Mentoring as been around, in one form or another, for 2,500 years or more. Coaching, the new kid on the block, has a history of at most a couple of hundred years. Yet, while mentoring in the past three decades has had great impact on social development, it is coaching that has captured the headlines (more…)
When a successful female entrepreneur is held up as a role model, is it a good thing or not? There is now so much evidence that women can be as effective (and in some circumstances, such as rural economies in developing countries, considerably more successful in business creation) than men, that the fact we still...
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The ability of humans to collaborate in teams on large-scale projects goes back thousands of years, according to theories emerging from the evidence of excavations of ancient monuments. Ancient monuments like Stone Henge, the Egyptian Pyramids, the statues of Easter Island and the 3,500-year-old Poverty Point in Louisiana are often depicted as the result of (more…)
It’s a natural assumption that, the more coaching a line manager gives his or her direct reports, the greater the positive impact on performance and engagement. In reality, however, according to a study by Gartner, there is very little correlation. The study suggests instead that quantity of coaching is much less important than quality. It...
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Read More How much coaching should line managers give direct reports?
The concept that humans are composed not of one single self or personality, but of numerous different “selves” that think and behave differently in response to different stimuli, is now well entrenched (Bern, 1964; Rowan, 1990, 1993). Bachkirova (2011) and Lawrence (2018) have explored the implications of multiplicity theory in the context of one-to-one coaching....
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One of the biggest impediments to team performance occurs when there is a mismatch between the leadership style and behaviours the team needs and those that the leader and the team default to. The word default is appropriate because there is usually an unconscious process of adaptation, which may be driven by: Having a language...
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Read More Negotiating the balance of power between the team leader and the team
The Abilene effect (where a solution is adopted that no-one really favours, but no-one feels sufficiently opposed to, to go against the majority) happens remarkably frequently, even in high performing teams. It is actually quite easy to prevent, with the use of a simple procedure. The starting point is to discuss the question: “What are...
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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...
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Read More Why Line Manager Coaching Often Doesn’t Work and What to Do About It
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...
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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...
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