Top 7 Reasons to Learn Coaching and Mentoring

Are you keen on learning the practical skills to become more effective as a coach? Do you want to drive your team towards better performance?

If you want to gain industry-leading coaching skills, the blog highlights the importance of Coaching and mentoring.

Here are the top 7 reasons why you must continue to read.

#1 - Learn the meaning of Coaching, mentoring, and the GROW model

A coach guides a person to achieve a specific goal or skill. Mentoring is the act of counseling and support. It is vastly different from Coaching. It is fundamentally teaching. However, the objective is slightly different.

As you proceed, you will learn the differences between the two terms.

You will also learn about the GROW model, which aids coaches in better coaching their employees to achieve higher performance.

• Goal setting
• Reality check
• Options developed
• Wrap it up with a plan

#2 - Identify and set goals using the SMART technique

SMART stands for the following goal characteristics:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Timely

SMART goals are easy but require a commitment to use them consistently. They are essential to the coaching process.

#3—Understand the balance of member contributions and encourage mutual support—To elicit the maximum amount of teamwork in any given team, it is paramount that each member provides their knowledge, expertise, and skill to the team unfettered and unencumbered. Suppression of ideas by dominant members may lead to unfavorable results that may not benefit the team in the long run.

For members of a team to value each other's contributions and work well together, they must establish mutual understanding and respect among one another. Coaching and mentoring help provide ample amounts of assistance and support to fellow team members. It is a sure-fire way of improving teamwork.

#4 – Overcoming team obstacles and stress-

Let us now talk about conflicts within a team. Leading researchers have three types of conflict narrowed down to:

Relationship conflict:

• Personality clashes or grievances can lead to lowered productivity and reduced communication if people pretend the problem does not exist.
• Task conflict: Most people dislike critical questions about their ideas and work, which can lead to animosity between teammates.
• Process conflict: Arises from allocating duties and resources and can lead to internal arguments and lowered group morale.

When coaches step in, they play a role in understanding both conflicting parties' perspectives and maintaining a delicate balance between having enough differences to maintain a reasonably high level of conflict of ideas but not so much that the team descends into relationship conflict.

Coaching and mentoring give the ability to motivate, clarify goals, be an appropriate role model, and generally create and maintain an environment where the team can succeed.

#5- Understand the meaning of trust and its relationship to Coaching and building trust

Effective Coaching is done in an environment of trust. To inspire your team to perform better, the members must trust you. Your coaching session is a great opportunity to show them they can trust you, as this is a gateway to understanding each other and building relations.

Avoid using your coach session as a venue to deliver reprimands, sanctions, bad news, etc. Coaching should be a purposeful event that happens regularly and is void of negative information. This is not to say you cannot discuss performance issues. It just has to be presented in a way that speaks of development rather than punishment.

When Coaching, we should avoid being DOPE or

• Degrading your team
• Ostracizing your team
• Punishing your team
• Evaluating your team

#6 – Answer the key coaching and mentoring questions

Some of the questions that stimulate mentors and coaches are:

1. What is the quality of your relationship with the team?
2. Do you respect the team, and do they respect you?
3. Does the team understand your needs for information, learning, and upward support?
4. What does the team need you for?
5. What is the appropriate balance for this team when managing upwards and downwards?
6. What could you do that would improve the team's performance?
7. What could you do more that would improve the team's performance?
8. How much mentoring does this team require?
9. What style of Coaching would be most appropriate?
10. If you could choose a dream team, what would it be like?
11. What could you do to turn your existing team into the dream team?

#7 – Equip yourself and your team for success

Through this program, you'll understand coaching and mentoring concepts, discover why people coach, learn the techniques used for Coaching, and, most importantly, learn how to become the coach who leads others to success. The program will provide the most up-to-date coaching tools, tips, and models.

I hope you understood most bits of the course through our top reasons.

Increasingly today, the more Coaching and mentoring become integrated with day-to-day activities and processes, the greater and more lasting its impact on performance. Coaching and mentoring are not occasional but long-term activities conducted for many reasons.

Coaching and mentoring invest in already successful, experienced executives and high-potential leaders to accelerate skill and relationship development. It is more about enabling talented leaders to use their skills more efficiently, which is a long-term process. Additionally, teams today rely on their coach to act as a sounding board and help them avoid potential blind spots.

I encourage you to start the journey, self-teach yourself, and become a coach who can lead your team towards achieving maximum potential!