For buyers of coaching services, it can be tempting to give up trying to navigate this swamp of theoretical models and obtuse jargon. But, if one is patient, steps back and asks what all these people are doing and why, it’s all pretty simple. If you look at coaching or mentoring in action, in most cases you would simply see two people having a conversation. And we all have conversations every day.
Closer analysis would establish that these are often very focused, confi dential and ideally voluntary exchanges that are quite structured and follow a process that helps learning to occur and thus performance to improve and potential to be realised. So they are a very specific type of conversation and not everyone is used to having the patience to help people learn. These conversations also take place in a wide variety of contexts and different relationships, which requires a flexibility of approach.
It is now generally accepted that people learn in different ways and therefore it is also common sense to accept that there is no single correct style, technique, methodology or theoretical approach that should be followed.
Instead, there is a continuum of approaches depending on the context and purpose. Clearly, the motivation behind coaching and mentoring in, for example, education, or for drug users, is quite different to that for highpotential young managers in large businesses. Differences between different brands sometimes relate to a specific context, but more often relate to some theoretical or academic influence.
The answer to why there has been a recent explosion of coaching and mentoring activity lies in its overall purpose: to provide help and support for people to take responsibility and control of their own learning and development in order to develop skills and improve performance; in other words, maximising potential or proactively becoming the person they want to be.
These are all desirable outcomes that are clearly interlinked, but different approaches and timescales are often needed. Coaching can be described as either (or both) developmental or performance-focused. Whereas the activity can often be therapeutic, it is very rarely therapy, so a practical, common-sense approach will probably be more successful.
A successful and effective coach and mentor will, in practice, be guided more by the situation they face than any single theory. They will have the knowledge, skill and confidence to be able to adjust their style flexibly, even in the course of a single conversation, in response to the situation they are facing. To do this they will, of course, need the ability to understand, interpret, respect and sometimes apply techniques from all the competing brands and methodologies that contribute to the emerging coaching and mentoring profession. But, above all, they need to be themselves and trust their life experience. Coaching and mentoring is not rocket science but simply applied common sense. It is a question mainly of attitude.
Since I have become a member of this profession, I have come to accept that I am expected to use a “label” to describe the approach that I advocate, so I have chosen the term “situational coach-mentoring”, with the slogan “Let simplicity and common sense rule, OK?”