Career pathing is a useful process for helping someone learn from their previous career moves and apply that learning to future career choices. Its about moving from allowing careers broadly happen to you, to taking greater control of your career; about creating choices rather than waiting for them to come to you. Some of the...
Building rapport is the first step in creating a successful relationship. Investing time in the early meetings to get to know each other, establish common ground, share personal stories and start to think how you will work together is time well spent. Establishing rapport is essential in, for example, mentoring coaching relationships, because it allows...
Identifying strengths is just the first part of a strengths-based approach to personal development. There are numerous self-completion questionnaires to help with the process, but these should come with a health warning – you have to have a relatively high level of self-awareness and emotional intelligence to see yourself accurately. More effective is to add...
Read More Building on personal strengths – beyond the basics
It is good practice to review your mentoring relationship at regular intervals. This will ensure you keep a check on how the relationship itself is working and on what progress is being made on achieving the objectives you set at the outset (and how those objectives may have changed). Ideally, a first review would take...
Recommended good practice is for mentees to spend at least 30 minutes in quiet reflection after a mentoring conversation. It’s important to set this expectation both for the mentee and their boss! It’s helpful to use the following headings to structure this reflection: Issues Insights Ideas Intentions © David Clutterbuck, 2014...
The three-way conversation between coach, client and the clients boss, is commonplace in coaching. Sometimes also involving HR, it provides a valuable opportunity to clarify agendas, establish the support needed from the boss, and improve the direct report-boss relationship. Yet in the context of mentoring, this conversation is typically seen as one to be avoided...
While the core relationship in coaching and mentoring is the coach-coachee or mentor-mentee, other people have a stake or interest in it too. When a line manager coaches a member of his or her team, they have to take into account not only their own expectations of the direct report, but also what’s expected of...
Read More Managing expectations of other stakeholders in coaching and mentoring
It is good practice to spend at least 30 minutes and preferably more preparing for every mentoring meeting. It is important to think through what you want from the meeting and how you can achieve that ensures you will get the most from that meeting; this takes time. By also advising your mentor in advance (more…)
Being a mentee isn’t about sitting back and letting the mentor do all the work. If you are going to make the most out of this powerful learning opportunity, you will have to invest considerable time and energy, both in the mentoring meetings and between them. If you can answer yes to all or most (more…)
One of the things successful people tend to have in common is that they have had at least one, and sometimes many, mentors in their lives – people, who cared enough about them to help them learn about themselves, make significant transitions in their personal growth or careers, and achieve their aspirations. Some people have...