How mentees can manage their boss’ expectations of the mentoring relationship

In theory, the boss should be delighted that someone else is sharing the responsibility for helping one of their direct reports to manage their career self-management and personal development. In practice, they may have reservations about how much time away from the job will be involved, what mentor and mentee will say about him or...

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How to assess commitment to development goals

It often happens that people bring goals to coaching and mentoring, which they feel obliged to accept. Because these goals are externally generated (for example, from the expectations of their line manager, or their spouse), their commitment is likely to be much lower than if the goal were generated internally, meeting their own needs. So...

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How to find an informal mentor

If you are not able to join a mentoring programme in your own organisation or profession, you can still find a mentor informally. The starting point is to think through what you want a mentor for. Once you are clear about this, you can move on to thinking about what sort of person would make...

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Hope to help the coachee/ mentee cope with change

In essence, all coaching and mentoring are about helping people achieve change. When change is incremental, planned and about progress towards a desirable objective, and the coachee/ mentee feels reasonably in control and not under threat, then coaching or mentoring task is relatively straightforward. But when change is unexpected, threatening or involves significant perceived loss,...

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Building on personal strengths – beyond the basics

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...

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Building rapport

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...

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Career pathing

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...

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Circles of concern and influence

We all have concerns in our lives; concerns could be around home life, health, finance, family, friends, the environment, violence, oppression, starvation, the environment – the list goes on. We are not always able to influence all of our concerns. So, we have a choice about where we choose to focus our attention, time and...

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Coaching or mentoring: which do you need? (A decision tree)

A coaching or mentoring decision tree can help to identify the appropriate type of developmental approach and method. The first step is to consider the need/issue; this will help in determining the support needed. Aspects to consider include: is the issue one of performance; career development; or personal/ leadership development? If the issue is about...

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