How can executive coaching & management mentoring help your business?

There are all kinds of situations where training and developing staff can be of benefit to your business. It could be that you want to get a new skillset in-house using existing, talented people.

It could be that you want to start using a new piece of technology, methodology or process and want to train your workforce. Or it could be that you want to offer people the chance to train and move up in your organisation as a way to encourage staff retention.

Coaching and mentoring are similar to training but are one-to-one methods of helping people with specific challenges and getting them to be confident in reaching their potential. Executive and management coaching and mentoring are things that you can either arrange within your own organisation using your own experienced managers (if you have that size and structure), or by using third-party training specialists like management training by 3GHR to provide to your promising current and future managers.

Why Do Senior Staff Need Coaching in Management?

A lot of the time within a business, people get promoted into management jobs because they have performed well in specialised roles. You may choose to promote a great admin person into an office management position or to make your best programmer head of development. This is great and allows people to see real progression by doing a good job and gaining expertise, but it means that often people arrive in senior positions with a lot of technical knowledge and no real management training.

There are various ways to give people the skills they need to take on the new tasks and responsibilities that come with management and leadership positions. One could be sending them on traditional management courses or helping to fund them to do an online degree in a management discipline. However, most people learn this very specific skillset best by working with an experienced manager as a mentor.

Why is Mentoring So Effective?

A mentor can achieve better results than classroom training or studying from books because they can offer real world experience and insight that is very specific to the mentees situation and concerns. What might help someone learn to supervise a call centre effectively may not involve the same management skills as managing a technology development project, because the number of people, the level of the people they are supervising, and the issues they’ll face will be different.

Experienced managers who can work with someone on their own actual problems and help them discover how to deal with them or learn how to take the best approaches with their size and type of staff, can be invaluable.

Who Does Mentoring Work Best For?

Mentoring and executive coaching can work well for almost anyone if they are paired with a mentor who is right for them. The relationship between the mentor and mentee needs to support developing a similar management style, and so people with vastly different approaches would not be good matches. Management training companies that offer mentoring tend to work hard to find a mentor that suits the specific ambitions and needs of the mentoring candidate, but if you are looking at making mentor relationships in your own business, it is important to know the people involved and to be sure there isn’t going to be a significant difference in outlooks.

Mentoring can be useful at all levels of industry but tends to be used mostly by people who are aspiring to senior positions or have been promoted into them and need a bit of support to become completely effective due to having less experience of the demands of their new level. It can be good to give promising people a mentor in your company even from more junior positions however, as this will help them reach their potential and progress faster as well as making them feel well supported.

Do Mentors Have to Be from the Same Industry?

In general, people would expect that someone who had done their exact same job and moved on to higher things would be the best mentor, but actually, people who have held senior positions in different departments or even different industries can still have a lot to pass on about management itself. Aspects like decision making, time management, and leading staff are universal, and it can actually be beneficial to get the insight of someone from another sector, on the relevant parts, because it can bring new ideas into your own business.

Mentoring is one of the best things you can do for your promising executives and can really give your company strength as they grow quickly into competent, confident leaders. It is well worth considering instigating a mentoring program or bringing in external mentoring specialists to bolster your top tier.