Techniques for Coaching and Mentoring

Citation

Megginson, D. (2006), "Techniques for Coaching and Mentoring", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 20 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/dlo.2006.08120bae.001

Techniques for Coaching and Mentoring

A round-up of some of the best book reviews recently published by Emerald.

Techniques for Coaching and Mentoring

David Megginson, David Clutterbuck,Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 2003

This book is an addition to the many books already written individually by Megginson and Clutterbuck on this and similar subjects. It does not set out to explain the rationale for coaching or mentoring. Previous books have covered that. Rather, as it says on the cover “Techniques for Coaching & Mentoring is designed to offer the reader a range of interventions they can employ when working with others”.

The reader, in this case, is ideally someone who is already committed to coaching and mentoring, either as a manager who coaches staff, or as an external mentor or executive coach.

The first chapter offers a short introduction to some of the thorny issues that fill earlier books on the subject – the difference between coaching and mentoring, the essence of a good coaching and mentoring relationship, and the pros and cons of relying on techniques. Any debate about the difference between coaching and mentoring is skilfully avoided here.

The bulk of the book is a set of chapters, explaining techniques for:

• •

  establishing and managing the coaching or mentoring relationship;

• •

  setting goals;

• •

  clarifying and understanding situations;

• •

  building self-knowledge;

• •

  understanding other people’s behaviour;

• •

  dealing with roadblocks;

• •

  stimulating creative thinking;

• •

  deciding what to do;

• •

  committing to action;

• •

  managing the learner’s own behaviours;

• •

  building wider networks of support, influence and learning;

• •

  ending the coaching or mentoring relationship; and

• •

  some generic techniques.

There is a chapter on each of these, containing case studies, diagnostic models to clarify perspectives and feelings, and sample questions for the coach or mentor to ask.

The final chapter contains a list of 107 great coaching and mentoring questions, the last of which is “the one that does pretty well everything that you need: Wassup?”

You can see that part of the book’s style is not to take itself too seriously. In addition to the techniques and case studies provided by the authors there are a number of case studies and inputs provided by visiting contributors.

Collectors of three letter acronyms will be pleased to know that in addition to being a rock band, and “rapid eye movement”, REM also means “role environment mapping”. This and other techniques are attributed and explained in a way that leads you to want to use them.

The case studies enable you to see how the models and techniques have been applied to people who the authors have worked with. The models explored include diagnostic tools such as Myers-Briggs, and versions of the four-quadrant diagrams which are so popular with management developers.

The one thing that struck me as a bit odd when reading the book was the way Megginson and Clutterbuck refer to themselves. Sometimes they are “the authors” or “one of the authors”. There is the occasional “I” in the case studies. Sometimes they refer to “David” – leaving the reader trying to guess which of them it is. I found this a bit of a distracter, but only a mild one from what is otherwise both a good read and useful reference book.

This review, by Pete Sayers, was published in, Industrial & Commercial Training, Volume 37 Number 7, 2005.