RE: Is coaching for improved performance effective?

["Hart, Rowena" <Hart -at- SelkirkFinancial -dot- com>]

Pat,

The university writing program I attended
had a very successful internship program.
I learned a great deal about writing in
six 4-month internship placements. Mentoring
(coaching) was a very big part of the internship,
but the length of the placements were a real
limitation to developing a deep mentoring
relationship.

Some of my mentors were more effective than
others. Or perhaps I was just a better student?
It's hard to pin down the reasons. As Geoff
Hart rightly pointed out, the student needs to
practice humility on a daily basis. This can
be difficult if you believe that the mentor
does not respect or support your efforts. So,
I have to say that trust is a huge issue in
mentoring, as it is with all teaching.

At my previous job I attempted to initiate
a mentoring relationship with a manager in
my department but there was no interest from
the manager. She didn't view mentoring as
beneficial and claimed that it would reduce
productivity. So, to partially answer
question #6, I don't think that everyone
wants to be a mentor (or student, for that
matter). And if you don't want to be a mentor
(or student) you aren't likely to be very
effective in that role.

I believe that mentoring relationships do
form without explicit discussion or planning
on the part of the mentor and student. It's
quite easy to participate in impromptu
mentoring sessions that carry on for days
or weeks. The motivation is always sharing
knowledge and making the student more
effective in their role, and therefore more
valuable to the company.

Last year I participated in an intensive
3-day course on how to teach. I learned a
great deal about how people learn and how
to effectively pass on knowledge to different
people. I think that a mentor would definitely
benefit from formal training as an instructor.
This training could come in the form of a
book or through classroom training.

Hope this helps,

Rowena

# -----Original Message-----
# A few questions for those who are gracious enough to respond:
# 
# 1. Does your firm have a coaching program? 
# 2. Have you ever been coached? Was it effective? 
# 3. Was it the coach, the tools, or the method he or she used 
# that made it
# effective? If none of the above, then what?
# 4. Have you ever coached someone? What tools or method did you use?
# 5. Are there differences between coaching technical people and
# nontechnical people?
# 6. Do you believe that anyone (e.g., managers) can be an 
# effective coach 
# given tools and training?
# 7. Have you read any coaching books that you would feel comfortable
# recommending? What made them worthwhile?
# 
# I know there are a lot of questions here, but I would appreciate your
# input. Since this topic may not be of interest to everyone, you may
# respond offline and I will summarize for the list.
# 
# Thanks in advance.
# 
# Pat Glass
# wordsync -at- swbell -dot- net
# WordSync--bringing words and ideas together
# 

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