Business Coaching & Mentoring For Dummies
Overview
Shape the leadership of tomorrow
Business Coaching & Mentoring For Dummies provides business owners and managers with the insight they need to successfully develop the next generation of leaders. Packed with business-led strategies, key concepts, and effective techniques, this book equips you with the skills to transform both yourself and your team. Whether you're coaching colleagues, employees, or offering your skills as a service, these techniques will help you build a productive relationship that leads to business success. The companion website also features eight bonus videos that will further your mastery by showing you what great coaching looks like in action. Navigate tricky situations and emotional minefields with ease; develop vision, values, and a mission; create a long-term plan—everything you need is here, with expert guidance every step of the way.
- Understand how mentoring benefits both sides of the relationship
- Learn key coaching techniques that develop leadership potential
- Adopt new tools that facilitate coaching and mentoring interactions
The modern workplace is a mix of generations, personalities, strengths, weaknesses, and quirks; great leadership can pull it all together toward a common goal, but who leads the leaders? Mentors and coaches fill this essential role, and this book shows you how to be one of the best.
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About The Author
Marie Taylor worked across the spectrum of business in private and nonprofit organizations delivering a range of leadership training and behavioral training. Steve Crabb is a Licensed Master Trainer of NLP and a Master Transformative Coach who has helped to train and coach more than 30,000 people.
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business coaching & mentoring for dummies
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General Business
If you’re looking at business coaching only from a best price perspective, you’ll probably be disappointed and you may end up with buyer’s remorse. There are more important criteria for you to consider than just price.
When hiring a coach, think of the process as a two-way conversation and building a professional relationship.
General Business
As more companies recognize the value of business coaching, they’re looking for ways to get the best value for money from coaching. As a result, coaches are finding increasing demand for them to work alongside existing teams of coaches or to work with the company to develop its own in-house coaching talent and in-house coaching programs.
General Business
You almost certainly know that a significant difference exists between task-level thinking and strategic thinking. Unfortunately, a number of leaders who believe they’re highly strategic just aren’t. In fact, what they’re really good at is task-level thinking — handling and delegating tasks. They’re great — brilliant even — at managing complicated tasks or leading a high volume of activity in the business.
General Business
Your business, profession or leadership role is a reflection of who you are and how you present professionally and in life more generally. Use these questions to check the alignment between your nonwork life and working life.
Analysing your values
What do you value about the nature of your business and your role in it?
Think of business coaching and mentoring as the use of a professional skill set where the well-trained coach doesn’t need to have experience of a particular type of business, specific leadership role, or experience in the same functional area as the person being coached.
The coach is using a set of skills and experiences to help the client find solutions and make sense of things from the client’s own resources.
General Business
Developing collaborative relationships within and outside of a business can help to leverage ideas, investment, innovation, and the like. Many high-growth businesses have been spawned through collaborative working and the development of specific industry networks. The high-tech sector, in particular, has actively identified synergies in new products or joint working and collaborated to create spin-outs and new joint ventures.
General Business
Everyone, even a business coach, hits a little wall of conscious incompetence in life — that space where the realization dawns that we don’t know something we need to know or aren’t as competent as we thought. Mentors with more experience of business or a specific area of expertise can really support people here.
General Business
Business has never been so publicly exposed as it is today. This is an important factor for business coaches and mentors. The opportunity to give real-time customer feedback on social media is ever present. Leaders sometimes need support through the coaching and mentoring process to adapt to that reality because failing to adapt can seriously compromise business and personal success.
General Business
Mentors, if you aren’t getting the desired results, change your communication strategy. Do you know the saying, “The meaning of the communication is the response you get”? The more variety clients have in the way they communicate their ideas, the more success they have in achieving their desired results.Social psychology experiments confirm that our decisions and behaviors are influenced by many things beyond our conscious awareness.
General Business
Good business coaches know that most people experience self-doubt. The truth is, in leadership, self-doubt can create restriction and limitation in a business. If we asked you to imagine a library full of books where the titles describe your life up to now, what would the titles be? Would any of them say things such as
I should have grown up by now.
General Business
Business coaches play an important role in helping business grow. An intrapreneur is an employee working for an organization, rather than striking out alone. But other than that difference, intrapreneurs act just like entrepreneurs. They take calculated risks. They see opportunities rather than obstacles. They pioneer innovation.
General Business
The global business coach training industry is thriving. In any profession, this results in some great training programs, some mediocre programs, and some downright awful programs bordering on fraudulent. Some training schools promise that anyone can have a six-figure coaching practice in a month. Coaching flying pigs wearing grass skirts and playing the ukulele is not usually an option on the syllabus, but it wouldn’t look out of place.
As a mentor, you have a number of ways to help a client see herself and become aware of the impact of her experience and how that may manifest in behavior and habits. The following is just one three-step process you can use in a two- to three-hour session.
Step 1: Gathering the personal map
Ask your client to bring every bit of objective and subjective data she has about herself to the session.
General Business
As a mentor and business coach, you have a responsibility to ethically persuade. When looking to influence, always keep the end goal in mind and consider what could be an obstacle or resistance to reaching it.
Always think, what does my language do to the submodalities of the listener or receiver?
The word manipulation is emotionally charged, especially in the context of influencing and persuasion.
