Coaching, Counseling & Mentoring: How to Choose & Use the Right Technique to Boost Employee Performance

Coaching, Counseling & Mentoring: How to Choose & Use the Right Technique to Boost Employee Performance Stone's book well covers the landscape of these three topics. Her information is accurate, practical, and presented in an easy-to-read format. Stone's illustrative stories demonstrate her points and bring the material to life. This book fills a void in the marketplace and does so in a way that very effective. "Coaching, Counseling & Mentoring" is an excellent tool for managers and supervisors. I recommend it without qualification.

Along with the highly competitive market, comes the high competition for companies to recruit and maintain these top performers. Employees have more choices today. Employees who do not feel challenged, or adequately compensated, will move on. It is not just about money anymore, either. Keeping top performers is a lot more than just a salary figure. So, how do companies keep their best people? According to author Florence Stone, the answer is by helping employees excel. Since most motivational experts agree that most people want to better themselves it does not require threats or force to get employees to improve. It does require a system that will allow them to grow. This book is exactly about that. It is about how to coach, counsel, and mentor employees to success. These three areas each have a distinct role to play in any firm: 1. Coaching helps all employees. The art of coaching will improve employee's job performance, as well as give them greater potential to move onto more difficult assignments and jobs. 2. Counseling is used to address problem performers. More often than not, these employees have bad habits that have risen to the level of chronic. The author says that by investing ten percent of time on these people using counseling can save a firm from spending fifty percent of its time fixing problems in the future. 3. Mentoring, writes the author, is reserved for the most talented employees, the true top performers. These people will provide the greatest return on investment for time spent helping them advance. If these people are ignored, they will quickly leave the firm and find someone else to nurture and develop their talents. Each of these areas requires different skills to be executed effectively. Those skills are presented in this book to help persons truly master the arts of coaching, counseling, and mentoring.

Knowing the distinction between the three roles and functions (see title) is essential to be any good at either or all. Dah... And yet I wish more people would take the time and effort to get and read this book and know the differences.This book not only provides sound theory on all three subjects, but it also provides very good practical advice on how to practice either. If you want to be knowledgeable on these subjects, either for bettering your own performance as a manager or for knowing when and why to hire specific professionals, just read this book. Trust me.

The book describes three different techniques that can be used to improve employee performance. Even though the book is written from a manager's perspective I found it to be interesting despite my limited experience in leading a group of people. The book is divided into three parts, where each part discusses one of the techniques. It starts off with Coaching followed with Counselling and Mentoring. I found that each topic is described with the same detail, and answered many of my questions. The book includes many real life examples to better explain how to handle different situations. It is easy to find specific information since the sections are organized the same way, and also includes a discussion about common traps and problems. You will also find a useful Index in the end of the book. It can be hard to differentiate between coaching and mentoring. After having read the book this is my interpretation of the terms. Coaching is a way to help and motivate the employee to excel in his current position. Like a sports coach you train the employee to do his job in the best possible way. Coaching is a process that begins before the employee starts working for the manager. This section discusses what to look for in a potential employee, and how to bring a new employee up to speed. Mentoring on the other hand is a way to stimulate your top-performers. Mentoring is limited to a few of your employees - employees where you see a special potential that need training to come to surface. A mentoring relationship is a relationship in which you do more than train the employee to do his job well. As a mentor you share your experience, contacts, wisdom to move the employee to the next level. This can be a useful way to keep top performers on your workforce when they feel they have reached the limit of their current position. Counselling is used to fix poor performance, and this section suggests how to approach an employee with a performance problem. Being honest and direct, and to handle the problem as soon as possible before it grows. A reader outside the States may find some of the legal advice to be less useful since different laws are effective in other countries.