Mentoring & Coaching: Are Both Necessary, and What's the Difference? - Part II

What is coaching?

Coaching is a collaborative process that integrates business and personal goals, building on individual strengths at the office and in home life. The process usually begins with an initial, in-depth consultation with the CEO or managing partner to align coaching and firm goals before work with individuals or a team proceeds.

Coaching can also be one-on-one guidance and extended support for professional and personal growth and change. It recognizes that who one is as a person and as a professional are intricately linked.

The work usually takes place on two levels concurrently; there is an underlying developmental plan as well as conversations which take place in real time to support an individual through a crisis or a hiccup on his or her path. It is designed to ensure lasting change and promote continuous growth. Coaching deals specifically with performance enhancement, self-observation and self-correction in order to make the changes sustainable.

Creating a coaching culture

A coaching culture provides an environment in which objective assessments and candid feedback are seen as essential to personal development. We all know that supervisors and managers of all ranks generally don't provide such feedback to subordinates. Staff members often have no idea what is really expected of them and what they need to do in order to be successful.

Why don't managers provide consistent, candid feedback? Candor generates emotion, and emotion can be very uncomfortable. An environment for safe feedback needs to be created and the skills to do so are skills that can be taught.

Unlike most business processes, coaching engages with people in ways that acknowledge and honor individuality. It helps people know themselves better, live more consciously, and contribute more richly. The essentially human nature of coaching is what makes it work, and it is also what makes it nearly impossible to quantify.

While strategic retreats are now common for companies to re-evaluate vision, mission and strategic plans, it is curious how many smart, highly motivated, and apparently responsible people rarely pause to do the same for their own lives. Often more inclined to stay in action than to reflect deeply, executives and professionals may reach the top ranks without addressing their limitations or what “gets in their way”.

Coaching encourages them to slow down, gain awareness, and notice the effects of their words and actions. “Coachees” can then perceive conscious choices rather than simply react to events; moreover, coaching can empower them to assume responsibility for the impact they make on the people with whom they interact.

In addition to creating self-awareness, coaching is a form of active learning that transfers essential communication and relationship skills. Strategic coaching should integrate personal development and the needs of the firm.

This approach can help partners adapt to new responsibilities, reduce destructive behaviors, improve retention with a perceived perk, enhance teamwork, align individuals to collective goals, facilitate succession, and support growth and change.

Key Benefits of Customized Coaching Programs

Attraction of talent

• Attracting the best talent is the first step to ensuring the success of firms or organizations.
• An effective employer branding strategy encompasses a wide range of Human Resources and coaching elements, including:
• Reward and recognition
• Internal communication
• Goal setting
• Work practices
• Career development
• Working environment
• The values and ethics of the organization
• Mentoring

Retention

• Retention of excellent employees is one of the most important challenges in organizations today. Key employee retention is critical to the long term health and success of professional firms and businesses in general.
• Retaining your best employees ensures customer satisfaction, client retention, satisfied coworkers and reporting staff, effective succession planning and deeply embedded organizational knowledge and learning.
• Talent retention depends on how well a firm or organization implements the promises of the attraction strategy mentioned above.

Reducing burnout

• When people are aligned with what they do, they will achieve extraordinary results.
• Increased productivity and performance is the result of changing some behaviors of successful people through the coaching process. Coaching creates a higher level of self-awareness which promotes course correction.
• Clarifying what’s important, recognizing and supporting the whole person and continually experimenting with the way work is being done are three elements which reduce burnout and lead to greater job satisfaction. Coaching assists people in making the changes that help create work and life environments in which they can thrive.

Exposing systems issues

• Often companies are built, much like a house, on a foundation that supports only a couple of stories. As the firm grows, the foundation struggles under what has now become a 15 story building.
• Through coaching conversations, what may have appeared as a communication breakdown or conflict among employees is exposed as a systems issue.

Coaching leads to many positive outcomes

For individual employees, coaching:

• Leads to breakthroughs on personal bottlenecks that limit performance.
• Brings performance to its highest capacity.
• Helps employees understand the intersection between themselves and their jobs.
• Creates enormous gains in emotional intelligence and effectiveness in one's entire interpersonal domain.

At the company or firm level:

• Problems are no longer tolerated, covered up and allowed to snowball.
• The level of trust and motivation rises.
• People get better at telling the truth.
• Coaching removes barriers to individual performance.
• Performance of the management team improves dramatically.

Three conditions must exist before any company can realize the benefits of coaching.

• Coaching must be introduced as a developmental tool, not as a deficit or fix-it tool.
• Confidentiality must be respected in all coaching situations.
• Coaching must be voluntary.

How is coaching delivered?

Programs can be tailored to the individual needs of firms in alignment with size and stage of growth and maturity.

The following elements are commonly incorporated into our programs:

• A climate assessment or discovery process is explored first to understand the firm’s needs.
• Assessments are utilized to create a development plan for each individual involved. Coaching then creates the environment for the development plan to be implemented.
• Often a 360 feedback creates an awareness of how the individual “shows up”. Partner, peers and staff are interviewed confidentially to provide feedback on strengths, “gaps” and areas of impact for the coachee.
• Feedback helps create the appropriate goals. Once goals are in place, clients pursue individualized strategies and create an action plan to increase self-awareness and build skills that draw on their personal and professional strengths. Considerable emphasis is placed on both action planning and achieving measurable results linked to identified business objectives.
• The coachee is taught how to use awareness to self-correct. Feedback and feed-forward become a component of continuous learning.
• Coaching sessions take place on a one-to-one basis every two weeks, either in-person or by telephone. In addition the coach is available by email and phone calls to support the just-in-time development of the coachees.
• For maximum results, coaching programs extend for a period of 6 months to 1 year.

The ROI of Coaching

A study by Manchester Inc. showed that coaching programs delivered an average return on investment of 5.7 times the initial investment in a typical executive coaching assignment.

A study by Kotter and Heskett (1992) showed the following:

Summing up the differences between Coaching and Mentoring

The key distinction between mentoring and coaching can be thought of as follows. Mentoring is the transference of information from the person who has it to the person desiring the information. Coaching is a development process defined by the specific needs of the person being coached.  

When considering the value of both programs, if your firm is like many others, you will find that many of your partners have the technical skills to impart. How many of them would you recommend to coach others in communication and interpersonal relationships? The answer to that question suggests that the same people may not be qualified for both purposes.

About Frumi Rachel Barr

Frumi Rachel Barr is a catalyst for change.

Frumi and her associates specialize in and have a passion for working with successful accounting firms. Her concentration is on what are commonly called the “soft skills.”

Frumi and her associates work with those firms who want a competitive advantage in recruiting prime talent, retaining their key employees and developing their partners, managers and staff. Frumi & Associates provides a formal measurable coaching program to address the specialized needs of growing firms.

Unlike other coaching firms our associates all have an intimate knowledge of the accounting profession and the challenges they face.

Frumi has had a distinguished career history as an entrepreneur and financial executive. Her experience and expertise as both a CEO and a CFO provides responsive and collaborative support to her clients. It is this unique blend of practical, theoretical and communications/strategic skills that makes the work Frumi does unique among business advisors and coaches.

Learn more about Frumi and Associates