NeeD homework "COACHING AND MENTORING CLASS

Mentee's Name: Daphne McFadden

Mentor Value Proposition: The mentor value proposition is help my mentee enhance her communication skills. The mentoring process will contribute to enhance the way she communicates and become more assertive without being concerned for telling others how she feels because she is concerned how others will take her message, and without overreacting and talking down to her peers.

Mentee's Vision: Although my vision is to provide my mentee the tools and strategies I have implemented throughout the years to communicate according to my audience to a to present an effective message, my mentee is too proud in terms of accepting help from others, and even accepting that she does communicate effectively. However, she accepted the idea of this mentoring process after I presented her with several scenarios in which I have witnessed her miscommunicate with diverse individuals. She is now on clear understanding that her communication skills are not excellent as she considered, and that she needs to work on them to enhance her possibilities of being a successful student, mother, and for job interviews because of improving her communication skills.

Needs Assessment Results:

1) Needs to learn to communicate effectively.

2) Needs to start using proper grammar to prevent that others misunderstand her and any of her messages.

3) Use validating body language when speaking to others.

4) Use proper tone when communicating a message.

5) Need to adjust tone in her message to her audience.

Short-Term Goals (0-6 months):

Become aware of actual communicational skills. Improve communication skills, using a multi-stage approach to develop strategies that will help her with working on her personal communication, written communication, verbal communication, and body language. (0-1 month)

Enhance knowledge on effective communication by reading material related to the topic and practicing proper grammar rules, my mentee will improve her written communication, which is also relevant for her in personal and professional life. (2 months)

She also needs to start outlining her thoughts before a phone conversation, by doing this she will be able to transfer messages in a more effective way. (3 months)

Practice effective communication by becoming an avid listener, and being able to provide effective responses to other people requirements or questions and apply effective communication skills to problem solving situations. (4-6 months)

Long-Term Goals (6 months-2 years): Schedule periodic meetings with his followers to ensure she is discussing relevant matters with them, rather than avoiding them. (Within 7 months)

Following a meeting with a coworker, a group or a follower, the mentee needs to implement a new process in her communication pattern, which is asking for feedback. (Within 7 months)

Take a public speaking and listening class. (Within 9 months)

Become a mentor to help a follower become a better employee, empower others to become better communicators. (Within 12 months)

Activities to Meet Short-Term Goals: To meet the short-term goals, as a mentor, I will prepare a series of scenarios that will be discussed with my mentee every week. Also, when we meet each week we will discuss with my mentee the role he played in communicating effectively in those scenarios, the way they were handled and how she considered they needed to be handled. Also, we will watch motivational videos related to effective communication, and we will discuss the way situations were handled in those videos and ask my mentee for an alternate handling of the situation.

In addition, my mentee will be suggested reading some books related to effective communication that could help her acquire additional knowledge on effective communication, and textbooks that can help her start using proper grammar rules when communicating in writing.

Another strategy to improve her communication will be paying attention to others when they are talking to her, be mindful of others feelings when she talks to them and provide and ask feedback effectively. To do so she will respond with questions to others to ensure they understand that she is listening to them and not perceive her as cold and inattentive.

In addition, the mentee will keep a log of her interactions when she should make decisions that did not make her feel comfortable, that way when we met every other week we can discuss how she handled the situation in terms of communication and how confident she felt about that. This strategy will help her start forming a model of effective communication exchanges to ensure she uses them in the future.

Activities to Meet Long-Term Goals:

To meet the long-term goals, I will schedule a few coaching sessions along with a few mock interviews in which all relevant topics are proposed and discussed rather than being avoided. I will facilitate some of the sessions along with another mentee or mentor.

The mentee will also implement a new strategy that will allow her to know how she did in her meeting. She will ask for feedback immediately after a meeting, she would use a simple format like an email asking for feedback to ensure she receives comments from his followers and is open to take action in terms of improving future interactions.

The mentee and the mentor will coordinate the proper schedule to take a public speaking and listening class, which will provide the mentee with additional opportunities to enhance her communication skills.

