The Coach-AI Partnership If coaches are to benefit from the rise of Artificial Intelligence, then they will need to embrace the new technology and integrate it with their practice. But what does that mean? The coach-AI partnership fulfills several functions: It provides real-time information about what is going on in the conversation, in the client […]
How Mentoring Can Facilitate Mergers
How mentoring can facilitate mergers The immediate aftermath of a merger poses a number of major challenges. While many of these challenges relate to integration of systems and structures, the people challenges are often the most difficult and long lasting. In particular: Ensuring that senior level talent does not leave. Headhunters target merger situations, because the uncertainty causes people to […]
Five ways to solve mentoring engagement issues and why
Five ways mentoring solves most engagement issues (and why it matters) Organisations spend a great deal of money on turnover-related expenses each year. Many also invest heavily in engagement surveys, in an effort to predict where they’re vulnerable to low productivity and loss of key talent. Engagement has been found to contribute to a raft […]
Coaching and Mentoring—Same, Similar or Different?
Coaching and Mentoring—Same, Similar or Different? I always smile when I hear people trying to explain the difference between coaching and mentoring. Particularly when coaches try to describe mentoring and vice versa. Each tends to think their own discipline is somehow better than the other. Bob Garvey, one of Europe’s leading coaching and mentoring academic practitioners, compares the pursuit of truth for the two terms to the Pepsi–Coca Cola wars of the 1970s and 1980s.1 Is there […]
How ethical mentoring can make a difference
GUEST BLOG Ethical mentoring can manage reputational risk It seems every day, there is another story of organisations, 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. Yet they demonstrate just […]
Humour in Mentoring
Finding the Funny Side of Mentoring When asked to describe the mentor or coach they would dread, learners typically refer at some point to the person without a sense of humour. Not surprisingly, mentors and coaches have similar feelings about trying to form developmental relationships with humourless learners. The person who is too intense, too […]
Employee-Led Mentoring
How to Support Employee-Led Mentoring Programmes One of the biggest barriers to widespread use of mentoring in organisations is HR time and focus. Lean HR teams in many companies have a wide range of urgent tasks and projects that tend to take priority over deep learning initiatives. Minimum effort solutions, involving matching platforms that put […]
Helping a Mentee Manage Uncertainty
When Uncertainty Becomes a Barrier Much as humans generally crave certainty, we have to live with constant uncertainty. It’s how we manage uncertainty that counts. In organisations, uncertain comes in two kinds: prediction uncertainty and decision uncertainty. Prediction Uncertainty Prediction uncertainty comes from operating in a VUCA environment, where we know that “best guesses” […]
Helping a Manager Understand His or Her Leadership Style Options
Manager Intervention: Helping managers understand their leadership style options How a manager behaves in any specific situation depends on many factors, including how much preparation time they have, but the two most significant factors are their general style preference and the range of options they have within their preference. The role of a coach or […]
Time to Man Up to Men Mentoring Women
When will the tide turn on the impact of #MeToo? We published our research “Cross-Gender Relations in a Post-#MeToo World” in 2018. It was our fervent hope that this would start a conversation about the unintended consequences of the #MeToo movement – namely that men were starting to avoid contact with women in the workplace, most notably, in […]