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Terence T. Burton 102 20 505

Applied Leadership #8: Mentoring and


Coaching is the New Management
Publié le 14 juillet 2017

Effective mentoring and coaching is the foundation of talent development and


strategic success.  You can't achieve this success just just by mimicking someone
else's practices, going through the motions, or winging it . . .

I read so many confusing articles on the topics about leadership, mentoring, coaching,
engagement and other general management topics. Many of these articles are treated as
separate and distinct topics written by people who have never held a leadership position,
but are self-proclaimed leadership experts. Many articles are also oversimplified,
abstract representations of reality from an academic or intellectual perspective. Finally,
there are too many leaders, managers, consultants, educators, and continuous
improvement practitioners simply mimicking practices of others, and going through the
standard motions of change leadership, mentoring, and coaching. The competency of
mentoring and coaching doesn't automatically come with a Black Belt or Lean Sensei
certificate. Culture change does not respond well to these short-sighted tactics.

The world is evolving at warp speed, rendering many of our traditional beliefs and best
practices to become obsolete. "Management" is one of these examples and requires an
upgrade to its accepted and antiquated definition. The purpose of this post is to redefine
management, clarify the differences between mentoring and coaching, and demonstrate
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the need to re-integrate all of these concepts to achieve leadership, operating, and
cultural success.

Step One: There's No Substitute for Experience

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As I mentioned in my previous Applied Leadership posts, I have been blessed working
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with over 350 client organizations in 48 states and in 23 different countries around the
globe. This represents working with thousands of executives and managers with a wide
variety of egos, backgrounds, specialties, operating styles, motivations, and localized
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cultures. This journey has, and continues to provide a phenomenal opportunity to assist
leaders and direct their organizations through a broad spectrum of transformation
initiatives.

True leadership competencies are learned and


developed through long term, direct and
active engagement with other people with
their own diverse backgrounds, cultures,
values, personalities, motivations, and human
frailties.

What have these experiences and working with thousands of great people taught
me? Leadership is a lifelong journey of learning and development . . . and it includes
failure, humility, embarrassment, humbling experiences, and many scuffs on the
knees. The ability to lead, manage, mentor, and coach cannot be achieved with a quick
45 minute read of a fiction leadership novel or attending a five-day workshop. And it
doesn't come by osmosis with a Black Belt or Lean Sensei certificate. Arrogance and
unemotional by the book facilitation doesn't get you anywhere, but observing and
listening to others, living in their empathy and experiences, and shared learning makes a
world of difference. True leadership competencies are learned and developed through
long term, direct and active engagement with other people with their own diverse
backgrounds, cultures, values, personalities, motivations, and human frailties. There's
no substitute for experience - Not measured in years but by thousands of personal
discovery moments in a variety of leadership, change management, and human drama
situations. The greatest reward is adapting to these challenging human situations,
helping people develop, grow, achieve their full potential, and do the same for others
around them.

Leadership, Management, Mentoring, and Coaching

I was visiting with an executive who made a statement that I will remember as long as I
live: "It's no wonder why we're not getting anywhere! We're just throwing
groups of unskilled and inexperienced people together with vague
Messagerie
directions, calling one of them the leader, and then expecting them to be a high
performance team." Success requires much more than going through the motions.

So why is mentoring and coaching so vital? 

I have visited with so many organizations that claim, "Sounds great but we don't
have time for mentoring and coaching." Not the first or hundredth time I've heard
this. I am always amazed that these same organizations always find the time to deal with
the same recurring problems, over and over again. This is frustrating environment for
employees who often know how to prevent these wastes but are stuck (without a

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voice) working within an inefficient process. Look - If you have time to do things over,
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you have more than enough time to mentor, coach, develop, and engage people in
eliminating problems at the source. For the short-sighted, this is a real productivity
improvement.
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Look - If you have time to do things over, you


have more than enough time to mentor, coach,
develop, and engage people in eliminating
problems at the source.

The remainder of this post will provide my own perspective on leadership,


management, mentoring and coaching. By all means if you have additional inputs or
perspectives, please feel free to add your comments to this post.

