Practising mentors building their practice
In our reading and conversations with coaches, we have identified four types of loneliness: The first and last of these are unhealthy. Even though coaches meet lots of people, they may experience the loneliness of isolation, because as professionals, they must maintain an emotional distance from their clients. If they lack close others, who they...
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The sociopath in the workplace brings frustration and misery to colleagues and to anyone, who tries to manage them. They are manipulative, and expert at both dodging responsibility and shifting conversations to their own agendas. It often takes time to recognise them (not least because they are good at flattery and because we don’t like...
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Read More Eight practical tactics for dealing with the office sociopath
It’s evident that a coaching and mentoring strategy – especially if the aim is to create a coaching and mentoring culture – requires the sustained support and energy of an organization’s leaders. In our interviews on this topic with both HR professionals and leadership teams, a number of themes recur frequently enough to warrant inclusion...
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Read More Gaining and keeping commitment from the top to your coaching and mentoring strategy
Cameroon is one of those countries that most people have heard of (largely because it once performed well in the football World Cup), but couldn’t place accurately on a map. So when I was invited to join a small group of coaches and leaders climbing Mount Cameroon on behalf of the charity Village Aid, I...
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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...
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Last year I was privileged to assess one of the most well-founded and effective mentoring programmes I have encountered. This programme was not in a sector, where one would normally look for good practice in mentoring. It was in the military and, specifically, in the Royal New Zealand Air Force. People at all levels received...
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Coaching and mentoring conversations frequently run into the brick wall of blame, most often in one of two common forms: self-blame (assuming responsibility for one’s own or other people’s misfortunes) or other-blame (protecting one’s own self-image and reputation by blaming others). Both forms block the client’s ability to be authentic and to make progress. The...
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The word restorative implies “putting back” or “regaining”. An effective supervisor helps you to restore what you need to be a fully functioning coach (which may not be that different from what you need to be a fully functioning individual, although the supervisor is not expected to be a counsellor or therapist). Coaching other people (more…)
It seems that every day, there is another story of organizations, which were once respected, betraying the trust of their stakeholders. The scenes at Fifa (pronounced Thiefa), when staff applauded the boss, who had presided over years of corrupt practice, may have seemed inexplicable, but they demonstrate just how easily immoral and illegal practice can...
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Procrastination is typically a repeating cycle with four stages: Coaches and mentors can help clients break this vicious cycle by firstly helping them to recognise it, then to develop strategies for addressing each stage. When people fail to break the cycle, it is often because they address only part of it – so the process...
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