We both agree that she needed to coach someone to become better at communication otherwise she cannot consider herself an engaging leader. To do so she will involve in selecting a candidate, explain him or her the needs to change, the strategies to use among them discussions, scenario handling and repetition. Also, the plan they will establish, the role he will play in mentoring him/her and the solutions and approaches that are considered most relevant to implement for his follower to become better. The mentee will join a mentoring program, in which she will assist a follower enhance his/her skills by improving communications and any other skills that will improve the professional development of the assigned mentee.

Mentoring Techniques (to support the predetermined activities):

The Grow Model will decide the skills needed to improve, which we have already determined are her communication skills. Following, we will establish SMART goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, and realistic, as well as timetable.

Following with determine the status of her communication skills to ensure that we both agree on the mentor determination about her skills.

Next, we will work together on the strategies to apply to reach the proposed objectives. Following the will needs to be established to ensure my mentee understands the different benefits of involving in this mentoring process in term of improving her professional and personal life.

Coaching Techniques (to support the predetermined activities):

Among some coaching strategies will be observing my mentee to work together on constructing an agenda to follow in her process of enhancing his communication skills. Another technique I will use is to ask my mentee different levels of questions to determine is she has different ways to respond to a communication situation. I will serve her as a role model in terms of being an avid listener in terms of paying attention to her messages and respond by providing feedback and reinforcement to continue improving the use of proper communication skills. Also, to motivate her to continue I will remind her of all the advantages that these changes could mean to her personal and professional life.

Obstacles or Concerns:

A big concern is timing, because the approach I am proposing require meeting each week, this means that we both must commit to this plan for it to be effective. Another challenge is that I could provide her with assigned reading material and she would not complete her reading, which will be a waste of both of us time. Lastly, another obstacle is that I am not sure if she would be willing to trust me in guiding her to improve his communication skills.

Observations/Results (determined after implementation):

Verbal communication does not match body language

Send mixed and confusing messages when writing a message

Does not use proper tone of voice when speaking

Disregard paying attention to others when talking to them

Modifications or Future Suggestions (determined after implementation):

Need to be considered and when providing constructive feedback should not be smiling as people may think that she is making fun of them.

As a professional, she should be more careful when sending a message because may think that she does dominate proper language skills when it comes to grammar syntax.

She should not talk loud to others because people might think she is yelling at them.

When talking to others should look them in their face to ensure they are being listen to.

Vision Statement

As most students, Daphne considers that she has excellent communication skills; however, after observing her interact with several of her peers, her communication skills are not as developed as they should be for a person who is in the 12th grade and is planning to attend college and work in a office setting. Therefore, my assumption is that if she is not able to communicate with her peers now, it will be a disaster when she has to communicate with individuals he has never dealt with before. For her to gain full benefit of this coaching experience, we need to establish her specific needs in terms of communicating effectively are. To do this will need to establish certain rules and strategies to achieve the main goal of helping her communicate accordingly. We will start by determining the goals to achieve, and what is required to do so in terms of the skills to improve, and the priority to achieve those goals. Then, short and long term goals should be establish to ensure she understands that the mentoring process is not just a brief process in which we will enhance her communication skills overnight. Within the process we will work in enhancing our trust in each other to ensure we maintain proper relations while we formally evaluate her communication skills. The vision I have for this process is one of long term that will require weekly meetings to evaluate diverse communication scenarios, require that she implement diverse skills that will allow her to enhance all her forms of communication. I consider that becoming a corporate lawyer is a serious career that requires my mentee to communicate effectively when using written, body or verbal communication patterns. Therefore, in the process we will have to determine which coaching strategy will work best for both of us, in terms of improving the way she talks to others because when she is not afraid of talking to others, she talks to them in a very condescending manner. Lastly, I will proposed a couple of strategies I used before and that has worked out for me, which is creating diverse scenarios and practicing using them without providing her any lead, that way I can observe how she responds to those scenarios. Following, will provide her with strategies on how to communicate with others, and ask her to implement them in regular daily encounters. Those strategies will be complimented with a multistage plan that will incorporate goals to achieve in her verbal, written, body language, as well as short and long terms goals.