Old Management vs. New Management

Below is a framework of how we view these topics. First of all, the traditional definition
of command and control management is 95% irrelevant in today's world of work. We
won't dwell on the Old Management part of the framework. Any organization not
providing career growth and talent development opportunities, or managers walking
around using Attila the Hun tactics to make the monthly numbers is doomed by their
own actions. Any associate working in these environments is not committed, shows up
only to pay bills, and has one foot out the door. Recognize that management has,
however evolved to where it needs a different definition that includes a high degree of
mentoring and coaching.

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Leadership, management, mentoring, and coaching are different, but all integrate very
nicely with each other to build and nurture a powerhouse culture. The left side of the
framework provides specific objective attributes of mentoring, coaching, and traditional
management. This particular panel addresses New Management and provides the
differences between mentoring and coaching. In the framework, Leadership is an
overlay; Both Leadership and New Management include almost identical mentoring and
coaching but at different levels, time horizons, and degrees of focus. Leadership is
mentoring and coaching for the longer term to develop the organizations broader core
values, relationships, development needs, and a cultural standard of excellence.

New Management mentoring and coaching is highly aligned to Leadership but is more
focused on daily patterns of behaviors, shorter term skills development, fluid teaming
best practices, and competency expansion (KATA). Leadership creates the learning and
development environment and infrastructure to keep everything in synch. With the right
infrastructure and metrics, Leadership and New Management provide a check-and-
balance of sorts on each other. This is my perspective on how New Management has
(must) evolve to for a successful operating environment and no-limits culture. Notice
that I mentioned that traditional management is 95% obsolete. Daily realities require
that traditional management practices are sometimes necessary to intervene or turn
around some people and behaviors going astray. Humans respond to different
leadership, management, mentoring, and coaching approaches. As I mentioned
previously, situational leadership experiences provide a huge advantage in change
leadership.

"It's no wonder why we're not getting


anywhere! We're just throwing groups of
unskilled and inexperienced people together
with vague directions, calling one of them the
leader, and then expecting them to be a high
performance team."

The key takeaway of the New Management framework is that we live in a new world
where people should be fully engaged and empowered, have full authority and

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constantly challenged by self-management, and continuously develop the hard and soft
skills to improve autonomously as a normal way of thinking and working. Human
capital is the primary means to strategic and operating success.
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Leveraged Mentoring and Coaching

The concepts behind mentoring and coaching are not new. However there's a big
difference between "talking about" or "knowing how to" do these things, and living it
every day through formal structured means and deliberate actions. It's the last part of
this statement that adds the newness to mentoring and coaching.

We mentioned earlier in this post that there is too much going through the motions of
mentoring and coaching, and not enough serious development around the relational,
adaptive skills, values, problem solving, self-management, and human dynamics
competencies. Lack of commitment, passion, experience, interest, time, and other
detractors stop mentoring, coaching, engagement, and empowerment dead in its
tracks. Worse yet, whatever mentoring and coaching behaviors, choices, and actions are
being practiced . . . Are being observed by the organization 100% of the time - Evolving
culture either forward, steady-state, or backwards.

The figure below provides an overview of our Leveraged Mentoring and Coaching
framework. These are the mission-critical components for getting mentoring and
coaching right at all levels of the organization.

Three important requirements of leveraged mentoring include:

On Demand – Seasoned mentoring and coaching professionals help to establish


the right formal deployment measurement and feedback processes, and understand
where and what type of mentoring is necessary at all times. Mentoring and coaching
is not a standard, one-size-fits-all cookbook. Experienced professionals provide
both ongoing and specialized support on all issues as quickly as possible to the
teams and people they serve.

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Leveraged – This is the equivalent of using debt financing to increase Essayez Premium
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shareholder value. Organizations borrow the extensive background and experiences
of the seasoned mentor and coach. The velocity and magnitude of improvement is
amplified by their collective skills, knowledge, and implementation experiences in
Terence T. Burton 102 20 505
hundreds of previous initiatives and thousands of successfully completed projects.

Targeted – Mentoring is proactively provided based on continuously reaching out


and identifying critical leadership, strategy, planning and deployment, or
execution. The seasoned mentoring and coaching professional knows where to look
and what questions to ask to identify and resolve barriers to success quickly.

