THE EFFECT OF COACHING AND MENTORING IN CAREER PROGRESSION
21st century is known for the growth of corporate sector and management that requires a shift from traditional skills developing techniques to some more advance forms of training. Organizations are flooding with the workers that strive for self fulfillment and personal development. Moreover, globalization forces employers to acquire new skills for their survival. That is the motive that organizations are striving hard to develop and retain high performing work force for uninterrupted organizational operations.
Important strides had been taken by coaching and mentoring in last decades. But as the time passed, these new HR (human resource) practices had greater influence on the productivity of organization, as they both targeted at improving performance of
employees within the organization.
Coaching and mentoring enhance personal skills of people through an effective learning process that is beyond the traditional training methods. Among many training practices, coaching and mentoring are the best mean of providing support to individuals to realize what one can do, how one can achieve one’s goals, increase one’s potential, and how one can capitalize one’s strengths in order to improve performance.
As coaching help people to improve their performance it is considered an important tool for management. In today’s highly competitive environment where every organization is at war of recruiting competent candidates, they see coaching and mentoring “skepticism” and “hope” for their further development.
People may confuse the term mentoring with coaching but in reality these both practices are different from each other as they both have different aims. Mentor’s job is to counsel and advise people on their career paths, and has a senior position with vast experiences and expertise that can also give assignments to the people for the purpose of helping them in their development. On the other hand, Coaching is the art of facilitating the performance, learning and development of another. Coach is more than an instructor, who observes the people’s behaviors, develop improvement plan with the people, get feedback from them and then recommend future actions. Potential of a person can be unlock by the coaching for better job performance.
One thing common in them is that the both of these practices develop a relationship between mentor and mentee or coach and coachee.
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There are countless benefits of coaching and mentoring. These benefits includes improved performance, increased selfesteem, professional and personal development etc. They not just help learners but mentor and coach can also be benefited by these training programs.Coaching and mentoring makes people more valuable by developing and enhancing their skills—both professionally and personally.Mentoring is a longer process than coaching.
Coaching and mentoring involves more than just introducing a new employee to be more productive and skilled within his position in the organization. Coaching and mentoring are two separate strategies for continuous development, parallel staff needs, and daily routine duties. Coaching and mentoring require much assistance to provide appropriate professionalism and the environment for development, training, capacity, and self-experience related to the establishment of a structure within the organization.
Coaching and mentoring has proven to be critical methods of development and learning used to bring about change, develop efficiency, raise awareness, and change attitudes and behaviors in organizations. Several critical areas of Coaching and mentoring have been investigated.It is wise, of course, to check the Coaching and mentoring that has already been internally and what is available externally before seeking for any coaching or mentoring relationship.
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Theaccurate definition of the coach/Coachee, and Mentor/mentee, and how to build a relationship between them is significant in the right guiding to both association.
Coaching and mentoring differ in their aims and styles. Coaching aims at providing instructions while mentoring aims at development of skills and abilities. Coaching and mentoring have positive impact on people’s performance.
They both play an important role in strategies related to professional and personal development and learning of new skills. Feedback and reinforcement by the mentor and coach are also very important as they both encourage people to exert more effort in order to improve their performance. Useful opportunities are offered to the people by these two practices. People may not perform well, their required tasks due to lack of essential skills. Mentoring and coaching introduced by the organizations helps the people in their professional and personal development.
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In conclusion,
this changing global environment challenges organizations to obtain appropriate expertise and assistance that promote its growth and take it to the next level. Coaching and mentoring are very important as they both are used as a training tools in many companies and academic sectors. Both of these tools are designed to improve people’s performance, confusion is created that whether these two approaches coaching and mentoring are different or same because different researchers attempted to separate coaching from motoring. Mentoring produces results for mentee while coaching gives returns around performances. Coach’s main job is to motivate individuals to change their behaviors. Coach has a belief that learner has an ability to self direct himself or herself for own benefits.
Helping people forces coach to understand their current problems and then have a discussion with employee in order to improve their performance that is problem centric.
While mentor advises people what is better for them but does not force them to do what is said by him, instead let them free to choose what they like to do and then provide instructions to execute their choice in a better way. The importance of mentoring in improving people performance as it allows them to set their agenda and then provides guidance for how to accomplish those agendas.
Writer: Dantarason David Danladi
Abdullahi Suleiman a Certified Registered Nurse based in Nigeria, an Entrepreneur and Also a Blogger, passionate about Community Development and Cosmetic Nursing
