Practising coaches building their practice
Giving feedback is a key skill in coaching, mentoring and leadership. Not surprisingly, there are several models for how to do this. Among them: STAR-A stands for: Situation/Task – Clarify the situation or task – what should have happened. A: Action – Give details about what you or another person did R: Result – Describe...
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Effective coaching and mentoring sessions frequently take the conversation into unexpected areas. Seeing things from a different perspective or reflecting on a question that challenges assumptions opens up issues that – usually more complex and deeper than the presented issue – that the learner needs to explore. If these new issues or topics arise towards...
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Read More What to do if a coaching or mentoring session runs out of time
This is a practical and very simple way of helping someone, who is feeling overwhelmed. There are three parts to the process: © David Clutterbuck, 2016...
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One of the myths of coaching and mentoring is that coaches don’t give advice, while mentors do. The reality is that there are many situations where both should and do give advice – for example, if the learner is at risk. However, effective developmental coaches and mentors are careful to choose the appropriate situations for (more…)
The notion that “It’s rude to interrupt” is instilled into most people from an early age. A coaches or mentors, who have been taught the importance of listening and letting the client do most of the talking, we may feel even stronger inhibitions against interrupting. However, there are some occasions when interruption is exactly what...
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There are two types of noise or interference that prevent people achieving what they want. One we can call “fog” – not being able to see things clearly enough to work out what to do or where to go. The other is the “inner voice” that gets in the way of performance. The coaching pioneer...
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Shame is a universal experience of mentally healthy people. Defined as “a feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behaviour”, shame tends to have the negative impact that it inhibits learning. Whenever people feel shame, they tend to avoid discussing it with other people and they also try not (more…)
Coaching requires skills, such as listening, questioning and giving feedback, but all of these should already be developed to some extent in line manager coaches and in coaches more generally. What makes them effective is the coaching mindset, and this we can summarise as the three Cs: Caring: Co-learning: Creativity: © David Clutterbuck,...
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While many of the basic skills of being a mentor come naturally, you can learn to become an even better mentor, if you have put thought and planning into it. And all of the skills you enhance through practice as a mentor will have application in your role as a manager. A planned approach to (more…)
Coaching sometimes seems like Keats’s rainbow—the more we try to define it, dissect it, classify it, and demystify it, the more we diminish it and lose its essence. Often coaching literature represents attempts to confine coaching within the partisan wrappings of a particular school, philosophy, or approach. Often the motivation seems to be less about...
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