Tune in and listen to our latest guest, Charlotte Fuller, to talk about some of the challenges women face navigating male dominated workplaces. The Director of Digital Transformation Consulting & Women in STEM Training, she is on a mission to support female tech talent to build the confidence, skills and mindset to thrive in tech.
This fantastic episode includes actionable tips on setting boundaries at work, building self-confidence, and how businesses can better empower female employees.
We get it, mentoring and coaching are easy to confuse.
Given that they both relate to personal development and involve working with others to achieve goals, there are a lot of shared elements to coaching and mentoring.
Luckily, we’ve already covered the differences between coaching and mentoring in a previous article. Read it here if you need a refresher!
But what about the benefits of both practices? It’s one thing to know the differences but that doesn’t always tell you which one your workplace needs. That’s where we’re here to help!
Find out the top benefits of mentoring vs coaching below to help you make the right decision for your people.
What is coaching?
First, let’s define coaching. Coaching is the act of a trained coach working with a person, known as a coachee, on specific performance objectives, skills and goals. Sounds similar to mentoring, right?
Well, a key difference in coaching is that the coach doesn’t need to have direct experience in the industry or job function of the coachee. Instead, they use tools and techniques learned through training to develop them. They will not share their personal experience throughout the sessions, which means that learning is often more structured and focused in coaching.
“Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player. We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.”
Coaches work on areas such as communication, confidence, and career planning. It’s all about unlocking people’s potential through targeted sessions that challenge limiting thoughts or beliefs.
What’s best about this tool is that it’s so focused on the individual. Through questions, exercises and other techniques, coaches work on the underlying issues that affect your team. Another bonus is that you can find trained coaches easily, confident in the knowledge that they are accredited and ready to help your people develop.
The benefits of coaching on an organisational level are vast.
Offering coaching to your people shows your investment in their development. It’s a great way to up-skill your workforce and address the underlying issues that hold people back at work. As well as confidence, coaching can benefit mental health too.
By hiring coaches from outside your organisation, or training individuals internally, you can provide targeted support to develop your people.
Further benefits of coaching for your organisation include:
✅ Identify high-potential employees
✅ Improve individual performance
✅ Create targeted learning and development
✅ Improve retention, engagement and productivity
✅ Benefit mental health and job satisfaction
Coaching is the kind of benefit your employees are asking for. By providing them with 1:1 support from a trained coach, you’re investing in your talent and helping them to grow. This has lasting impacts on employee engagement, satisfaction and retention, as well as your bottom line.
Find out more about the different types of mentoring in our guide. Similar to coaching, mentoring involves targeted support for individuals looking to grow. However, in mentoring, mentors are there on a voluntary basis and will use their direct experience to guide their mentees. These relationships can last for a short time or a lifetime.
It’s a practice that’s been around since the age of Socrates and shows no signs of disappearing anytime soon!
What are the benefits of mentoring?
For both the mentor, mentee and the organisation, mentoring has a wide range of benefits.
Participating in mentoring can increase self-confidence, self-awareness and help your people to practice communication and leadership skills. By learning from other people’s perspectives, or sharing your own, cultural competency will improve at your organisation.
Given that it’s voluntary, long-term and based on personal experience and connection, it can be easy to get started in mentoring. Whether through an informal mentoring relationship or using mentoring software such as Guider, there are many routes to mentoring.
The benefits of both coaching and mentoring include…
As you can see, both practices have major benefits for your people and your organisation. They both involve building trust and unlocking potential.
The common themes are:
Personal growth
Problem-solving
Employee engagement
Skills development
Employee bonding and connection
Improved retention
Leadership development
Takes the burden off line managers
With all these benefits of running a mentoring or coaching program, which one should you choose?
Which do I need, coaching or mentoring?
Whether it’s for you personally or for your organisation, deciding whether you need to find a mentor or a coach is tricky.
If you’re looking to build lasting, long-term connections between your employees then mentoring could be right for you. It’s great for creating a culture of social learning and draws on the expertise of your existing employees – meaning less training is needed!
