Q: What is the difference between coaching and mentoring?
A: Coaching primarily addresses/improving job performance by developing specific skills. Often in the process, workplace roadblocks are identified and resolved. Executive coaches provide tools to recognize conflict flashpoints, resolve issues and create an enhanced working environment for leaders and their staff.
Mentoring, more broadly based and intuitive, focuses on the development of capabilities and could include guidance for establishing a viable career path. Mentoring is often done by a senior professional within the firm. It focuses on capability and includes, for example, helping someone establish a viable career plan.
Q: What makes for an optimum coaching/client relationship?
A: An effective coach anticipates and recognizes client needs and interests and customizes the approach by establishing a climate of trust, empathy and understanding. Rather than just providing answers, successful coaches emphasize personal awareness by helping clients recognize strengths while creating their own learning needs and behavioral changes and uncovering stumbling blocks to success.
Q: How do individual coaching and team effectiveness work differ?
A: Team coaching involves simultaneous individual and group focus. Each member of the group must be addressed with an emphasis on the interaction of all members. The objective is to foster understanding and create positive relationships leading to an improved, productive team effort and more rewarding personal interaction and communication.
Q: Should coaches tell clients what to do?
A: The goal of most coaching is to assist clients to become more confident in their own ability and make decisions by assuming responsibility. Coaches can advocate for certain courses of action, the client should demonstrate free and informed choice in their behaviors.
Q: What’s the responsibility of the coachee?
A: Clients who benefit most prepare for formal coaching sessions. In particular, they should be clear about their learning needs and prior thinking about those needs. Some coaches note key learning points for review and reinforcement of new insights.
Q. Who makes the best coach?
A: Many experts make ineffective coaches because they are unable to empathize with client problems while effective coaches have insight and patience helping clients to develop their own route. They also identify and resolve, interpersonal and inter-organizational roadblocks.
Q: Do line managers have to be coaches?
A: Coaching is one of the core skills of a line manager. Truly effective team leaders concentrate on creating an environment where constructive behaviors occur naturally between members of the team.
