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In this case study, we offer an analysis of feedback from a student experience survey completed by Black undergraduate students who received proactive, targeted coaching and mentoring support during 2021–2022. All the students were studying at a large higher education institution in the United Kingdom which offers a broad range of degree courses by distance learning.

This paper reports on the intervention delivered and analyses the student experience of being offered, and receiving, proactive coaching and mentoring. It is based on the responses of 102 students who engaged with the experience survey after having self-selected to receive the intervention. What follows is an analysis of their experiences using a qualitative in vivo approach based on word frequency in students’ free-text comments.

The findings presented are that, in this intervention, students who self-select to receive coaching and mentoring support experience tangible (self-reported) behaviour changes with potentially longer term benefits for their studies. These include improved self-confidence and self-efficacy, increased proactive help-seeking behaviour, greater recognition of strengths and achievement and personal growth and self-awareness.

In presenting this case study, we aim to contribute to the growing corpus of practitioner case studies and research papers that show the benefits of coaching and mentoring in higher education and – more specifically – why coaching and mentoring can be a worthwhile targeted intervention for students from underrepresented backgrounds. This lends support to the growing consensus that students with positive, proactive help-seeking behaviours perform better than students not able to access support (Byrne et al., 2014). We conclude the case study with some practical implications for providers looking to provide targeted support to students.

This paper aims to explore why creating a mentoring culture can help to transform businesses and solve key recruitment, training and development and retention issues. It looks at what a mentoring culture is and the benefits and provides advice for companies on how to build this kind of culture.

This paper considers the approach taken by leadership coaching company The OCM to develop effective coaching and mentoring programmes which can contribute to organisational success in an ever-changing business environment. This paper explores current business challenges and how they can be overcome.

Creating a mentoring culture can transform a business. It can address many talent and leadership-based challenges and tap into the potential of knowledge transfer across a multi-generational workplace. The paper includes two case studies of organisations whose experiences of mentoring and coaching have been overwhelmingly positive and led to much-needed cultural shifts.

This paper attempts to raise awareness of the benefits of mentoring and coaching as an effective method for attracting, developing and retaining people and meeting the challenges of a modern workplace.

The search for competitiveness by family-owned companies has led us to research topics that may help these companies succeed. The management of human capital is undoubtedly one of the keys to success, and the practices of employee development (training, promotion, succession, career planning, mentoring and coaching) help improve the performance of these companies.

This paper is based on studying a sample of 560 family companies and analyzing the relationship between performance of the family businesses and the use of employee development practices. The techniques used were confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling.

The results show that employee development has a direct effect on the indicators of performance in family companies. The authors have developed a series of practical implications for companies that justify investments in and efforts with regard to employee career development.

Family businesses need to understand the development needs of their employees. In addition, the very processes and tasks performed. The authors have developed a number of practical implications for companies that justify the investments and efforts made in employee career development. This work validates the usefulness of the use of certain practices for the development of employees in family businesses, allowing the company to generate human capital to build a competitive position in the market.

The results of this study suggest that family businesses should understand the development needs of their employees and that various practices are available to help detect these needs. Family businesses should see individual development processes as an opportunity to improve the performance of employees, which could avoid conflicts in such businesses (Qiu and Freel, 2020). Companies should develop career and succession plans that enable these changes to be faced throughout the company, ensuring that when handover occurs, the candidates are sufficiently qualified in accordance with their career paths. The present research study shows that coaching is a powerful tool for improving performance. Moreover, mentoring appears to be an important part of employee development. For this reason, mentoring programs should be formally planned with designated objectives. In addition, family businesses should provide employees with real opportunities for promotion and the development of their skills and abilities, which is a way to retain nonfamily professionals (Ramankutty and Pujar, 2017).

Family businesses are a very important part of the productive activity of a country and their continuity is necessary to maintain employment and income. The management of people in family businesses is a key aspect for their success, therefore knowing the key aspects for the development of human capital will have a positive influence on maintaining employment and income.