However, if you want to up-skill and develop your people with a more targeted approach, coaching could work better. Coaching is great for providing structured development programs that hone in on core skills and objectives.
The first step is to consider the problem you are trying to solve, what resources you have and consider whether coaching or mentoring is the right solution.
Once you understand the problem or need you are addressing, it should be clearer which one you need. From there, the only way is up! Setting up a coaching or mentoring program is easy with Guider.
If you’re looking for help setting up a mentoring or coaching program, we’re here to help! Talk to one of our expert team today and get going with Guider.
In a job market where sales turnover is higher than ever, sales leaders are struggling to find and retain productive talent.
This issue is driven by a lack of ownership of the onboarding process and supporting new sellers, ultimately increasing the likelihood of employee churn. The process may be managed by a sales leader or an HR specialist who would take this on as an additional responsibility, instead of as an essential part of recruitment. This can leave new sellers feeling under-equipped and undervalued in their roles.
Michael Smith, a Managing Director from Blue Ridge Partners, puts this growing issue into numbers when he says; “We’ve seen companies lose 80% of their talent following an acquisition. Fast-growing businesses in attractive and growing markets are unable to keep pace with that growth almost entirely due to their inability to attract and retain sales talent. In Silicon Valley, it’s not unusual for firms to lose 25% or more of their sellers every quarter.”
When firms lose a large number of their sellers, there is a direct negative impact on their business activity – including revenue, costs, and margins.
Research by Blue Ridge Partners indicates that “A five percent increase in sales rep attrition across your sales team can increase selling costs 4-6% and reduce total revenue attainment by 2-3% overall”. Not to mention the difficulty of fostering long-term relationships between short-term sellers and customers and motivating your sales team throughout.
Therefore, it’s in your company’s best interest to develop its talent. If you can do so successfully, the results are two-fold. Not only will the seller be less likely to look for a new job, but the entire company will see a boost in production.
A recent study by McKinsey & Company, which included more than 600,000 researchers, entertainers, politicians, and athletes reveals that “High performers are 400 percent more productive than average ones”. So, the idea is simple: when you can recruit and develop sales members into high-performing employees, business performance increases.
This is a lot easier said than done – and something that many senior executives do not have time to take on. Mckinsey & Company found that, “a whopping 82 percent of companies don’t believe they recruit highly talented people. For companies that do, only 7 percent think they can keep it”. There’s clearly a problem.
The great news is that companies don’t have to tackle this challenge alone. Internal mentoring software, such as Guider exists for these reasons. Here at Guider, we understand the difficulties faced by sales leaders – a lack of resources, dealing with poor employee experiences, and fluent communication in an age of hybrid working. To assist sales leaders, Guider provides one centralised innovative mentoring platform with everything you need to launch or scale impactful mentoring programs and prove ROI.
Providing sales mentors to your team tackles employee churn and speeds up time to competency for new hires. It’s a win-win all round. Whether you’re building out a new outbound sales team or developing the performance of your sales leaders, mentoring and coaching are essential.
Our platform can transform mentoring and coaching in your organisation. With uses across the recruitment, onboarding and team development process, mentoring software is a solution that effectively reduces employee churn.
With Guider’s mentoring platform you can:
✅ Offer an attractive benefit to new candidates
✅ Improve the efficacy of your onboarding process
✅ Develop and up-skill your sales team
✅ Offer greater opportunities for learning and growth
✅ Develop your teams networks across the business
Our mentoring software can be implemented virtually too, making it a great solution for hybrid and remote first companies.
By working with us, your sales team will be set up for success. With out dedicated customer success and engagement teams on hand, we go the extra mile to get your people connected through sales mentoring. We take care of the groundwork by taking care of the following:
Build your mentoring program
Before going live, we build your mentoring platform with:
☑ Customised landing pages unique to your program
☑ Work with our expert team to create a recruitment and promotion plan
☑ Customise the Guider platform with your branding
Time and time again, mentoring has proven to boost retention rates for companies around the world. Frank Jules at AT&T understands the value of mentoring programs and describes its benefits when he says; “If you don’t invest in training and enabling your people, you wind up spending a significant chunk of resources dealing with rep churn, finding new reps, and ramping them. In the end, very few of them will develop into the top talent you need to outperform the competition.”
