How to Get Unstuck

How to Get UnstuckAll through life, Alex has always felt that other people, schoolmates, friends and later colleagues, seemed to have it easier. Dad was never quite satisfied. It was hard to live up to his standards. Aunts and Uncles always knew a cousin who was better, brighter, richer, faster.

Alex, like you and me, would like to earn more, be recognized and respected. To enjoy life and have fun. To simply succeed.

Is it really so difficult?

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6 Top Reasons Leaders Seek Coaching

Why do leaders seek coaching? Over the past twenty years of coaching, I have found that leaders seek to a coach for six main reasons, and more urgently when two or more of these reasons combine:

So just what can a coach do for you?

A coach can help you:
  • Gain insight – particularly about how current behaviour is PERCEIVED by others through providing feedback and assessment.
  • Get Clarity of Purpose – Extroverted people who are outer directed (and rewarded behaviours in this world) tend to get their self-esteem from satisfying others’ expectations of them. This may cause them to lose touch with what is truly important for themselves. Without clarity of purpose, you may tend to rush through days not knowing what you want to achieve. Often asking what others want rather than seeming to have opinions of their own. Reflection and review through coaching can help here.
  • Help you improve relationships – changing behaviours in relationships changes their perception of the other party and you’ll get more open and honest feedback. Coaching that helps you conduct planned conversations with colleagues is especially useful here.
  • Broaden your perspectives – we all play a role and have a preference of the way we process…. increasing the diversity of opinions we consider in decisions broadens our perspective leading to improved and more acceptable decisions.
  • Develop your leadership skills – developing the skills each individual needs for their new position or a future role.
  • Help you Identify and overcome barriers to change – change occurs over time, unlearning is often resisted, especially deeply rooted habits, and stress causes us to revert to preference. Self-righteousness is often the biggest barrier. Coaching can identify and discuss the roadblocks developing strategies and new ways of thinking to overcome them.
  • Improve your ability to learn – dependence on your coach for feedback is a disservice. Internalizing the ability to learn and continuously grow, sustaining behaviour and results. Coaching uses a cyclical process, making this process explicit, the coachee becomes more skilled at using the same process on their own.

When is Coaching needed?

There are times in life and work when we would benefit from the experience, wisdom and knowledge of people who have been in similar situations. If you are looking for one such person, then you are looking for a coach. Most coaches are professionals, people with considerable experience in one or more sectors, more often than not trained in coaching skills. They choose to become coaches as they are willing to help others by sharing their experience and by helping their coachees to find solutions to their issues, following them through a plan of action.

According to a report published by CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel Development), one in five chief executives claim that having had a coach was critical for their success.

Young graduates report to have found their feet in the organisation thanks to the help of their most experienced colleagues. Even people coming up to retirement have been eased through this difficult stage of their life through people who have “been there before”. Within a work environment there are many situations where the help of a coach would be appropriate.
Typical Situations when having a coach will really help you
  • Starting in a new job/position when you are expected to hit the ground running.
  • Taking on a new role or responsibility, or starting in a new industry where you have little experience, but need to gain the skills and experience quickly.
  • When needing a personal assessment to determine your strengths and weaknesses, and consider what you should be doing in order to maximize your potential.
  • When striving for promotion or a new position.
  • When needing to talk through your thought processes, strategies, and plans in order to move forward.
  • When struggling with certain skills and performance areas and you wish to improve.
  • When feeling you have reached a plateau in your career and want to explore options.

 

Overview of Mentoring

Overview of Mentoring

The GAINMORE™ Mentoring Advantage

The GAINMORE™ Mentoring Advantage


Foreword

What is mentoring?

In spite of it’s origins in Greek culture some 3,000 years ago, mentoring is a buzzword today where life and work is high-tech but not high-touch.

When we use the word “mentoring”, a dozen or more different images race across our minds. It seems that we might not all be on the same page. It will serve us well then, to offer a working definition that brings us all together in our understanding. Here, I have tweaked a definition original from Paul Stanley and Robert Clifton and later by Dr. Tim Elmore:

Mentoring is a working relational experience through which one person empowers and enables another by sharing their wisdom and resources.

Why we need to be mentoring and be mentored

We all recognize the need for leaders to have accountability. The rash of failures of leadership between 1995 and 2005 could have been prevented with acceptance of accountability. Mentoring, certainly the kind of mentoring we advocate and teach, would have prevented the failures in leadership and given that needed accountability.

As leaders, we all want to finish well. And all leaders would embrace mentoring if they saw it as an enhancement for their growth. Mentoring can reduce the likelihood of leadership failure, provide accountability and empower the responsive, potential leader.


What makes a mentor?

Often, when people are introduced to mentoring, they consider the “ideal mentor” – a perfect role model who can do almost anything. Few exist. The myth about mentoring is that it requires a “super-gifted” guru, oozing wisdom. A sage. A Moses or Socrates figure. There may be a handful alive today. Instead, we put mentoring in the practical sphere. Anyone can mentor.