General Business
The following business coaching example shows you how to check for commitment and desire to established SMART goals. You can ask individuals to do this exercise on their own or do it with them.
Business outcome: By the end of December the customer services team in the meat packing unit will have improved the time for acknowledging and answering initial complaints from five days to three days and have improved customer satisfaction with our complaints process while reducing packing and delivery errors.
General Business
Business coaches can be an asset for family-owned businesses. In the U.S., family-run businesses account for 30 percent of companies, with sales over $1 billion. In the UK, they account for 66 percent of all small to medium-size enterprises. The economic footprint left behind by family-run businesses is a large size 12.
General Business
The Logical Levels model was created by Robert Dilts, building on the work of Gregory Bateson. This model is widely used in personal development and business coaching. You can use it both as a diagnostic to help clients consider where the business is currently and also as a planning tool to elicit rich data to support the development of mission and vision.
General Business
Values are about how individuals behave in a business, individually and collectively and business coaches are a part of this. They’re a key component in terms of business ethics, social responsibility, corporate governance, and reputation. Although they’re more than just attitudes, they need to be consistent with the attitudes the business presents.
General Business
You can find many niche areas of business coaching, and the profession is constantly developing. Niches even exist within niches. Whatever your bag, understand that a significant difference exists between personal coaching and business coaching.Working with business requires a whole different level of relationship management, particularly if you’re working in corporate organizations rather than with small, founder-led businesses.
General Business
Business coaches and mentors must sometimes face the enemies of learning. When discovering new things, many people experience what’s called enemies of learning. These unconscious behaviors block people from trying new things for the sake of comfort and familiarity. As a coach, you need to have an awareness of your own enemies of learning and see them in others.
General Business
Most business coaches know that the grim reality of business is that grand visions often end in failure, new products are unsuccessful, and new ventures fail to live up to their expectations. In the United States, 33 percent of businesses fail in the first year of trading, and by year three that number rises to 50 percent.
General Business
Part of business coaching and mentoring involves helping employees mange stress levels. Any interventions that help with stress, depression, and addiction are impressive. Introspection promotes psychological flexibility, awareness, resilience, job performance, better decision-making, reduced absence rates, and the ability to learn new tasks.
General Business
The CLEAR model is very useful in business coaching. Peter Hawkins at Bath Consultancy Group developed the CLEAR model in the early 1980s. Like many coaching models, this model is defined using acronyms. It has five stages or elements:
Contracting: Opening the discussion, setting the scope, establishing the desired outcomes and agreeing to ground rules.
General Business
Solution-focused business coaching helps people see the range of possible solutions open to them and how they can take action to achieve that solution. It can be particularly useful when a client is finding it difficult to discuss the content of a situation or perceives the problem as overwhelming and can’t break it down into its component parts.
General Business
Part of being a good business coach or mentor means understanding what success means to different people. You can’t help someone achieve success if you don’t know what they think it means. What does success mean to you?
Is it stuff? Stuff is the property you have, the car you drive, the brand of clothes you wear, the watch on your wrist, the credit cards you have in your wallet.
General Business
Networking is reciprocal. As a business coach, you can develop your network in different ways. Traditionally, face-to-face relationship creation has been the norm. This method often consists of getting together at evening network meetings with like-minded business professionals over canapés and a glass of wine or at a business breakfast with a speaker and mingling while you chew on a croissant and drink average coffee.
General Business
No legal requirements exist in relation to a standard of training or hours completed for business coaching and mentoring. However, you’re likely to find it difficult to build a successful coaching practice without appropriate training and completion of practice hours to build your skillset.The required coaching standard for internationally recognized coach accreditation is between 35 and 100 hours coaching practice plus the training requirement.
General Business
You likely got into business coaching because you enjoy helping people solve problems and grow in their careers and professional relationships. What you probably weren't as prepared for are all of the administrative tasks that come with running your own practice. Ugh is right!Here are some key questions to ask yourself at the beginning or end of every month.
General Business
Coaches and mentors need to have a strong set of skills to manage session time well and to help their clients get the most from their time and make shifts in their thinking and approach.
Being present for a session
In coaching, turning up for a session isn’t being present. A street lamp can be present. Looking or sounding interested isn’t enough either.
Just like everything else in life, business coaching and mentoring sessions have a beginning, middle and end. Use this list as a quick check to help you and your clients get the most from your coaching and mentoring sessions.
Before the session
Review previous notes
Prepare personal notes to keep on t
General Business
Not everyone is mentoring inside a large organization or has a weighty board of advisers to draw on. If you’re mentoring inside a small organization, you can use a technique called “creating your virtual genius team.” (You can use this activity if you’re in a larger organization, too.)As a mentor, you work with your client on the process.
General Business
As a mentor, you need to have a cache of words that you can draw on to help make a difference. Have you ever met someone who said he would do something but didn’t follow through with his actions? This sorry state of affairs is not uncommon in business, especially after meetings when instructions have been given or agreements have been made but people still don’t do their part.
General Business
The UK department store chain John Lewis has a tagline: “Never knowingly undersold.” Its website explains that this tagline means the following:
Quality: “We have the very highest standards when it comes to product quality, plus we regularly benchmark John Lewis–branded products against the competition to ensure that we’re not just market-leading in quality, but also on price.
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