Coaching, Counseling and Mentoring

Book excerpt: Coaching, counseling, and mentoring can dramatically improve employee productivity and satisfaction. But there’s a big difference between continuously encouraging employees to do their jobs well (coaching), attempting to fix poor performance (counseling), and helping top performers excel (mentoring). Unfortunately, most managers don’t truly understand how and when to do each. Coaching, Counseling & Mentoring provides helpful tools like self-assessments and real-life scenarios, and gives managers specific, practical guidance on using these techniques to improve the performance of all their people.This updated and revised second edition includes useful scripts for talking to employees about sensitive issues, and new material on topics including working with off-site employees, what to say when an employee denies a problem exists, whether or not to coach temps and part-timers, how to draw the line between the mentoring and supervisory role, and what to do when counseling fails. This is an essential guide for managers who want to build their confidence and skill in getting the most from their people.