To avoid this common problem, give your team the edge by investing in mentoring for your sales team. By partnering with us, you can improve both business performance and retain long-term sales talent. The benefits of mentoring are remarkable why don’t you find out for yourself?
Want to find out more? Talk to us on the chat below about how we can transform your sales team through mentoring
The Guided podcast has another fantastic episode for you!
This week, we speak to Moses Williams, EMEA Regional DE&I Lead at ERM and ex-police officer. Moses’ journey from police force to corporate DE&I is a fascinating one that raises key challenges and learnings regardless of industry and sector.
Tune in to hear about changing the system from the inside and why all businesses should be celebrating the small wins when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Listen to the latest episode here or catch-up on the series so far
Hiring software developers and engineers costs money. Recruitment, developer onboarding and software developer training are not free and when your top employees churn you’re losing valuable knowledge, skills and morale. On top of this, many companies are grappling with a high risk of engineer burnout and an incredibly competitive hiring landscape.
With so many companies competing over pay and benefits, how do you attract, retain and develop top engineers?
This is where holistically developing your engineering team through learning and development comes into play. By utilising mentoring, coaching and sponsorship in your engineering team, you can go a long way to develop your engineers, retain talent and avoid burnout.
There are a number of reasons for this. The top reasons developers leave their jobs are cited as; seeking higher compensation, a lack of advancement in their current role, more career growth opportunities, and being unsatisfied with leadership.
This is bad news for company budgets with the average cost to replace a highly-skilled employee estimated at 213% of their annual salary. Given the competitive hiring landscape, many companies are struggling to compete to attract top talent.
Pay isn’t a magic fix, however. Even large companies such as Google and Amazon suffer from a median employee tenure of just a year. The problem is that unhappy engineers can easily be lured elsewhere by better compensation, but quickly experience the same struggles and burnout that they had before. So, if higher pay isn’t the answer, then we can quickly see that engineering teams need a solution that addresses the other root causes of employee churn. It’s time to look at software developer training, developer onboarding and pastoral care.
What tools can I use to develop my engineering team?
A key tool to prevent employee churn is learning and development. This is where mentoring, coaching and sponsorship play a key role (but more on that later!)
Often, engineers can feel as though they’re coding machines, expected to deliver high-quality results without being offered the pastoral and holistic care to help them develop. Utilising software developer training is an important way to develop your team.
There are two key ways that learning can become a core pillar in your retention strategy:
1:1 support in technical skills development
A major perk for attracting and retaining talent is providing 1:1 support. By pairing engineers with senior engineers for mentoring and skill development you can provide a key channel for continuous, collaborative learning in your team. This will also build relationships and networks.
1:1 support in holistic development
Through mentoring, coaching and sponsorship, you can provide support in wider holistic development. Because engineers are not just there to code. We all need a range of people and communication skills in order to progress in our careers. Whether you want to develop your team or inspire future leaders, providing the right development opportunities is essential.
When you support people to hone their technical and communication skills, build relationships, successfully navigate power structures and implement change in their organisation, it impacts not just their performance but how they feel at work.
Helping people to feel seen, heard and valued improves job satisfaction and engagement. This in turn affects retention, preventing employee churn. So, by offering core benefits focussing on learning and development you can tackle multiple areas at once.
How do mentoring, coaching and sponsorship benefit and develop engineers?
Mentoring is the act of helping another person by listening, giving guidance and sharing your experience. It’s a powerful personal development tool that is centred on human-to-human connection.
For engineering teams, mentoring has multiple benefits. As codebases change, engineers need to be constantly learning to keep their skills up to date. By pairing engineers with a senior mentor, they can share skills and knowledge, creating a culture of social learning.
Mentoring can also up-skill your team in other areas such as communication, leadership, networking and confidence-building. It provides relationships outside of line management in which your developers can build their wider skillset.
