Matching How you will match your programme participants is a key element in the overall programme design and needs to be clearly defined and agreed upfront. It is often the one thing that people will ask most questions about and have the greatest expectations from in your programme and the more transparent you can be (more…)
Summary Selecting participants for your programme can be a challenge. Generally you will be guided by what your programme purpose is. If this is a graduate programme you will have your mentee group identified immediately. This will also aid your thinking in who you might want to approach as mentors as some criteria you might (more…)
Once mentors have some initial experience, they typically want to consolidate and grow their skills. Some of the practical ways programmes meet this need include: There appears to be a direct correlation between this process of continuous development as a mentor and willingness to be a serial mentor. For those, who want to go further (more…)
Summary Levels of training The aim of any training course in mentoring is to equip participants with the skills they will need to be confident, effective and safe in the role in which they are expected to operate. For most organizations, it is convenient to categorize training programmes as: Line manager briefing Nature of (more…)
When Kathy Kram carried out her seminal research into mentoring at the beginning of the 1980s, she focused on a small number (22) of informal mentoring relationships, taking place within a specific cultural context – educated North Americans. She identified a number of themes that recurred in these relationships and, as she herself has readily (more…)
One of the remarkable aspects of mentoring is how extensively researched the topic has been. However, extensively-researched isn’t the same as well-researched. Having had to trawl through hundreds of papers and a fair pile of dissertations for my own current doctoral research, I soon came to echo the thoughts of an anonymous business school faculty (more…)
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 (more…)
Why do coaches need supervision The concept of supervision in coaching is borrowed from the world of psychotherapy and counselling, where supervision is a condition of practice. Most of the professional bodies in coaching, in Europe at least, insist that all professional coaches undergo regular supervision. European standards for supervision should be published by the (more…)
In corporate programmes, a small group of supervisors (or just one) is usually appointed. If, however, you find you need to select your own supervisor, the following advice may be helpful: Be clear what kind of supervision you are looking for (e.g. individual or group? With an emphasis on a particular psychological approach?) and look (more…)
How much supervision do I need? It depends on several factors: · the level of coaching you are doing (i.e. whether it is for example, predominantly skills coaching or, say, behavioural coaching) – the more significant and complex the issues your client faces, the more supervision you need · how often you coach (at least (more…)