Created more than a decade ago, the Twelve Habits of the Toxic Mentor and the Twelve Habits of the Toxic Mentee have been quoted in hundreds of publications and training programmes. I’ve thought for a while that it would be useful to have a similar checklist for executive coaches. So here, finally, it is…. The (more…)
Powerful questions we can define as ones that have a significant, positive impact on the quality and direction of a person’s thinking about issues important to them. Based on analysis of hundreds of powerful questions and observing how coaches and mentors use them, the characteristics of a powerful question include being: Personal – it is (more…)
Considering how much organizations pay for the services of executive coaches, it might be expected that the relationship between them would be a partnership, aimed at providing the best possible support for the client. While in some cases, this is undoubtedly true, a more general picture appears to be one of more transactional relationships, with...
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One of the most common reasons for mentoring programmes failing is that they forget to train mentees sufficiently. Programmes that train only mentors deliver less than half the benefits, on average, than those that train both participants. The reasons include: Mentees’ often have little experience of mentoring and come with unrealistic expectations – for example, (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...
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Read More Leader development: Are executive coaches part of the problem or part of the solution?
While there are lots of good coaches around, there are a lot more, who are mediocre or worse. Few HR functions have the internal competence to assess coach competence, and standard methods of evaluation, such as client feedback, how very low validity – indeed, the level of challenge within a coaching relationship may be inversely...
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Asking questions is something we do all the time. It’s essential to how we learn, how we keep safe, how we collaborate with other people, how we make decisions, and so on… It’s a core skill of being human, yet few people stop to think about how they ask questions or whether they could be...
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One of the most common questions in coaching and mentoring is “Who can you get to support you in achieving this goal?” When people struggle to respond, as is often the case, or feel that they are on their own, it may indicate that they haven’t invested sufficiently in creating their community of support. Research...
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Read More Helping the coachee/ mentee develop a wider community of support
A common misconception in organisations is that it’s easy to sell a good idea. The reality, as detailed in the book Originals, by Adam Grant, is quite the opposite. Among the misconceptions his and other research identify are that: So when a coachee or mentee complains that their ideas are not being listened to, here...
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Read More Helping the coachee or mentee pitch an original idea
Many of the issues that coaches and mentors encounter can be classified as ethical dilemmas. These occur when a person either feels that they are being asked to do things that are against their moral values, or when they have a conflict between two or more of their own values. An example of the former...
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