This article has its origins in several complementary sources: the personal coaching experiences of both myself and my co-authors in 14 books on coaching and mentoring; the experiences of coaches, who I have supervised; and observation of coaches in real plays within coach assessment centres (robust, validated processes for evaluating the competence and “fit” of...
When we talk about supervision in coaching and mentoring, the first association is with one-to-one intense professional oversight, as happens in counselling and psychotherapy. Yet supervision can come in many forms and for many purposes. It can be relatively expensive, or remarkable inexpensive. As organisations become more familiar with the supervision concept, we are gradually...
Created more than a decade ago, the Twelve Habits of the Toxic Mentor and the Twelve Habits of the Toxic Mentee have been quoted in hundreds of publications and training programmes. I’ve thought for a while that it would be useful to have a similar checklist for executive coaches. So here, finally, it is…. The...
Powerful questions we can define as ones that have a significant, positive impact on the quality and direction of a person’s thinking about issues important to them. Based on analysis of hundreds of powerful questions and observing how coaches and mentors use them, the characteristics of a powerful question include being: Personal – it is (more…)
Considering how much organizations pay for the services of executive coaches, it might be expected that the relationship between them would be a partnership, aimed at providing the best possible support for the client. While in some cases, this is undoubtedly true, a more general picture appears to be one of more transactional relationships, with...
One of the most common reasons for mentoring programmes failing is that they forget to train mentees sufficiently. Programmes that train only mentors deliver less than half the benefits, on average, than those that train both participants. The reasons include: Mentees’ often have little experience of mentoring and come with unrealistic expectations – for example, (more…)
Here’s a typical story: Peter was away from the office for three days. Most of the team thought he’d been on a business trip, but when he returned, he was keen to tell them about the course he’d been on. “From now on,” he told them, “I’m not just the team leader. I’m the team...
I took an executive to task the other day, when he talked about gender inequality as a “women’s issue”. The implication was that he and his colleagues would take more notice, the more of an issue female employees made it. Of course, it’s actually a man’s issue as well. As a director of a large...
One of the interesting aspects of co-editing a new book on Diversity Mentoring (due to be published by McGraw-Hill in August) was the comparative reluctance of the LGBT community to discuss their mentoring relationships – even when the research was being carried out by an openly lesbian colleague, with high credibility in terms of understanding...
Questioning the role and value of executive coaching is likely to raise quite a few hackles. But questioning our own practice is a key component of competent coaching. So it was with both anticipation and some discomfort that I began last year to explore the question: “Could leaders and managers be using having a coach...
