Coaching and Mentoring

Organizations nowadays are not free of the burden of their employees making costly mistakes. Should they fall behind schedule on a particular project or if their current skills are not sufficient enough to compensate for an adjustment that is needed by a client that the company is servicing, then either the company will waste an opportunity or it will suffer a loss because their employees were not well-equipped to handle specific situations. And because of this, mentoring and coaching have become a very strategic manner in which organizations train and manage their employees. In such a setting, the atmosphere is more personal as opposed to a seminar and it is quite helpful as some cases have attested to it.

The goal of mentoring is to be able to encourage an organization's employees to further improve themselves and the skills that they have already mastered. It has been defined by Eric Parsloe as "a process that enables learning and development to occur and thus performance to improve. To be a successful a Coach requires a knowledge and understanding of process as well as the variety of styles, skills and techniques that are appropriate to the context in which the coaching takes place" (Parsloe, 1999) As with all professional matters , it is prudent to be able to know everything first before you act. This is also evident in coaching or mentoring as it constantly seeks to determine what are the different sets of skills and techniques that will benefit the client or the one who is being coached. A good mentor would be able to quickly gain a better understanding of his or her mentee if the person is aptly transparent with regard to his tendencies, capabilities and aspirations. This will greatly help the coach or the mentor assess how a particular employee will react to a specific situation and will therefore provide the guiding person an insight as to how a particular coaching or mentoring process should proceed.

Several reasons are evident as to why coaching is quite widely practiced now. One of them is that it provides a venue for the mentor and the lower employee to be able to see the vision that their superiors have. One very important issue that a mentor can discuss with their workers is why they (the mentors) are in their current position and how did they get there. Of course, there is always the hope and goal of upward mobility but it is also important to give credit to the lateral movement that a person does. The upper management can encourage older workers to focus less on their job titles and focus more on the skills that they have acquired as well as the knowledge and wisdom that they have gained during the course of their stay in the company. This will definitely be a big boost to the younger generation as it addresses the need for reflection. Whatever move that the workers are inclined to, the management will be there to readjust their focus on the more vital things that an employee should care about.

Another advantage of mentoring is that it enables you to reduce generational conflict. Normally a baby boomer would be bashing heads with the younger generation of employees simply because the younger generation seems to believe that there is a better way of doing things the way the older generation has been doing it. Through the venue of mentoring and coaching, the two parties are now joined by the common goal of enabling each other with vital information that will be able to help the company. The older generation can then help make the younger generation understand why