This paper addresses the study of people development processes in family businesses and proves its usefulness to improve performance, considering the formal planning of succession processes and professional careers, providing qualifications to candidates and ensuring that they are show satisfaction with their professional evolution in the company. Likewise, it is positive for family businesses to use coaching relationships, formally scheduled and employing a coach from abroad. The other tool that will favor the development of employees is mentoring, formally programmed, establishing objectives and properly studying the mentor's profile. For this tool to be applied successfully, it is necessary to get the participants to commit to the mentoring process. Finally, the organization must provide its employees with real opportunities to promote, training them and developing their skills.

The paper provides analysis of the use of instructional coaching (IC) as a prevalent trend supporting new teachers in the English system and aims to inform ongoing policy development and implementation. The qualitative study examines mentors' conceptualisations and enactment of the role of instructional coach and the readiness of mentors to assume mentors' key stakeholder roles in the professional education of early career teachers (ECTs).

Semi-structured interviews with 37 mentors explored mentors' understandings and experiences of becoming instructional coaches as part of a pilot support initiative to support ECTs in England. Two rounds of interviews were conducted to generate data related to the first six months of mentoring on the programmes. Thematic analysis identified seven semantic themes which describe manifest content found within the data and identify mentors' perceptions of their role and practice as instructional coaches. Three latent themes were developed from mentors' accounts which indicate challenges in becoming an instructional coach in this context.

Concern to apply IC “correctly” according to the programme models was a strong feature amongst both novice and experienced mentors. A key finding is the lack of explicit knowledge of professional learning pedagogies amongst mentors and insecure understanding of how new teachers learn. Assuming the role of instructional coach presented both benefits of having a “model” to follow and disadvantages in fostering limited and over-prescribed concepts and practices related to the learning of new teachers.

The study investigated mentors during the first six months of a pilot programme and the paper reports on analysis of one type of data. The research results may lack generalisability, and a longitudinal study is necessary to further explore the validity of the findings.

Sustained, high-quality professional learning for mentors is crucial to mentors' role as instructional coaches to enable mentors to develop deep, critical understanding of how IC might support new teachers and how to exercise professional judgement in working with “models”. Judicious use of time and resource is needed to enable mentors to fulfil the potential of national mentoring programmes.

The study is timely in its examination of mentors that assume the role of instructional coach as one response to national policy development that makes support for ECTs mandatory. Such strategies have wide international relevance where the retention of new teachers is a policy priority.

Chapter 5 opens with a fictional scenario of a Professor of Digital Marketing on the US East Coast, who is making a cup of coffee in the morning and reflecting on the climate impact of the coffee journey at the same time as considering how she could incorporate this knowledge into her lectures in an impactful way. The Professor is considering designing an authentic piece of assessment which leads to behaviour change and has positive impact on society. The mentoring conversation she engages in is with a former colleague who has extensive experience of education-focused initiatives in universities and is an active mentor in great demand in the scholarly community. The conversation builds on Molthan-Hill and Blaj-Ward (2022), a point-of-departure paper about assessing climate solutions in a personally and societally meaningful way.

The synthesis of scholarly literature which follows the scenario and conversation has two points of focus. One is assessment. Relevant literature is referenced to further contextualize themes such as alignment, authenticity, well-being, sustainability, inclusivity and meaningful use of digital tools in assessment to develop identities and spark action. The other is the overlap between mentoring and coaching; a combination of the two is likely to support richer professional development for academics and, consequently, for their students. Climate-focused approaches in coaching have more recently been developed and are being used to facilitate resourceful responses to climate change. Two volumes on climate coaching are reviewed, to offer insights into the process of linking professional knowledge and life experience.

Information was obtained in interviews with Richard Nagel in Winter/Spring 2022. This information was supplemented by material from secondary sources. The only information that was disguised were the real names for Bob Crater, Tim Landy, Jane Tolley and Mary Nagel.

The case was classroom tested in Summer 2022. The responses from students helped to shape the writing of the case.

