As we move further into 2018, we asked prominent industry leaders and thinkers to share their vision for what lies ahead.
Part 2: trends and challenges in coaching supervision, coach training and mentoring
Coaching supervision
For many practitioners in 2018, tightening time constraints in our full-on working world and squeezed budgets mean it will be a stretch to commit to supervision this year.
Yet getting quality supervision is becoming increasingly important as a way for discerning organisations and for practitioners to show they’re on top of their game.
In addition, as more and more coaches work with teams, supervision can be particularly helpful in such highly nuanced contexts, requiring a greater grasp of complexity and relationship dynamics.
Sally Bonneywell, formerly of GSK, and now director of Bonneywell Development, stresses the growing importance of “making sure that time is reserved for supervision – especially for internal coaches where calendars and time are really squeezed”.
She advises coaches this year to “prioritise supervision as a necessity and crucial to ongoing practice by finding a way of making each supervision session highly relevant”, and to be “really honest and [ask] for challenge if it’s not forthcoming, to ensure best possible outcomes from time invested in supervision”.
More and more coaches are getting accredited as supervisors, and this trend will continue.
Eve Turner, leadership coach and coach supervisor, and founder of the Global Supervisors’ Network, a free virtual network for experienced and qualified supervisors to provide continuing personal and professional development, says, “In the UK while there may not yet be saturation of supervisors, it could be close. There has been large growth in the number of training providers and qualified supervisors. Over time, finding a point of differentiation may become increasingly important, such as accreditation through the AC,
APECS or EMCC.”
Many will be feeling the squeeze of tighter budgets and the inevitable impact of that on accessing supervision. Lise Lewis, EMCC special ambassador and EMCC International past president, says that individuals are often struggling to “afford coach supervision and therefore to demonstrate professional practice to potential buyers of services”.
Peter Welch, board director of the Association of Coaching Supervisors, predicts more exploration of “creative and cost-effective ways to provide supervision, especially to internal coaches, when the host client thinks they have already provided a resource, for example, a peer group network”.
Bonneywell agrees, “Organisations face the challenge of getting internal ‘Job Plus Coaches’ line leaders who also have coaching clients to prioritise supervision attendance. The keen people see the benefit and prioritise attendance and get a lot out of supervision – others who cannot, or who don’t prioritise, don’t get the full benefit. It becomes a vicious circle.”
Coach training
It’s becoming more important for coach trainers to keep innovating and attending to quality.
Bonneywell says, “Coach training has to keep up with all the current trends to ensure it is not only about training foundation-level coaches. It has to increase in professionalism – only accredited courses with a full range of experiences will survive the glut of providers.”
Getting top-level buy-in for internal programmes will continue to be a priority. Tiffany Gaskell, global director of coaching & leadership, Performance Consultants International, says, “The biggest challenge is to secure leadership sponsorship for initiatives. For example, in an organisation where we have board-level sponsorship for a programme that is linked into strategic corporate goals, the programme’s potential is unlimited – we saw this in one client with a 74% improvement in the number of safety incidents. Without a sponsoring leader, the programme either falters or gets adopted by leadership; it could go either way.”
Organisations are continuing to develop leaders as coaches, although much of this is in-house. Where they do farm it out, it’s becoming more important to make training relevant for the business.
“Training providers need to focus on making the coaching skills specifically applicable to leaders in organisations. For example, not focusing on teaching how to conduct a one-hour coaching session, but how to integrate coaching into a leadership style to get the most out of people and empower them,” says Gaskell.
Bonneywell predicts: “Organisations will continue to develop their own internal programmes for training coaches. However they will look to external providers who can offer exciting and professional CPD opportunities at a reasonable cost.”
Meanwhile, with the spotlight on diversity as a result of campaigns such as MeToo, we’re seeing more demand for programmes focused on developing women. This could feed in to areas of focus on coach training programmes. We may also see training providers seeking to target more diverse groups in a bid to do more not to be complicit in maintaining the status quo, as well as to boost business.
Jackee Holder, leadership coach, coach supervisor and facilitator, says, “More coaching programmes would benefit with greater transparency about the exclusion of diversity and inclusion in coach training and make this area a priority for future training. This would make many courses more appealing and relevant to greater populations and could well reduce the class, race and occupational strongholds that reflects the greater coaching community.”
We’re likely to see greater innovation in training programmes, including around delivery and technology.
Holder says, “We’ve reached the limit of traditional coaching programmes and need to think and create new areas of training and development for coaches. The varying modalities of learning have expanded over the past five years and coaching is in danger of not keeping abreast with the changes in learning. I’d love to see more podcasting, virtual summits, more conferences and events that collaborate with other sectors and communities which break down silos that exists within the coaching world.”
Lewis agrees that we’re likely to see more “improvising and being creative in the learning experience, including around the use of technology”.
“The availability of online programme delivery is becoming an expectation and training providers will need to offer their services more flexibly by using a range of media. Social media is likely to be featured regularly as a learning medium: LinkedIn for group discussion, Facebook closed group pages for posting references, video clips, links to TED talks, Instagram sharing of workshop activities, etc. This is a real market opportunity,” she says.
