20 Mar Personalized Mentoring or Coaching

For the two scenarios provided, prepare a recommendation for mentoring or coaching for HR leadership in an internal memo that is a total of 2-3 pages.

Today’s employee has different expectations from work than employees have had in the past. Employees want their organizations to offer extensive opportunities for growth, learning, and advancement. In addition, employees have expectations that go beyond the present. The vast majority of employees in the organization have aspirational desires for career advancement. A challenge HR professionals and learning-development staff and supervisors are experiencing is guiding employees towards their long-term goals. Some employees aspire to become organizational senior leaders and will likely be in roles that will prepare them for that opportunity. Other employees want specialized tracks to success, tracks that will move them into senior positions with responsibility over products and programs. Another group of employees isn’t sure what they really would like their careers to be and will benefit from exposure to different roles and responsibilities across different disciplines in the organization.

Employees often have visions of their professional future that require mentoring to achieve. Mentoring will maximize the benefit of the experiences, learning, and development they will have while working in your organizations. In addition to mentoring, many employees will need coaching at different stages of their development in the organization. Coaching may be needed for many organizational roles and activities.

Mentoring

The nature of mentoring varies, and the type of mentoring we give depends on the needs of different employees. What might seem an easy, quick session with one employee might turn into an extensive engagement for another. Mentoring in organizations may be formal or informal. Formal mentoring usually involves a group of dedicated members of the staff willing to guide employees through professional learning they do not know and may not understand. Formal mentoring may be administered by the learning and development office of human resources. Some organizations have ongoing informal mentoring that manifests based on professional affinity between a prospective mentor and mentee. The benefits of mentoring are significant and allow employees to learn from past experiences of their mentor. This relationship can help encourage social confidence, support individual community and open networks to the mentee they did not know existed.

Coaching

Organizations must be capable of responding to performance, leadership, and other aspects of organizational life that require attention. An activity that can help improve all these areas is coaching. Coaching is a demanding skill that requires training and knowledge on how to execute it and directly support the employee’s challenges. Some challenges require more sophisticated coaching by certified coaches, but other less demanding coaching needs are often performed by supervisors or managers.

HR Challenge

These are two individuals that are in need of professional coaching or mentoring. Consider which approach would be most effective for each case.

Joaquin aspires to become a manager in the organization. He is currently in the very early stages of his career as a financial management professional at CapraTek. He is struggling with understanding what he could do to achieve his dream of becoming an executive at the company years from now, or possibly for one of CapraTek’s competitors.

Steve is a Baby Boomer who had worked at CapraTek, retired, and was offered the opportunity to return to the company because he possessed a very specific bio-tech background that was in high demand in the competitive landscape. Now that he is back and has made some very significant contributions to the company’s bio-tech projects, he would like to work in human resources, as he wants to make his new career about people.

The HR business partner that you support as part of the learning and development office for CapraTek has asked you to make a recommendation for each of the individuals above to begin a mentoring or coaching process within the company.

Instructions

For the two scenarios above, prepare a recommendation for HR leadership in an internal memo that is 2–3 pages.

• Select and explain whether mentoring or coaching would be the better approach to support each employee’s professional development needs.
• Describe the nature of mentoring OR coaching best practices, relevant to each individual.
• Evaluate the benefit to the organization from each individual’s mentoring or coaching program.
• Develop a communication strategy to inform the direct managers and their employees about the decision to initiate the mentoring OR coaching process.