Why I Had Business Mentoring and Coaching and the Benefits

I wanted to grow my business, but I did not know how to go about it, until a friend mentioned business mentoring and coaching. He explained that business mentoring/coaching would increase productivity in the workplace, increase team unity, decrease feelings of isolation, increase business and personal confidence, and ultimately increase profits, to name but a few of the benefits. I was interested in the benefits as soon as he had told me, but I wasn’t too sure on the term, so I had to resort to a dictionary for an explanation: business mentoring and coaching is “a form of teaching that includes walking alongside the person that is being taught and inviting him or her to learn from the mentor’s example.”

I decided to look into business mentoring and coaching in greater detail and discovered that it is a deliberate transitional process, executed to help businesses achieve their full potential, by working on their knowledge bank, work procedures and thinking ideologies. Business mentoring and coaching is a high end learning initiative which can be extremely focused or generic, depending upon the organisation’s needs and existent practices. Wow! That sounded very formal, so I decided to discuss the situation with my friend. First of all he explained about mentoring. A mentor is the driver of the mentoring process. Success of any mentoring exercise weighs heavily on the skills of the selected mentor, and it is important to understand their role: the business mentor is a motivational cum guiding energy, responsible for pushing the learners enough to perform as per the expectations. They would be well aware and experienced on the various systemised business coaching and mentoring techniques, which would be used to nurture the talent of the leaner.

He then went on so say a typical mentoring process would require the mentor to: pose questions to help the learner explore his thought process, desires and skills to accomplish the envisaged; bestow a vision and a path to commence the journey; listen, observe and then reach viable conclusions with respect to the trainee’s mindset; encourage participation – business mentoring is a two way process and therefore requires the mentor to stimulate reaction from the learner; select from among the various mentoring techniques and use the most appropriate combinations. He said the description he had just given was an encapsulation of the many facets to a near perfect business coaching and mentoring process.

As my friend was explaining the process, I thought that I could save myself some money and do the business mentoring and coaching in-house as an economical proposition. I put forward this suggestion to him, and it was immediately knocked down. He said business mentoring and coaching requires an expert approach.

So I asked him, how do I choose the best business mentoring/coaching service? He explained an ideal business mentor would have strong experience with the Office of Government Commerce's (OGC) Best Practice methodologies, and the training program would combine a variety of tools and techniques that had been tested over years. He said the company he used understood the pertinence of communication throughout the mentoring process and arranged for one-to-one training sessions, group workshops and briefings, remote support and post project reviews. Also the calibre of the training consultants needed to be assessed: had the company recruited the training consultants to ensure they would help the trainee work out their specific training needs; configure the training program to meet the defined training needs; are they suitably equipped to evaluate post training results, and are they qualified enough to infuse the requisite improvements at any stage; and are the trainers continuously trained on training standards and apprised with the latest procedures? He said that was the criteria he had used for choosing his business mentoring/coaching company and he strongly advised I do the same.

When I look at everything his business has achieved since his company has undertaken business mentoring and coaching, I know I will be following suit.