Mentoring and coaching can help you enhance your business performance and achieve your life and career ambitions.

What are Mentoring and Coaching?
Characteristics of Coaching
Characteristics of Mentors
What a Business Mentor Does
What a Business Mentor Will Not Do
What is a Typical Mentee?
Online Coaching and Mentoring
The Cost of Mentoring and Coaching
How to Find a Coach or Mentor


What are Mentoring and Coaching?

Robert Dilts breaks down mentoring and coaching into the following different activities:
Guiding: the process of directing an individual or a group along the path leading from present state to a desired state
Coaching: helping another person to improve awareness, to set and achieve goals in order to improve a particular behavioural performance
Teaching: helping an individual or group develop cognitive skills and capabilities
Mentoring: helping to shape an individual’s beliefs and values in a positive way; often a longer term career relationship from someone who has ‘done it before’
Counselling: helping an individual to improve performance by resolving situations from the past.

Characteristics of Coaching

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) lists some characteristics generally agreed upon by most coaching professionals:

• It consists of one-to-one developmental discussions.
• It provides people with feedback on both their strengths and weaknesses.
• It is aimed at specific issues/areas.
• It is a relatively short-term activity, except in executive coaching, which tends to have a longer timeframe.
• It is essentially a non-directive form of development.
• It focuses on improving performance and developing/enhancing individuals skills.
• It is used to address a wide range of issues.
• Coaching activities have both organisational and individual goals.
• It assumes that the individual is psychologically healthy and does not require a clinical intervention.
• It works on the premise that clients are self-aware, or can achieve self-awareness.
• It is time-bounded.
• It is a skilled activity. 
• Personal issues may be discussed but the emphasis is on performance on work.
  

The mentor's role is to be a sounding board, someone to share ideas with and approach for help. Mentors establish their own relationship with mentees and set their own agenda and ground rules. Some progammes require meetings at regular intervals – typically once a month – but more often than not, the frequency and method of contact are agreed upon between the parties involved. The following are characteristics one could expect mentors to have:

• They will have relevant business experience.
• Are able to listen well
• They are able to motivate and inspire.
• They demonstrate open mindedness.
• They have time to give.
• They’re committed to act as mentors to new enterprises and provide commercial expertise to the community – including the voluntary and educational sectors –supporting projects and initiatives where the commercial perspective is needed.
• They are high calibre, proactive business figures who recognise that by developing the region’s competitiveness through business growth and economic development, we all benefit.
• Experienced in Business
• Trustworthy and Professional
• Trained and up to date with current practices

A Mentor is someone to share ideas with, someone who will listen to your problems and issues, help wherever possible and be a friend to your business. 

What a Business Mentor Does

• Explore, suggest options
• Empower, show clients "how to"
• Offer expertise, information, ways of finding out
• Support and encourage
• Share their own experiences 

• Pre-judge the business viability of clients ideas
• Dictate or tell clients what to do
• Be an expert on everything - they will help clients to find out
• Create false expectations
• Make assumptions
• Adopt a judgemental attitude

• Individual clients considering developing ideas into a business, business start-ups and small- to medium-sized businesses.
• Women who want to develop and enhance their business and personal skills.
• Client’s participating in The everywoman Leadership Development Programme, which incorporates the provision of a mentor as part of an integrated support package.
• Clients referred to everywoman by other business support agencies and programmes
  

Rapid changes in the way organisations operate have generated a new management and business development tool: electronic-mentoring. Modern technology enables the exchange of useful, targeted information between a pre-matched mentor and mentee via electronic communication. This provides a means of developing meaningful, productive relationships one might otherwise never have benefited from.

The cost of mentoring varies according to the circumstances of the programme and whether or not it is funded it can range from free to up to £500 per session for commercial executive level coaching, typical rates are between £75 and £150 per session. Some mentors will often offer their services on a voluntary basis; others have their costs met by funded schemes.

Executive and life coaches will charge a fee, to the client or their organisation.

There are many qualified individual coaches and mentors, so ask your friends and colleagues if they have can recommend someone they know or have used themselves. There are also qualification bodies that have lists of qualified coaches and mentors – look up the organisation in your area. There are some Government/publicly funded mentoring and coaching programmes and many business support organisations have coaches – contact your local business link or enterprise agency.

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