Richard Nagel, the owner of the RE/MAX Elite real estate agency in Monmouth Beach, New Jersey, has just learned that one of his agents, Tim Landy, quit and left the industry. Tim was a young real estate agent and Richard had spent considerable time training him. Tim was motivated and he worked hard to prospect for business, but he showed that he was experiencing difficulty closing on his sales. Richard decided to recommend that Tim work with another agent, Bob Crater, as Bob was an experienced salesman but was not doing the up-front prospecting that Tim was doing. Richard suggested two different strategies to the two agents – a pairing up arrangement and peer-to-peer learning. The outcome that Richard envisioned was that both of the struggling salesmen would benefit from either of these strategies, but Bob refused to collaborate.

Tim’s quitting was characteristic of an ongoing problem with employee retention that Richard had been experiencing as a manager in recent years. This problem caused Richard to think about how he recruited his real estate agents, how he developed them through coaching and how he motivated them so that they would stay happy in their job and not leave. He recognized the importance of thoroughly examining his retention strategy within the next 12 months so that he could better manage the problem and strengthen the productivity of his real estate agency.

The case is intended for an undergraduate course in human resources management, as it deals directly with recruiting, coaching and retaining employees.

The introductory chapter in the volume offers a rationale for bringing together, in an edited collection, contributions from authors who emphasize the continued relevance of mentoring in academia. The focus of mentoring in the volume is on enabling academics to orient their practice towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); the introduction highlights the selection of SDGs discussed, as well as critically reflective responses to these in existing literature. The structure of the volume and of individual chapters is mapped for the benefit of readers. The volume is a hybrid text, combining academic scholarly reflection with narrative vignettes and with dialogue excerpts, to illustrate more fully SDG-oriented mentoring practices and experiences. The principles underpinning the writing methodology and the sources which have helped shape these principles are discussed here. As well as unpacking the writing methodology, the introductory chapter spotlights three core texts on mentoring which informed the volume at proposal stage and throughout the writing process. A personal note on mentoring from the volume editor is followed by a ‘pause and reflect’ section, which offers questions for the reader to consider when engaging with some or all the chapters in the volume.

We examine the relationships between clients’ level of coaching readiness and trust in their executive coach and increases to both personal learning improved work performance. Distance relationships, the setting for this study, epitomize the norms of the New World of Work (NWoW), but also provide particular challenges for building trust and recognizing similarities between client and coach.

This study investigates distance coaching relationships in matched-pairs, longitudinal investigation of formal executive coaching.

Results support the proposed moderated mediation path. Findings reveal that both coaches’ perceptions of client readiness for coaching and client trust in coach each predict both client personal skill development and performance improvement.

While important toward gaining a better understanding of the relational functioning of distance coaching relationships, inclusion of only distance relationships may truncate the generalizability of our findings.

The study’s findings have practical implications for organizations that invest in executive coaching with regard to the importance of evaluating the candidates' readiness for coaching before the assignment, trust-building throughout distance coaching relationships and perceptions of similarity on client coaching outcomes.

Distance relationships, the setting for this study, provide particular challenges for building trust and recognizing similarities between client and coach and the current investigation points to the relevance of these relational mechanisms to client outcomes. In so doing, this study explores how perceptions of deep-level similarity between a coach and client may serve as moderators of these relationships.

Co-authored by three South African academics working in higher education development, this chapter uses the transition from professional practice to academic contexts as an entry point into a discussion of transitions broadly. We reflect on the role of mentoring in supporting the multiple transitions which dual professionals navigate and what this means for the provision of inclusive, quality education (SDG 4) with a focus on higher education. In reflecting on this Sustainable Development Goal, we approach the topic of mentoring from a critical perspective which allows us to attend to the themes of power, access and equity that it invokes. The body of scholarship on the transition experiences of practitioners into academia has challenged the assumption that professional expertise translates into teaching expertise in the classroom. The opening vignette contextualizes this challenge. The vignette protagonist offers to support an academic colleague and approaches a mentoring expert to explore her guiding principles for mentoring within and beyond the classroom. The dialogue surfaces the need for mentoring that considers the various transitions that dual professionals navigate. We engage critically with international literature on the role and positionality of dual professionals in academia and reflect on selected concepts from this literature to highlight the importance of an adaptive mentoring approach for meeting academics in transition at their point of need. We offer a synthesis of literature on holistic approaches to mentoring, critically reflecting on how they enable inclusive quality education for the benefit of society.