Product reviews for Mastering Mentoring and Coaching with Emotional Intelligence

This book is rich in Neuro-Linguistic Programming tools and combined usefully with appreciations of Emotional Intelligence - this will help numerous budding mentors who have NLP experience. It is generously written having many helpful and useful ideas taken from a wealth of sources including some of their own. A reader with some appreciation of NLP-speak will find the text an easier read than a novice in NLP for whom the ideas may come off the page much too fast.

A great gift of Mastering Mentoring is the inclusion of many self-assessments that help the reader to learn through their own experience, to increase their own perception and to mentor themselves before letting themselves loose on unsuspecting colleagues. This approach, respecting the reader's learning process, underpins the philosophy of best practice in mentoring (and coaching) and is to be congratulated.

The book is structured around process, opening with about twenty pages of advice on how mentoring can be applied within an organisation and some key advice about how internal mentoring can be structured. Then the authors concentrate on core skills (which they call 'short-term skills') in the following forty pages. After this follows about sixty pages offering more tools and models and exposing the reader to personal enquiry that deepens awareness of motivation, personality and values. These tools look to widen perceptions about the meaning of behaviour, how we interact and perceive our relationships, for example. There is also a 'treasure chest' of further tools and techniques in a variety of depth, and many pointers to other resources.

This is a book to read and then re-read as some key messages may be easily passed over by managers not having the depth of experience and understanding about mentoring compared to that of the authors. It is not really a reference book and would anyway suffer from lack of an index. There is though, much wisdom that may be missed for lack of emphasis or repetition in the text on first reading. For example, the authors usefully state that, "reflect back cleanly too, using the same language and words as your protege' but this key advice is almost lost in a page of grey packed with other information. Reflective language is a key skill of both coaching and mentoring best practice as it puts less of the mentor's view of the world into the session and allows the mentee (or protege) to feel understood and be able to move forward without the hiccups that occur when mentors use competing language.

Another bit of wisdom that is not adequately stressed for the novice is this:
"If a mentor helps too much, they do their protege a disservice, because the protege may end up relying on their mentor, or even become a kind of extension of the mentor, instead of growing to fulfil their own potential'.

Here is the core of the difference between mentoring and coaching as understood by thousands of 'graduate' coaches: that is, that executive coaching is a facilitation process (non-directive) whereas executive mentoring also involves the revealing of personal expertise. Michael Hall, in the book's preface, actually underpins this view of mentoring, "mentoring is all about passing on one's expert knowledge and experience'. Historically that is certainly the case but I sense that the authors, like me, now feel that the best mentoring is less intrusive and directive.

The authors, however, set out their stall without making such distinctions between mentoring and coaching. Instead and unusually, they prefer to define coaching as a short-term engagement dealing with today's issues and targets (what and how questions) and mentoring being defined as a longer-term engagement (why and who questions). None of my numerous professional coaching colleagues would make a distinction like that as they normally work on assignments that invariably last a minimum of six months and often many more.

Aside from that, this is a really good resource book for tools that can be used by both mentor and (non-directive) coach. Usefully, the authors underline the considerable caution necessary when a mentor delivers their own ideas and experience. They illustrate this by including advice on metaphor and examples of less directive language than most practising mentors are presently skilled at using - in that, these examples are a significant gift to mentoring.

The authors take the unusual step of using the word protege to describe the mentee. I dislike the word mentee simply because it is a diminutive of mentor and am not sure about the word protege either. Possibly the word protege will catch on but since there is still some remaining confusion about terminology (about coaching and mentoring) in organisations, there is no harm in finding a better word than mentee -perhaps their offering of protege is the one!

I would have liked to see more of the key messages underpinned by actual examples of mentoring (and the language used) to provide practical ideas of how the tools are used. These are limited in the current edition and I feel the book's appeal and audience would both be broadened by the addition of many more examples from the author's experience and knowledge. With the caveats above, this generous contribution to mentoring is a welcome addition to my library.