Coaching and Mentoring Articles Review

Coaching and Mentoring are two terms that are considered the same by many; however, they are not the same. In mentoring, the mentor and the mentee benefit from the learning association, where the mentor is also learning as he/she provides the mentee with advice based in formal and experiential knowledge. In mentoring the mentor and the mentee get together for the long term to share experiences that can contribute to the mutual growth of the mentor and the mentee. On the other hand, coaching is more related to the corporate world, as an employee requires coaching for performance enhancement, capacity to adjust to corporate protocols, or how to follow the organization vision in terms of new strategies. As both processes continue improving and becoming an important part of the corporate world more research has become available to guide coaches and mentors in the process. This paper presents articles that serve as a guidance to a mentor in terms of adopting the most effective strategies to improve the professional and personal experiences of mentees.

A research from Clutterbuck (2008) in the latest developments in the field of corporate coaching and mentoring, determined that structured or supported coaching and mentoring continues to be strategies that are evolving in the corporate world. The processes of coaching and mentoring are clearly defined these days and differentiated, which in the end will contribute to enhance both processes to make them more effective. A way to make them more effective according to the study is by involving in constant dialogue during these processes and by establishing proper supervision in the process.

The study concords with my vision of mentoring in which the mentor and the mentee require to involve in a trustful close association to ensure the process move in the proper direction. Also, proper evaluation of the process and feedback will help improving these associations because they are formed since trust which can help the mentor and the mentee communicate effectively in terms of the purpose, the goal, the ways, and the progress being made in the mentoring or coaching process. Therefore. Clutterbuck's article (2008) confirms that trust, communication, and structure are necessary for a mentoring association to evolve and produce desired results.

An article published by the NASSP bulletin by Hopkins-Thompson (2000) expresses the vision I had when selecting my mentee. This article titled “Colleagues Helping Colleagues: Mentoring and Coaching”, focuses on the relevance of having a mentoring program that adjust to the needs and skills of both the mentor and the mentee. The article also points to the need of mentors to have skills that include “communication, needs analysis, and feedback” (Hopkins-Thompson, 2000, p. 32).

The process of mentoring should incorporate tools like the ones used in the National Association of Secondary Schools Principals (NASSP) mentoring and coaching module like observations, communication, and feedback. This model correlates with most of the strategies that I have envisioned for my mentoring experience that require observations of my mentee while communicating with others, communicating with him always and providing him with constant feedback to ensure I can provide him with a learning experience that will benefit both of us. (Hopkins-Thompson, 2000, p. 32)

A different study titled, “Extending The Mentor Role In Initial Teacher Education: Embracing Social Justice” authored by Duckworth & Maxwell (2015), provides an important aspect of mentoring relationships in terms of the type of association that mentors should have with their mentees which requires to establish collaborative democratic mentoring relationships, in order to create room for critical reflection, support mentees to experience different cultures, develop self-critique strategies, and generally act as advocates and foster passion for social justice. (Duckworth et al., 2015) The latter supports the kind of association I envision to have with my mentee; although, the idea of social justice is not planned to be part of my relationship with my mentee, the rest of the skills correlate with the strategies he needs to incorporate in improving his communicational skills in order to enhance his professional and personal communicational patterns, particularly when it relates to support mentees to experience different cultures, because in his career he would have to related with individuals of diverse communicational patterns .

The article authored by Rhodes & Fletcher (2013) titled "Coaching and mentoring for self‐efficacious leadership in schools" points to the importance of coaching and mentoring as potential scaffolds to create an appreciation of self‐efficacy's value at all stages of the headship journey (Rhodes et al., 2013, p. 47). This means that mentoring and coaching associations can help the development of a leader as they can serve to minimize the possibilities of those who have the potential to lead do not achieve that goal as they have not enhanced their skills.

This article correlates with my current mentoring method, because by using the GROWTH method I will ensure that my mentee secures his pass to become a leader in his profession and do not fail in progressing as lawyer who requires to have excellent communication skills. Rather than reducing his possibilities of becoming a leader my mentee will improve his communication skills and become a more complete leader in his firm and set the pathway for his career to one day become a partner there, because he could communicate with others in a way that is assertive and effective, demonstrating that he is an avid listener and will embrace communication as a tool for professional development.

References

Clutterbuck, D. (2008) "What's happening in coaching and mentoring? And what is the difference between them?", Development and Learning in Organizations: An International Journal, Vol. 22 Iss: 4, pp.8 – 10

Duckworth, V. & Bronwen, M. (2015) "Extending the mentor role in initial teacher education: embracing social justice", International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, Vol. 4 Iss: 1, pp.4 - 20