Last Friday, I ran one of the PM Forum’s popular “Coaching and Mentoring for Marketing Professionals” workshops which was hosted by law firm Devonshires. It was interesting to see why the delegates had chosen to attend the session, their objectives for the day covered:
- Learning how to work better with fee-earners on bids
- Identifying new ways to promote cross-team working and cross-selling
- Gaining a better understanding of the views of partners and fee-earners
- Encouraging fee-earners who weren’t fans of collaboration
- Gaining buy-in to marketing and business development processes
- Supporting cultural change
- Developing remote relationships
- Knowing how to better develop cross-cultural relationships
- Helping partners make progress with their personal development plans
- Working more effectively with HR and its programmes
So we had our work cut out! We started by considering the differences between coaching and mentoring and gained experience of working with some of the main coaching, elementary individual change management and learning tools.
There were various exercises to help us understand our own personalities, cognitive, relationship, leadership and team styles and strengths and weaknesses before considering how these might be adapted to work with others who had different styles. Then there were practical exercises and role plays around coaching peers, coaching juniors and coaching partners – winning trust, conveying negative feedback and developing realistic goals were areas of focus.
We covered a huge amount of ground and there was a lot of exchanging of ideas, challenges and experiences. Happily, everyone felt that they had achieved a lot from the day – including their initial objectives.
The key “takeaways” from the session included:
- The use of scenarios in goal setting
- The need to coach as opposed to consult
- The GROW model
- Dealing with bullying behaviour
- The need to do something different if a different outcome is required
- Appreciation of different styles and perspectives
- The dangers of labelling people
- The need to adapt our own behaviour
For more information about coaching and mentoring please see http://kimtasso.com/consultancy/coaching-mentoring/
The PM Forum training programme details are available on http://www.pmforum.co.uk/training/index.aspx