The good news is that we know mentoring improves retention rates, with 72% retention for mentees and 69% for mentors. It can be used as part of developer onboarding and software developer training to make sure your hires want to stay.
Coaching is the practice of a trained coach working with groups or individuals to develop in specific areas. While it’s similar to mentoring, the main difference is that coaches do not need to have experience in what the coachee is going through to be effective.
Coaches are focused on building wider skills through the tools and techniques they learn in training. By asking the right questions, they can help you to find a solution. Offering coaching to your engineers creates targeted learning opportunities that unlock your team’s potential.
This tool is great for developing communication and personal skills, showing your developers that they are valued for their whole selves, not just their knowledge. Find out more about the different types of coaching in our guide.
The benefits of sponsorship for engineers
Finally, sponsorship is when a more senior person, the sponsor, acts as a champion to someone more junior, the sponsee. They focus on opening doors and putting the sponsee forward for opportunities that they otherwise wouldn’t have access to.
A sponsor will go beyond the role of a mentor and actively provide their sponsee with opportunities for progression, promotion and more. Sponsorship has wide-ranging benefits for career progression, as individuals that may struggle to put themselves forward for opportunities have a channel to find further support.
It is also a powerful tool for diversity and inclusion. We know that there’s a diversity issue in the field, with women making up just 16.4% of the IT workforce. Done right, sponsorship programs are a fantastic way to break down systemic barriers to career progression for under-represented groups.
How do I implement mentoring, coaching and sponsorship?
That’s where we’re here to help! With our mentoring software, you can set up and scale programs in mentoring, coaching and sponsorship with ease.
Our easy-to-use platform connects developers with the right people that can help them to:
We guide you through the whole process, from set-up and promotion to feeding back the ROI at the end of the program. The Guider platform is a secure and simple solution to embedding social learning in your company culture.
Implementing a mentoring, coaching or sponsorship program will lead to better retention, engagement and productivity, while also helping to prevent burnout. Your engineers are the backbone of your company. By proactively investing in their development, you can create a team that’s built to last.
Want to find out more about how we can help implement a mentoring, coaching or sponsorship program at your organisation? Book a chat with our team today!
It’s natural that companies want their employees to feel nurtured, valued and supported. But it’s only a successful effort if everybody is feeling that way.
A diverse and inclusive organisation is therefore one that employs and equally supports people of all genders, races, religions, sexual orientations, abilities, ages, backgrounds, appearances, and languages.
There are many ways companies can be actively improving their inclusivity in order to achieve a truly diverse workplace. One of those ways is by using mentoring for diversity and inclusion.
In general, the benefits of mentoring are extensive. But utilising mentoring for diversity and inclusion, you can truly make an impact. In this guide, we’ll talk you through how mentoring can support diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and provide some tips from our learnings here at Guider.
But first…
Why is diversity and inclusion important?
Everybody navigates the world differently. Our characteristics – both physical and personal – affect the way we experience life, resulting in a vast range of perspectives.
In order to best understand anything (be it a problem, a method, or an experience) we need to have as many of these perspectives involved as possible.
Seems intuitive doesn’t it?
Unfortunately not. When managers were asked for factors stopping them implementing diversity, many quoted the worry that too many differing opinions would hamper productivity.
Naturally, this positively affects the bottom line. A study by BCG found that companies with diverse management teams make 19% more revenue, showing how D&I is not limited to an HR goal, but is ultimately good for the economy.
Firstly, it’s important to acknowledge that diversity and inclusion are different things:
️ Diversity is the goal for a workforce to be made up of a broad variety of people.
️ Inclusion is a method to ensure everybody is equally factored into that group.
So, despite diversity and inclusion being grouped together, the way to tackle these issues can actually be contradictory.
For example, if you’re looking to run a mentoring program to increase diversity, you may select a particular minority group and pair individuals in that group with mentors in order to achieve a goal. However, this will not be inclusive if you only make the program available to that one group.
