Mentoring of coaches rather than formal supervision is increasingly seen as providing an important means of quality assurance to coaches' private, corporate and prospective clients. Organizations are increasingly favoring external coaches engaged in a mentoring relationship via a seasoned mentor. All coaches engaged in professional practice encounter dilemmas, difficulties and questions they need to resolve in their coaching role and relationships. Mentoring provides a vehicle for coaches to tackle these issues and help them develop the strategies to resolve them or prevent them recurring in the future. 

 

Mentoring in professional practice is a reflective learning process. All coaches need a safe and supportive place to explore their own and others’ practices. Mentoring provides coaches the opportunity to attend to their professional and personal development in an atmosphere that guarantees emotional safety. Practice learning via mentoring can include: case management support, identifying current best practices and new cutting-edge tools, exploring coaching boundaries, discussing and developing different perspectives of the coach/coachee/client relationship. Finally, mentoring allows for the development of the coach’s professional codes of conduct and the acquisition and trialling of new intervention and client management skills.

 

Coach Supervision versus Coach Mentoring
Supervision is universally seen as a crucial ingredient for success in a wide range of professional groups. However, "supervision" certainly doesn't fit for many experienced people developers looking to develop a coaching practice or to simply use the coaching model of change and learning inside an organization. This group of people developers typically prefers a mentoring model as a means of practice support.

 

Being supervised is usually based on the traditional management relationship where the 'supervisor' oversees the coach's actions. The term "supervision" certainly doesn't fit for experienced people developers. Most of these professionals view the term as belonging to a hierarchical management model. Recent research suggests that experienced professionals best prefer the support provided by a specialist mentor who is typically an accredited adult educator, a successful coaching practitioner and, a subject-matter expert who also possesses specialist psychological training and knowledge in the use of the mentoring model.

-In Summary: Some key functions of coach mentoring include:

• Educational - the direction feedback required to develop the knowledge, attitude and professional and personal skills required to be a professional practitioner. 
• Professional guidance - the norms, values and best practices required.
• Support - the re-assurance and emotional support provided to better manage professional work stresses, personal issues, doubts etc -more effectively and the sourcing of further specialist knowledge and resources as needed

Some Client Benefits
Client management is assured that the mentor, as the third party, assists the coach to work responsibly and to the best of his/her ability. Mentoring experience is designed to provide the coach with guidance, environment and opportunities to facilitate the development of competencies. This especially enables the new coach to use his/her knowledge base in a professional and ethical manner. Mentoring is increasingly regarded by clients as an important component in the maintenance and development of a coach's professional competencies.

Ultimately the mentoring process exists for both the coach's and client's benefit.

Case Sample: The Behavioral Coaching Institute's Faculty also act as a Coach Mentor to CMC Course graduates.
-The Institute describes mentoring as "our faculty's long term commitment to a graduate's professional development and long-term success." 
As developers of, and authors on coaching best-practices, the Institute's faculty members work with some the world's leading specialist coaching practitioners and corporate coaching program managers in the form of an ongoing, co-learning, developmental partnership. All of the Institute's new and established graduates receive equal access to their experience and knowledge base via mentoring.

The Institute's exclusive pre- and post-course mentoring program provides "the glue to creating foundational strength and resiliency" required by graduates of their invitational Certified Master Coach Course. The mentoring program is considered a vital part of the coach's professional development and acts as a form of personal and business success insurance.

The Behavioral Coaching Institute's  invitational, fast-tracked, 4 Day, Very Small Group Certified Master Coach Course (conducted in N.Y., London, Singapore, Bangkok and via our Distance Learning Program etc) meets the critical needs for business and executive coaches to be trained and mentored 1-to-1 in the use of validated, reliable psychology-based tools and techniques.  Read More >....