Mentors and coaches need to establish a professional body in order to win public respect and confidence
Currently anyone can describe themselves as a mentor or coach. Some mentors’ and coaches’ professional backgrounds have prepared them for these roles, while growing numbers have entered the profession from tangential routes with little or no training. There has been much debate recently about the credibility and professionalism of coaching practices and as responsible members of an emerging professional group, it is vital that we ask and start to answer some key questions.
We need to be looking at our field of practice, whether we want to be members of a professional group or whether we would rather be practitioners in professional practice; and how we should be operating as professionals as we develop the profession.
We need to clarify our work, who our clients are, what our relationship with them is and how we can build sufficient public trust and confidence so that they see us as a professional group.
For this to happen, a governing body is required which sets standards and codes of conduct. With such bodies, there are usually examinations and an educational process to allow prospective members of the profession to be accepted. The result of not having such a body is a lack of a unified or coherent preparation process across the mentoring and coaching population. One of the consequences of this disparity may be confusion among our clients about what the practice of coaching and mentoring is focused on.
We need to examine how we prepare someone for being a mentor or a coach at the content, theoretical and practice level and what it takes for someone to ‘qualify’.
In terms of identifying our field of practice, as most mentors and coaches work with people sponsored by an employing organisation, it is reasonable to assume that the focus of mentoring and coaching is on the performance of the person in the organisation. But a wide range of factors influence how a person undertakes their work within an organisation. This multi-layered perspective of work performance relies on the competence of the professional to ascertain the nature of the agenda that the client is bringing to the sessions.
As professional practitioners, we need to be capable of using multiple processes with our clients and able to create enterprising ways of couching our interventions. This demands that we are either reflective practitioners who ask ourselves evaluative questions or that we are members of a practice and supervision group with whom we can monitor our practice.
I think it is important that we develop ways in which individual professionals can develop their practice, such as CIPD events and the use of reflective practice groups. Other aspects include focusing on our relationship with the theory and ideas supporting our work.
In addition we need to identify the professional bodies that we hold responsible for our profession. How will mentors and coaches come together as a practitioner community over the next few years? If they do, will they be a separate professional group or is mentoring and coaching part of wider professional groups? I have heard some people state that they are practitioners, implying a split between the theory and the practice of their work as mentors or coaches. Before we can develop into a professional community we will need to develop research based and evidence-based practices.
Kant is reputed to have said: “Theory without practice is mere play and practice without theory is blind.” Are we blind in our practice, or are we merely playing at being practitioners?