individual or group at this time
  • Refer someone to another helping service when he needs something beyond your experience, skills and boundaries
  • Run your own business practice well and make a great living doing what you love

If you want to understand the specifics of the coaching skill set, take a look at Chapter 4.

Choosing a coach or mentor

In the real world of professional coaching and mentoring, you can find people with months of training but limited practice experience and some with lots of experience but little training. The research highlights two things in relation to coaching and mentoring outcomes. No positive correlation is shown between the length of time since a person qualified as a coach and coaching outcomes, and even less correlation between fees charged and coaching outcome. What’s important is the relationship, and the onus is on the person commissioning the coaching or mentoring to establish what he’s looking for from the relationship.

If a prospective client asks how you’ll to manage the relationship, you can show him something like Figure 1-1, which shows a typical framework and the elements usually included. (This is the framework Marie uses.)

Being on the Other Side as Coachee or Mentee

Professional development and continuous learning is important in this business. You can’t be in integrity and coach people to develop self-mastery if you aren’t working on it yourself. If you think that you’re ‘cooked’ and have nothing else to learn, there’s a door plaque marked ‘delusional’ with your name on it, and you’re the only one who reads it as ‘desirable’. Please don’t skip the information on the competency stairway if you’re in this group, and pay particular attention to step one.

Most coaches are consummate learners who see continuous professional development as a feature of their business. This development is not an optional cost, but a core requirement. Coaches need to be able to identify learning needs in themselves and others, to notice the blind spots as they come into awareness and occasionally be prepared to have a colleague point them out gently (and sometimes not so gently, depending on how well you know them). Even writing this book has helped one of us see that we still have a propensity to correct like a track change pedant when asked to comment and the other one to recognise a rather unhealthy relationship with the apostrophe and the comma.

The Competency Stairway Model, shown in Figure 1-2, outlines the four stages of learning. Use it to consider your own learning or help others discover their learning needs.

Here are the four stages of the competency stairway:

1. Unconscious incompetence: The oblivious

   You don’t know what you don’t know (blissful ignorance).

2. Conscious incompetence: The Homer Simpson (Doh)

   You become aware that you don’t know (becoming self-aware).

3. Conscious competence: The I’m sexy and I know it

   Through experimentation, knowledge acquisition and/or practice, you’re practising how to do it and improving (increasing in confidence).

4. Unconscious competence: The accomplished performer

   The doing of it comes so naturally to you that you don’t even realise you’re doing it. (Who me? What did I do? How do I do what? I don’t know!)

Mentors help us see the blind spots.

Think about the competency stairway as you consider the coaching skill set throughout this book. Notice where you’re becoming aware of skills and knowledge you use that you’re not consciously aware of. Notice where you feel your competence needs developing or honing for specific situations.

Understanding Professional Requirements

No legal requirements exist in relation to a standard of training or hours completed. However, you’re likely to find it difficult to build a successful coaching practice without appropriate training and completion of practice hours to build your skill set. The required coaching standard for internationally recognised coach accreditation is between 35 and 100 hours coaching practice plus the training requirement. (See the accreditation guidelines in Table 1-2.) Most professional business coaches who coach at a senior level have more than 500 hours of coaching in the bag and coach regularly.

To keep it simple, we have produced two checklists that set out our view of the minimum requirements you need. Do your own homework and check out the professional institute websites for guidance.

Checklist 1: Just do it:

• Contracting paperwork that sets out the financial agreement and the coaching agreement
• A clear disclaimer about any changes the client makes being his responsibility and choice
• Individual client next-of-kin details if you’re meeting offsite or contracting with an individual rather than an organisation
• Clear terms and conditions regarding fees, payment, cancellation, travel and expenses
• Insurance to cover your professional liability and public liability if you have premises
• Confidential storage for your client records and ways of protecting and destroying confidential documents

Checklist 2: You don’t have to, but please, just do it:

• A disclosure from the client regarding any therapy work he is engaged in or any medical conditions that may impact his work with you
• Your own system for session management, clearing the space, notes (coaching log) and review
• Sharing an open notes policy with the individual you’re coaching
• Having a coach and/or mentor or supervisor
• Most important of all – loving your clients