This is something to be aware of before you group them together and set up a ‘Diversity and Inclusion Mentoring Program’.
11 Examples of inclusion
What does inclusion look like in real-life? Here are 11 examples of inclusive behaviours at work in action:
Make sure everyone is heard. Noticed someone was interrupted in a meeting? Actively direct the attention back to that person to give them the chance to finish speaking.
Create a collaborative environment in which everyone can contribute ideas.
Set-up pronoun options on your company communications tools.
Make sure everyone has the chance to speak in meetings by actively inviting them to talk.
Allow people to select their best ways of working for example 1:1 meetings or a quiet environment for working.
Practice active listening with your colleagues.
Focus on fostering psychological safety where people aren’t afraid to make mistakes.
Openly give credit for ideas and success to the correct person.
Create channels for open feedback that go both ways.
Provide non-alcoholic drinks options at company socials as well as food options that take into account dietary needs..
Implement a bank holiday exchange scheme that means people can celebrate the religious holiday of their choice each year.
What is equity and equality in the workplace?
Another pair of key terms is equity and equality. With diversity, equity and inclusion or diversity, equality and inclusion often grouped together you may wonder what these words mean.
Equality means giving everyone the same opportunities and resources.
Equity means allocating opportunities and resources so that everyone can achieve the same outcome.
As you can see, these two terms are similar but not the same. Aiming for equity will mean paying greater attention to the way that you allocate your time and resources. This accounts for the systemic inequalities and barriers that exist that cannot be overcome with the same resources.
How to promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace through mentoring
Workplace mentoring programs are a great way to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. As we’ve outlined, there are differences between the key terms, so the way you approach setting up your programs will differ depending on who you are trying to support.
Let’s look at some examples:
Mentoring programs for diversity
The aim of mentoring programs for diversity is to support and empower minority employees in their career progression, developing their skills and network to increase leadership succession.
This typically involves pairing high potential employees from minority groups, with senior management level employees to diversify the talent pipeline within organisations. This is known as reverse mentoring for diversity and inclusion. The other types of mentoring an be used for diversity mentorship programs too, but reverse mentoring is often the most common.
As with starting any mentoring program, businesses looking to implement a diversity mentoring program must first outline the goals. Try and be more specific here than just ‘fostering a culture of diversity’ – perhaps you’re looking to increase employee retention within a minority group, or encourage more black women into leadership roles. Whatever the goal is, define it before starting and understand how you will measure success.
Depending on the goal, size of organisation, and current diversity status, the way the program is set up will differ. In order to avoid the contradiction of a highly-exclusive diversity program, you can make it open but prioritise the under-represented groups that it is aimed to support.
For a full step by step guide to setting up a mentoring program, check out our full guide:
Alongside a tailored diversity mentoring program, HR and L&D teams can also run mentoring programs supporting a culture of inclusion. You can utilise your employee resource groups (ERGs) to promote and recruit participants to your program.
A good example of where mentoring for inclusion can have a real impact is age discrimination within the tech industry. 41% of IT and tech workers have witnessed age discrimination in the workplace, and 32% fear losing their roles due to ageism.
In this case, a number of companies have seen great success from reverse mentoring. Younger employees mentoring older employees and supporting them in their learning of digital skills can be hugely beneficial to everyone involved.
In this kind of mentorship, the younger employee will naturally also learn a lot, creating an inclusive culture of learning and development.
By making mentoring an integral part of your company culture, you will naturally foster the sharing of knowledge, aspiration and development amongst all your employees, contributing to a diverse and thriving workplace.
Striving to create a diverse, equitable and inclusive workforce should be a number one priority for all businesses.
While external training and courses may have a positive impact, particularly with leadership teams, the best way to enact change is through the people already within the business. This is where diversity and inclusion mentoring can really make an impact.
Mentoring harnesses the people in an organisation to learn and grow together, to share experiences and knowledge, and level up inclusivity in the workplace across the board. That’s why mentoring is such an effective method to support diversity, equity and inclusion in your organisation.
Want to find out how Guider can help? Book a demo now to speak with our team.
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