Coaching and Mentoring as a Manager
Developing your team using coaching and mentoring
Managers have a responsibility to develop their employees. For this, companies use formal mechanisms like performance reviews, career planning, project planning & work assignment. Outside of these formal ways, great managers are always looking for ways to grow their people.
When thinking about how best to help people, it’s worth remembering that:
“Help is defined by the learner not by the helper” [1]
No matter how much you want to help someone, good intentions aren’t enough! You need to put some work into understanding how someone will learn best, what they need to learn, and — importantly — how they want to learn from you. Without this foundation, your efforts to help someone just won’t stick.
Two approaches to helping people grow are coaching and mentoring.
As a coach, you work with your coachee to help them find their own answers to their challenges. Coaching assumes that the best solutions to problems come from within. With some questioning and probing conversation, individuals can arrive at those best solutions. By uncovering and challenging the assumptions of your coachee, you can lead them to gain a better insight about the situation they find themselves in. However, if the coachee is just looking for answers from you, or isn’t ready to step up, then this approach will be frustrating for you both. It’s also an exercise in restraint for a manager — the temptation to simply tell your coachee what you think they ought to do is always there! Resisting this urge and helping your coachee come to their own answers can lead to more impactful growth in the long term.
As a mentor, you are typically more experienced than your mentee and are there explicitly to share your advice, expertise, connections & experience. A good mentor would know about the organisation, the people in it, and the work that’s being done. They use their experience to give specific advice to their mentee. Managers are often in the role of manager precisely because they have experience that can help their team achieve their goals. Without that expertise, the team might be left going down the wrong path, or trying out solutions that have already been shown not to work. Mentoring therefore is crucial in any organisation as a way to pass knowledge from those who are experienced in an area to those who are learning.
To sum up, a coach could be described as someone to learn WITH, while a mentor as someone to learn FROM [2]. A great manager is able to mix and match both coaching and mentoring styles to develop their people — sometimes even within the same conversation. A skill of great managers is therefore knowing the right time to lay things out for an individual, and the right time to draw out the answers from them in pursuit of a greater understanding. By being intentional about the ways you help your team members, you can have a greater impact on their career growth.
References
[1] “How Managers can Develop Managers”, Alan Mumford
[2] “Coaching and Mentoring”, Nigel MacLennan
[3] “The Complete Handbook of Coaching”, Elaine Cox, Tatiana Bachkirova & David Clutterbuck
