WORKING AT HEIGHTS - Wind Energy Network

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENTCoachingLet’s start with coaching. This is awork activity that rates highly amongstprogressive people at all levels. It seemsthat many of us really enjoy developing theskills of new and improving staff. In factmany regard passing on skills and adviceto ‘learners’ as one of the most fulfillingparts of their job whether they are in asupervisory role or in an expert role.No problem anticipated here then. Maybeyou just need to let the boss know thatyou want to start coaching or spend moretime doing it. The more you do the morewidespread will be your legacy of goodpractice in your profession.On the days when you take someoneto a higher level or stop someone doingsomething wrong you are ‘changing’ thefuture for that person. Indeed it might besaid that you are changing the future - oneperson at a time.MentoringLet’s move on now to mentoring.Speaking personally I can only coachpeople in my areas of experience andexpertise e.g. management, teambuilding, negotiating, presentation skillsetc. However over the years I seem tohave acquired more and more ‘mentoring’clients i.e. people who want the magic ofone-to-one learning sessions as well as, orinstead of, the classroom experience.I am usually a mentor to professional,technical and scientific people becauseI cannot really coach them to performtheir individual calling. I am not on thepremises, like you might be, to coachthem, to run behind them or sit alongsidethe individual who wants to do his/her jobbetter, or inspire a group of disgruntledpeople at a meeting.What you and I can do in the mentoringrole is listen carefully to the individual’sconcerns and then bring a lot of goodexperience into play in a discussion abouta problem that is really vexing an individualor his/her employer.Again I can only speak for myself - butthe type of problems and work situationsI have helped people tackle successfullythrough mentoring include career issuesat junior and senior levels; dealing withdemanding people, performance issues atjunior and senior levels and a wide rangeof other thorny management questions.How is this done? Typically the mentoring Ido is face-to-face at a convenient location,or on the telephone (in an emergency).I increasingly mentor on-line with e-mailmessages going back and forth.ResultsResults as far as I can tell seem to have allbeen positive to date. This is in no smallpart down to the honesty and realismthat comes from a one-to-one session.For example a middle manager in a highlysuccessful company, seeking a £25k perannum pay rise immediately, becamemore realistic following our telephonementoring session he was able to quicklysecure an extra £20k per year – with theincrease spread over three years.In recent times I spent a day mentoringa young and untrained supervisor whohad reading and writing difficulties of hisown. He confided that he would neverattend conventional management trainingcourses because of the (continuing) painand embarrassment he had suffered sincehis school days. However, one to onementoring sessions, that involved a lot ofwalking around his premises and talkingabout his job, helped him to transformhis performance and his employer nowrecommends mentoring wholeheartedly.Again in recent times an outgoingmanager sent his replacement (his deputy)for a series of half day mentoring sessions.After each session workplace goalswere set for the coming week and theindividual would then report on his resultsat our next half day session. The outgoingfellow was able to monitor results, whichexceeded everyone’s expectations, andby using the quieter half days disruption tonormal working was minimised.So if you are looking to add even moresatisfaction to your role then thinkabout mentoring as a way to boost theperformance and confidence of yourpeople. It is cost-effective use of your timeand you can customise it to the needs ofthe individual and the requirements of youremployer.Good luck with changing the future – oneperson at a time. In the second part of thisarticle I will look at how you can changethe future by making presentations topeople – standing up and speaking up!Frank Newberrywww.franknewberry.comwww.windenergynetwork.co.uk19