Yes, that’s right. Anyone. Including you. Provided you have learned something from your past and are willing to share with others what you have learned.

Why we need mentoring now?

Mentoring is as old as civilization itself. Consider Socrates and Plato, Plato and Aristotle. Moses and Joshua. Confucius and Yan Hui. But today, the learning process has shifted from a relational model of personal development to computers, classrooms, books and videos. The relational connection between the person with knowledge and experience giving to the receiver has weakened or is non-existent.

This leaves people relationally deficient and narrow-minded. The resurgence of mentoring in virtually every walk of life is a response to this discovery. “Please mentor me” is the often unspoken cry expressed by many today.

The only surprising thing about mentoring is that so few organizations and institutions insist on it as a vital, efficient and powerful part of its people development. In 1978, Harvard Business Review ran a cover article entitled “Everyone Who Makes It Has a Mentor” (Harvard Business Review, 56, July/August 1978, 89-101.) In this article, based on a study of the Top Fortune 500 executives in America, every single one of these CEO’s said they had a mentor. More than 30 years later… do you have a mentor? Are you one?

We all need mentors

When we’re young, we need mentors because we lack experience and, when we’re older, because we fall into ruts.

Do you want to impress or impact people?

1.       Impressing followers can be done with little or no relationship. All we need is the will to be involved and to leave a memorable impression on followers. It can be done at a distance – a concert, a convention, a conference, heck you can impress on YouTube or Facebook, even a tweet.

2.       Influencing followers can be done with some relationship. Influence requires the will of the follower to be involved. The follower must want to be influenced by the leader and this usually involves a connection between leader and follower.

3.       Impacting followers can only be done through an intimate relationship. Both the wills of the leader and follower need to be involved. They agree to accountability and growth usually “up-close and personal”.

It is time to shift paradigms. Especially for our younger future leaders. They don’t want a “sage on the stage”, they want a “guide on the side”.

As leaders who desire to impact others we need to follow Dawson Trotman’s axiom, “More time with less people equals greater impact for everyone.”

To truly impact people, mentoring cannot be done in large groups. In fact, even small groups often don’t create good mentoring. Of course, you can inadvertently mentor someone in the course of an ordinary day when you share something with a group and “speaks into the life” of one particular person.

My challenge to you is to become a true mentor to the people you serve.

So the questions “is mentoring really necessary?” can only be answered when we decide how much we really want to impact others.


Is Mentoring the same as coaching?

The purists would argue that they are very different. Most suggest that Coaching is performance based and the coach needs to be experienced in the function or technical skills. Whilst mentoring is, in theory, a less structured approach to whole life development.

I consider coaching to be about the coach prompting (often through questions) the coachee to find their own solutions. Mentoring is prompting (through my stories and sharing my experience) the mentee to learn from this and adapt it to their situation.

Personally, I find the distinctions and separations unhelpful. If I have the pleasure to work with someone in their development, sometimes I coach, sometimes I mentor, sometimes I teach, sometimes I counsel, heck, sometimes I just listen. After all, coaching can, and often does include ‘life’ coaching, and mentoring is often about a specific task and improving performance. That’s why I gave up the argument and called myself a ‘leadership caddy’. The skillsets a mentor needs in the developmental relationship are the same. If it would help to share a personal experience for one particular person, whilst another needs you to show them exactly what you mean, whilst another just needs to be asked the right question to get them to think it through for themselves… use whatever works and don’t get bogged down by defining how it works.

Mentoring versus managing

Although many managers display ‘mentoring behaviours’, there are marked differences between being a mentor in a formal programme and a manager / line manager. A manager focuses his / her attention on the objectives of the organization and assigns tasks, conducts reviews and recommends salary increases and promotions. In the presence of a manager, employees tend to show only their strengths and hide their weaknesses.

A mentor on the other hand focuses on developing the mentee both at a personal and at a professional level. A mentor does not carry performance reviews, nor does he / she discusses salary increases, promotions or conduct performance reviews. This creates a safe environment for the mentee who feels free to discuss his / her issues openly without worrying about any negative consequences on their employment.

Don’t the interventions cross each other’s boundaries?

They certainly can do so. There are some instances where a mentor’s role in particular, can cross into areas often considered to be part of the line manager’s role. Indeed, in a mature organization, an individual’s line manager would also be one of their mentors.

A distinction that often helps is:

·         A coach is focused on developing the individual’s capability in their job

·         A mentor is focused on the individual’s personal development and their future career and life.

·         The line manager, on the other hand is focussed on their performance of given tasks within a job role or team and their career path in the team.

Can a line manager be a mentor or coach to one of their staff?

A line manager can (and should be encouraged to) mentor and coach their staff. The difficulty is creating a ‘safe environment’ that reassures the staff about any possible negative consequences on their employment. Some organizations prefer to separate the roles to make this easier, and it is good to gain perspective from others.

What if the mentor and line manager have different opinions or give conflicting advice?

Yes it does happen. It’s then up to the staff/mentee to decide what is in their best interests.

Isn’t that hard to do?

Yes. Who said this was easy?