There comes a point at least once in a coaching conversation, where the coach feels instinctively that the issue is clear enough to pose a powerful question – one that will really make the coachee think and open up new perspectives. Many times, that is exactly what happens, but occasionally the coachee simply responds with...
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As a line manager, one of your principal responsibilities is to develop your direct reports. Coaching and mentoring are two of the most powerful and well-publicized ways to support other people’s develop – but how do they work best in the context of a work team? Whatever approach you take to developing direct reports, it’s...
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The weight of evidence in recent years with regard to traditional performance appraisal and developmental conversation between line managers and direct reports presents a clear picture – not only do they not motivate higher performance, but they often reduce motivation and performance. To reshape these conversations to make them positive and useful, we can go...
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Recent research at the University of North Carolina and elsewhere, into how we perceive emotions reveals that having a name for an emotion is important in both how we experience it and how we cope with it. Academic Tiffany watt Smith at Queen Mary University in London explains that “putting a name to a feeling...
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Development mentoring’s focus on the acquisition of wisdom goes back to the original story of the mentoring relationship between Athena, the Geek Goddess of Wisdom and Odysseus, King of Ithaca and his son, Telemachus. In the guise of Mentor, and sometimes as herself, Athena helps the two men learn from their experiences, developing their insight...
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An implicit assumption within coaching and mentoring is that the coachee or mentee is motivated to change. That isn’t always the case and even when it is, there is a big difference between externally motivated change (doing something because you have to) and internally motivated change (doing something because you want to). Internally or intrinsically...
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Some years ago, a company, which I was chairman of, acquired its next largest rival at a time when the whole sector was in severe difficulties. The merged company survived and eventually flourished, while many other companies in the sector went out of business. Looking back on what we did right, one of the key...
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If you’d not heard of scientometrics before, you are probably in good company. I only just learned about it through a fascinating article (Samuel Arbesman, Truth Decay, New Scientist, 22 Sept 2012, p37-39) exploring how quickly “facts” in various branches of science turn out to be untrue. Many medical schools, says the author, routinely tell...
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As coaches and mentors, we expect our clients to have and to review regularly a Personal Development Plan. But how do we respond, if they ask us about our own Personal Development Plans as coaches? In a series of workshops with coaches, less than 30% overall say that they have one. Apart from maintaining credibility (more…)
When people glibly say that the mentoring relationship is confidential, what do they mean? In helping hundreds of organizations define confidentiality, here are some of the lessons I’ve learned: • Confidentiality is about confidence — trust in the other person’s discretion and judgement. The greater the level of co-confidence, the higher the level of honesty...
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