Page 87 - DMGT517_PERFORMANCE_MANAGEMENT_SYSTEM

Performance Management System

Notes Both coaching and mentoring are natural human activities, often intuitively practiced by
managers, although many managers practice them without thinking, many others have not
developed these natural skills or have allowed them to stagnate or disappear.
Mentoring and coaching are distinguished from each other generally by the work-distance and
time-frame of what is being discussed. Typically, managers coach those who report them, about
fairly immediate work developments. A mentor is often organizationally more distant from the
person they are mentoring (by seniority or by being outside the organization or department); and
can work with the mentee on longer term issues of personal development and career planning.

8.1 Coaching and Mentoring in the Organization

The significance of coaching and mentoring for the modern organization lies in four key

aspects:
1. The attention to the individual provided by these activities. This in itself is a shift from
previous attitudes to the management of subordinates. This attention can provide a point
of stability that makes people more able to respond effectively to change.
2. The individual becomes a skilful and refl ective learner. This is the underlying aim of
both activities. Individuals increasingly use their own experience as the key material for
learning, assisted by the knowledge and wisdom of the coach or mentor.
3. The importance of the relationship. Both activities are examples of what has been described
as ‘developmental working relationships’. A large part of the success of the mentor or
coach depends on the way they manage the relationship at a human and personal level.
This ability transfers into other working areas, as not only a survival skill in the new style
of organization, but as a means of sharing knowledge and expertise.
4. The effect of organizational climate, and the effect on it. Though the one to-one relationship
is clearly central in coaching and mentoring, to be fully effective it needs to be part of an
organization-wide appreciation of the value of learning as a driver for relevant change.
Effective coaching and value of learning is a driver for relevant change. Effective coaching
and mentoring relationships can help to develop this wider process as well as deriving

benefits from it.
Coaching and mentoring frequently run alongside, or are an intrinsic part of, a self-development
process set in place by the organization. This process can vary; with personal projects and personal
development plans at one end of the continuum, and an organization-wide self-managed learning
programme at the other. They are linked by an emphasis on development becoming something
for which individuals have to take responsibility themselves.
One of the most important conditions for coaching and mentoring to be successful is the
assumption that learning is a respectable activity, and that everyone can and should be engaged
in it. The mentor and the coach challenge and support individuals in their learning, and help to
provide the organizational framework in which it happens.

Success is also more likely where there is a clear, though evolving, picture of the nature of a
person’s job or role, and where it fits into the organization and the corporate goals. This requires

a degree of clarity about job or role expectations:
Well-developed and thought-through criteria so success, clear regular feedback, some sense of
the resources necessary to achieve the targets set, and an understanding of the work context, both
internal to the organization and in the marketplace. This clarity is never easy to achieve, but a
move towards it sets the scene for effective coaching and mentoring.

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