Jonathan Passmore , director of Henley Centre for Coaching, Henley Business School, highlights the importance for universities of focusing on “how we blend evidence-based approaches with practical skills. Most individuals who come for training at Henley are seeking both – skills to apply as a coach and access to the research, the evidence-based approach and resources that only universities can bring to learning.”
Lewis warns that “mature organisations with more experience and ability to use flexible learning approaches may ‘crowd out’ market entry opportunities for new suppliers in developing markets”, and that we’re likely to see “saturation in some markets with smaller organisations possibly going out of business”.
Mentoring
Most agree that mentoring is on the up, but there are a number of challenges in terms of it having
the impact it could.
“Organisational mentoring is likely to grow with the increase in businesses creating internal mentoring programmes; possibly a sign of the predicted five generations making up the working population Of course this provides a great opportunity for knowledge sharing,” says Lewis.
Bonneywell says, “Organisations will continue to use professional mentors at the most senior levels and will look to professional firms to find them. They will become more challenging on prices as the field grows. Internal mentoring, unless within a supported scheme, will tend to be ad hoc in operation and usefulness. Sponsorship will challenge in this space.”
She says,”Mentoring continues to have a resurgence at the top executive level. Mentors need to build their coaching and mentoring skills to ensure they are effective in supporting executives.”
Lis Merrick, EMCC UK president, founder of Coach Mentoring and long-standing columnist on mentoring for Coaching at Work, says, “Organisations are less afraid to introduce sponsorship mentoring to support women and minorities. After Sheryl Sandberg and others have come out advocating sponsorship, I sense it is more ‘acceptable’ in the UK market.
“Organisations are far more interested in developing mentoring for specific areas of support and development and I am finding more sophistication in what they are asking for: developing their mentors as leaders, tiered or cascade mentoring, cross-organisational mentoring, reverse mentoring, career break and maternity mentoring, etc.
“ ‘Flash’ mentoring is very popular: one-off mentoring meetings with no commitment. This is seen as a speedy response to learning challenges by some organisations, but is different to Fast Knowledge Transfer (FKT),” says Merrick.
Executive coach, Carol Braddick, predicts more organisations “treating mentoring as a short-term gig rather than as a long-term relationship, making it easier for mentees and mentors to come together for
short-term needs, eg, making a decision about a next job or proposal”.
We’re going to see more organisations making the most of generational differences in the workplace and market at large, such as reverse mentoring… and tapping the mentoring resources available in the gig and start-up markets,” she says.
Lewis highlights a number of areas of priority for organisations, including the continued criticality of buy-in and support from the top, but says, “Observations suggest that senior leaders continue to be reluctant to engage with coaching for continuous improvement”.
She warns that “poorly managed mentoring programmes are likely to prevent demonstration of adding value due to lack of reporting systems with feedback channels. As a result, internal practitioners are likely to be demotivated when feeling unsupported and with lack of recognition for their contribution.”
Merrick says, “L&D budgets are tight and this reflects often in how much money is allocated to introducing and running a mentoring programme….The challenge is that many organisations still don’t see the need to train mentees, or give ongoing support and supervision to mentors. They are setting up their programmes to fail from the start”
Merrick predicts, the further spread of FKT or ‘Mentoring Lite’, but she isn’t a great fan of it:
“This isn’t mentoring to me. There are advantages – it provides multiple points of expertise to call upon, and subject expertise is all you need. However, the two-way learning of developmental mentoring is completely missing. I sense many larger organisations are mistakenly introducing this as more effective mentoring and just missing the point that in good effective developmental mentoring, the mentor can learn as much in the relationship as the mentee.”
Trends and challenges
Coaching supervision
- Tighter budgets and time constraints making it harder to justify supervision
- Yet becoming more important, with more discerning sponsors, and especially for those coaching teams
- Closer to saturation of supervisor market as more coaches become qualified
- But still scarcity of high-quality supervisors
- More focus on finding creative cost-effective ways to provide supervision
Coach training
- More team coach training
- Continued focus on leader/manager-as-coach training
- Need for increased professionalism
- Increased focus on blending practical skills and evidence-based approach
- Greater innovation, including around technology
- Targeting more diverse groups
- More market saturation and economic pressures putting some providers out of business
- Ongoing need to secure top-level buy-in for internal training
Mentoring
- Generation Z (post-millennials) increasingly anticipating mentoring as part of the recruitment package
- Mentors also becoming research practitioners and informing the evidence-based body of knowledge for mentoring
- Mentoring continuing to be a development activity for all sizes of organisation and in all sectors, including voluntary; greater mobility in the workforce increasing opportunities for mentoring
- Portfolios of work including more than one role, with mentees seeking different mentors for different situations
- Demographic changes meaning that ‘reverse mentoring’ continues to grow as advances in technology and social media demand greater adoption for business promotion (above predictions from the EMCC Mentoring Membership Survey, 2015)
- Continued use of professional mentors
- More ad hoc ‘flash’ and Fast Knowledge Transfer mentoring
- More sponsorship mentoring
- More sophisticated and specific application, eg, reverse mentoring and maternity mentoring