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The origins of coach assessment centres lie in several major concerns by companies employing externally resourced executive coaches.

An overview of Clutterbucks Coaching Conversations programme, tailored specifically for your business needs.

How to create an extensive dialogue between coaches and fundamentalists.

Every significant study of effective managers concludes that those managers, who get the most out of their teams, spend a high proportion of their time and energy coaching or mentoring others. Effective managerial coaches are able to delegate more, to create a stronger sense of purpose within the team and to motivate the performance of others.

There’s a crisis in succession planning. Long one of the bastions of HR credibility, succession planning has a key role in maintaining HR’s strategic credentials. The problem is that evidence for efficacy of the elaborate processes devised to predict which talent to invest in and who should be targeted for promotion is thin at best.

High performance in business is strongly associated with the top team’s attitudes and practices towards developing themselves and others. So it would be logical to expect leaders to be role models for good practice in managing their own individual and collective development. Logical – but completely wrong. The Developmental Conversations at the Top Survey reveals a sharp contrast between top teams that are investing in their individual and collective development, and those whose attention to their own development is more often than not perfunctory, haphazard and uncoordinated.

The idea of measurement and review in mentoring is, on the face of it, to some extent at odds with the need to retain a high degree of informality and ad hoc responsiveness.

Coordinators are the largely unsung heroes of mentoring programmes. They promote the programme to participants and corporate sponsors; protect it from the destructive forces of sudden economies and changes of management fashion; and maintain the quality of the programme, often on limited budgets.

The melt-down of so many apparently strong companies in the past six months highlights an uncomfortable truth about leadership – it’s very easy for poor leadership to be covered up by fortunate circumstances.

The midst of a near recession that may become a full-blown recession doesn’t seem the most obvious time to focus on retention of talent. But experience of previous recessionary periods has taught talent managers a number of lessons, which suggest that now is exactly the time to focus effort in this direction.

Mentoring: Frequently Asked Questions

Reverse mentoring is valuable because people in senior positions in organizations can easily lose touch with the external world and with the perceptions and concerns of people at lower levels.

Someone who may have power, does not necessarily have to use it. In a mentoring relationship, it helps if both mentor and mentee agree to leave any power differential outside the relationship.

In my practice, I see every coaching conversation and every coaching supervision session as consisting of four parts – preparation, understanding, solutioneering and reflective debriefing – each of which may be managed eclectically. This works for me, but I don’t perceive it as a template for others to follow. It’s a continuing evolution.

Dialogue in mentoring, and in related disciplines such as coaching, can be regarded as having seven layers of increasing depth and impact.

Both mentoring programmes and relationships fail from a variety of causes, which can be categorised into contextual, interpersonal or procedural.