Management styles are revolting …and this revolution is fundamentally altering the culture of management within business.
Up to recent times traditional management has been viewed as directive, controlling and authoritative. An “us and them” mentality maintaining the strict boundaries between management and personnel.
The phrase “firings will continue until morale improves” summed up an attitude around motivation and reward that created institutions and not flexible, people and profit-centered learning organisations that successfully face and adapt to the pace of change in modern business.
So ingrained was this institutional approach that even very small businesses successfully managed to have a clear division between those doing the work and those charged with managing its implementation.
This style of management was perfect for those of us who are task-orientated rather than people-orientated. Of course we can communicate with staff…we tell them what to DO don’t we…?
Unfortunately, while managing to successfully communicate OUR desires and wants to our staff, we failed to involve and engage people well enough to ensure that THEIR desires and wants were part of theorganisational outcome.
In doing so we have missed an important point about people in the workplace. People want to work. People need to work. It is a fundamental means by which they actualise themselves in the world.
But if we fail to create an environment in which they can successfully actualise their potential, then we create people who give only what they must and not what they can, to our organisations.
But around ancient management styles, the people changed. They became better educated, more mobile, more demanding of consultation and direction and they sought more meaningful purpose in their working lives and they were willing to move to get it.
Faced with the challenge of retaining good staff and creating environments in which they can grow and succeed, there has come a radical revision of how management engages with its human capital.
Hence the rapid emergence of the modern coach rather than the traditional manager.
Now leaders must be both managers AND coaches, they must learn not just to communicate but to INVOLVE and ENGAGE with their people, but often there is confusion about the difference in the roles. There’s often confusion for managers about what coaching or mentoring is all about, what they are expected to do and how to do it.
Many firms simply tell managers that they are now coaches, while failing to provide the necessary training for what is a different way of reaching business objectives than traditional management.
In many cases managers may not have received even basic management training and often rely on unconsciously “modelling” their own managers for their skills – not always a good practice.
They also fail to learn key soft skills of engaging with others. Coaching (or mentoring) requires engaging with team members in a different way than traditional management and an enhanced ability to influence and persuade is just one such critical skill.
There is an increasing recognition of the importance that both coaching and mentoring play in developing people, but there is some confusion about what both terms mean. So, let’s first try to define that difference and then explain how coaching and mentoring are different from traditional management approaches.
Coaching and mentoring are similar but they are not the same. While coaching focuses on effecting a perceptional change in a delegate’s thinking, mentoring is more focused on the transfer of skills or corporate culture to a delegate – or training a person’s thinking about a role or organisation.
Think about it this way, a coach can work anywhere, with anyone, to effect change in their personal, professional or performance development.
What a coach has that is unique, is that degree of flexibility that comes with not necessarily being experienced in either the skills or the culture of the role that they may coach.
A coach can work with a CEO, a director, a senior manager, an executive or a team leader – virtually anyone within the same organisation.
A mentor however tends to work only with those with whom they have a relationship of seniority, or in contrast with whom they have a higher skill set or more experience in the firm or role.
The function of a mentor, while similar to a coach in terms of developing their professional or performance skills, is limited by the fact that it is primarily about the transfer of those skills unique to a role.
Those skills sets include knowledge of the job, it’s personalities, it’s ethics and all the other absorbed knowledge we take on board when we have worked somewhere for a time.
For example, I can successfully coach anyone from any industry (and do!) but I could not mentor someone from an industry other than one in which I am specifically experienced.
The reason why is that a coach works on the PERSON – often bringing unique ideas, insights and solutions to their challenges – seeing the wood as well as the trees, helping them to re-evaluate and generate NEW PERCEPTIONS.
The mentor however, focusing on the ROLE and the SKILLS, tends to see the same trees as their mentee but are experienced enough with the territory to find their way out of the wood.
What further confuses things is that coaching and mentoring may use exactly the same approach to get their result. What differentiates them is the type and level of outcome required from the process.
Coaching often operates using external agencies, whereas mentoring tends to be the title most apt to what in-company managers are expected to accomplish with their teams.
But what of managing versus coaching/mentoring then?
The main difference here is in the direction of leadership.
Managers are charged with implementing the business goals and targets.
They appraise the ability of their team members to work to and achieve those business targets, then reward them according to their performance to those targets. They lead from the TOP-DOWN.
Often they are trained to comment on where someone is failing rather than on where they are succeeding…and simple psychology tells us that in reinforcing poor performance, we continue to get poor performance.
A coach/mentor takes a different approach.
Even when furnished with a brief on what the company may want a client or staff member to accomplish, a coach/mentor focuses on the individual goals and aspirations of the “coachee” and looks to harmonise those goals with the organisational goals. Thus creating as close to a synergistic relationship as possible.
In this relationship the coachee owns both the goals and the actions, thus creating a self-directed person who moves forward on the basis of purpose and personal meaning rather than on impersonal corporate goals.
Coaches therefore lead from the BOTTOM-UP.
It’s not hard to see how the coaching/mentoring approach gets more motivation and buy-in today than the traditional management approach.
In understanding this difference, a manager, by being trained to manage both his or her communications style and expectations of staff, can move effortlessly between both roles and accomplish even more than was thought possible in the past.