Case Study : Coaching Initiatives Fail

In the modern world, mentoring has long been used to help nurture and grow people. This is one way that many companies attempt to hang onto the top talent at their company. The goal is to create employees that are knowledgeable and who have the wisdom and experience to be successful at the company.

This report will determine the value of coaching and mentoring; highlight some factors to consider when developing coaching and mentoring and show models and methods

Identify to stakeholders how coaching and mentoring (C&M) makes a valuable contribution to the management of talent.

How do you retain and prepare your best talent to lead? Mentoring programs are one of the most effective tools in achieving business results. The authors of the book, War on Talent reported, "Of those who have had a highly helpful mentoring experience, 95 percent indicated it motivated them to do their very best, 88 percent said it made them less likely to leave their company, and 97 percent said it contributed to their success at the company."

The business community describes mentoring as an employee training system under which a senior or more experienced individual (the mentor) is assigned as an advisor,

Mentoring is an interregnal part of every professional field. Organizations that pursue future improvement and development focus on mentoring by means of inviting internal and external professionals to mentor junior members. Mentoring is a rather complex subject and often takes serious preparation on the part of a mentor. Just being an experienced professional is not enough for becoming a good mentor for juniors. Mentoring is a responsible activity, which requires high levels of patience, professionalism, ethics, enthusiasm, tolerance and skills. Even though most of organizations mention highly developed training programs, in practice mentoring is still a new territory for most of them and often the professionals cannot properly explain what actually makes a good mentor and what efficient mentoring should include.

The main purposes that coaching and mentoring can be used for within this organisation is for everyone within the organisation to be fully involved within this programme so it meets the current and changing needs. Diversifying an organisation can be very disquieting for team members as change can be a difficult thing to take hold of. To succeed at coaching and mentoring, the team need to understand that the main role of this is to help people to learn and within this, that they are motivated to learn. The largest challenge is to ensure that the people in the organisation can cope will all the changes and therefore commit to bringing this forward. This is not just a benefit for the organisation but a benefit for the individual as their knowledge and skill within a role will grow and therefore more opportunities may arise and confidence may grow. Once coaching and mentoring have been implemented, the main priorities (IT skills and customer care) will naturally take shape and become embedded within all

The specific investigation has significantly demonstrated the ways in which coaching and mentoring relationships can help an individual to deal with different challenging situations in life. The coach of the specific case investigation feels that this case help him significantly in determining his capabilities and observe situations from diverse perspectives. For the specific case study, coach needed three aspects in supervision including willingness of client, mutual agreement between both the parties and feedback from the client regarding specific coaching exercise as well as development plan.

Mentoring allows you to strengthen your coaching and leadership skills by working with individuals from different backgrounds and with different personality types. I personally take any chance I get to shadow upper management, take on extra meetings in place of my boss when he is unavailable to get my name and face out there. This also allows me to get another take on different leadership skill as I mentioned above from managers of all levels at work. The growth is always there for people willing to take the extra step to get there.

In CIPD (2013) development techniques are used to define coaching and mentoring as one-to one discussion in order to enhance the individual skills, knowledge or work performance. Coaching and mentoring are very important part for training which is considered as the spectrum of talent management, due to this will emphasized on development new skills and directly give benefit to the organization as well as the individual or they assist people to conquer obstacles and develop their career through enhancing relationship with more experienced individuals (CIPD, 2014). However, Flexible techniques used for training are on the use of one-one discussion and focusing to increase knowledge, skills or work performance (CIMA, 2008).

Coaching is the art of facilitating another person’s learning, development and performance. Through coaching people are able to find their own solutions, develop their own skills and change their own behaviors and attitudes.

Mentoring is the process of guiding or coaching less experienced individuals, especially in areas requiring adequate skills and hands-on capabilities. In some practice, the word mentorship is being used as a professional relationship between a mentor (a person or a group, who are directly assigned to provide specific information or knowledge regarding specific field of interest) and a mentee (the one requiring guidance and mentoring). The practice of mentoring has been used for a long time that its essence has been an important part of employee development especially in the field of management. Considering that mentoring is based mostly on informal relationship between a mentor and a mentee, the process is mostly based on type of communication which most of the time is transferred informally as the situation requires. In the process of mentoring, the mentor and the mentee undergo a certain relationship that makes mentoring important. It is also during this stage wherein mentorship can be seen effective or not.

Accompanied with the current shift towards more organic organisation structures and more emphasis on the learning organisation, mentoring provides a more all round experience to the mentees by getting them confident with their role with the organisation. It also improves communication throughout the organisation by allowing mentees to give feedback and learn in a not so formal fashion which helps people feel more relaxed and develops the formal and informal culture of the organisation.

Establishing coaching as part of organizational competence. This implies that organizations should establish a strong coaching culture. This can also be applicable towards mentoring. Doing so will aid the employees in to reach their full performance and aid them in strengthening their skills. This as well implies that companies should invest in training managers, especially in terms of coaching or even in mentoring, in order to leverage talents of peer coaches.

The Mentoring Institute (1997) maintains that, in the past, mentoring typically just "happened" as experienced people recognized and developed new talent or as beginners sought the counsel of knowledgeable elders. Now, the institute describes a "new mentoring paradigm": todays protégés are better educated but still need a mentors practical know-how and wisdom ("craft knowledge") that can be acquired only experientially. Therefore, many organizations are instituting formal mentoring programs as a cost-effective way to upgrade skills, enhance recruitment and retention, and increase job satisfaction (Jossi 1997).