Mentoring and Coaching malaise? Spring clean your programmes!

Spring clean your programmesI just love the spring, with daffodils and tulips out in the garden, the bluebells beginning to peep through in our local wood, longer days and sunshine brightening up our lives, it is a time of renewal, recharging, refreshing and spring cleaning!

So don’t confine this just to your personal lives. With summer just around the corner, it is a good time to check that your mentoring and internal coaching programmes are in great condition to keep them going over the holiday months and into the autumn. So many programmes tend to launch or set up new cohorts in the autumn and now is the time of year they drift into a malaise and loose momentum. Effective mentoring and coaching needs to be nurtured and energised to deliver the best outcomes, so whether you are in HR, L&D or an external consultant then ‘clean up’ your programmes at this time of year.  Continue reading


Women’s Mentoring and making a crack in the ‘Glass Ceiling’!

Breaking through the glass ceilingSupporting women talent specifically requires a further lens on how you look at your talent mentoring design, so here are some pointers for when you are developing mentoring programmes specifically to allow female talent to break through the glass ceiling.

In our initial experience of designing mentoring to develop senior women, the outcomes included one wedding, five promotions, several large pay increases, cosmetic surgery and a bullied mentor! So with the benefit of a number of women only mentoring programmes under our belts, use this checklist when designing a women’s mentoring programme: Continue reading


Intimacy in Coaching and Mentoring

Coaches ConnectJust returned from the Coaches Connect Conference in Leeds, which was a great event for local coach networking and good to see some old and new faces. Well done to Vera Woodhead for organising such an interesting day!

Paul Stokes and I shared our research and thoughts on Intimacy in Coaching and Mentoring in a keynote at the conference this morning, a topic we have only explored outside of the UK previously! (EMCC Conference in Dublin 2010) Continue reading