These requirements are backed up by a strong combination of mentoring and coaching


competencies that increase the quality, speed, value delivery, and development of
continuous improvement teams. The five key facets of leveraged mentoring are
described below.

Proven Continuous Improvement Expertise

An important factor in this area is the ability to help leadership and improvement teams
uncover and logically scope out new improvement opportunities. The other component
of this is technical problem solving guidance and expertise. Too often, this process tends
to be a misguided practitioner effort where improvement tools are naively applied in

hopes of finding a solution. Value stream mapping is a good example. Many


inexperienced consultants, practitioners, and teams begin value stream mapping their
universe before they know and understand the real issues and needs. Improvement
teams waste valuable time and resources in their inexperienced journey through the
limited mechanics of improvement tools. I just don't understand why some
organizations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Lean and TPS consultants for
non-actionable wallpaper. Many organizations are in a mimic the recipe and
maintenance mode with their Lean and continuous improvement initiatives where
nothing has changed in years, and tangible value contribution is beginning to
disappear. It's no different than the two-years-of-experience-five-times-over
analogy. The future demands a higher degree of improvement leadership and change
management, strategic alignment, infrastructure and talent expansion, and real time
performance. Continuous improvement in today's warp speed economy requires new
adaptive thinking, creativity and innovation, deeper experiences, technology integration,
and much more robust deployment and sustainability best practices.

Business Process Experience

This is a real flaw in mentoring and coaching. Typically an improvement leader or


practitioner knows less about core business processes than the team. So they facilitate
the team towards what they know best - Applying the tools of improvement. Business

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expertise and process improvement experience includes deep


knowledge of the integrated architecture of core business processes, and extensive
experience in adapting or creating new approaches to improvement to these complicated
interconnected process networks. These processes are complex because they have a high
professional, knowledge, technology, and human content. They also have multiple cross
functional and cross enterprise touch points, each of which creates risks of introducing
performance issues. Finally, most of the larger opportunities are hidden and yet to be
discovered. Examples include global supply chains, new product development and
commercialization, global order fulfillment, logistics and transportation, compliance
and regulatory, cash-to-cash, or the total customer experience.

Business process experience is another technical competency of navigating through the


complex interconnected network of transactional processes. Defining the right
challenges, causes, and effects is fuzzy in time and space and requires more advanced
forensics thinking and approaches. It takes years of challenging improvements to carve
out the right multiple process segments and understand the upstream, downstream, and
interrelationship impacts on other parts of the organization . . . And actually achieve
residual improvements in other areas of the organization. Inexperienced improvement
practitioners and teams can easily achieve sub-optimized improvement—The shallow
topsoil improvements in one localized area that may negatively affect the end-to-end
business process. Business process improvement experience is a major factor in
accelerating success in strategic and operating transformations.

Knowledge of Best Practices

Today fewer and fewer organizations are looking externally, and especially

outside of their industry to learn more about best practices. The


risk of this approach is akin to “the fish who does not know that he is wet.” Seasoned
external mentoring and coaching professionals gain the voluminous and continuously
evolving skills, knowledge of best practices, and experiences through working in a
variety of organizations. These people are more often than not, best practices architects”
in their client organizations. In short, they are actively engaged in striving for best
practices100% of the time in a variety of diverse environments.

Many organizations simply copy and mimic the best practices of other
organizations. This approach at best, only makes you as good as everyone else and by
the time it is implemented, someone else has created a new level of best
practices. Knowledge of best practices and how to adapt them to the organization helps
is another key element of transformation success.

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Multi-Industry Executive Experience Essayez Premium
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The most important element of leveraged mentoring and coaching is multi-industry


executive experience. The reality here is that organizations, admittedly or not, are
missingTerence
many T.core
Burton 102
competencies to conceive, plan, and execute a successful 20 505

transformation initiative. Many organizations have a false sense of executive confidence


in deciding how best to proceed with major transformation initiatives. On a micro scale,
this same false sense of knowing how to improve serious performance detractors
always slips down the priority list of daily fires.

During a large scale transformation initiative, many related leadership, organizational,

and competency issues are revealed such as executive


commitment, recognition of the need, organizational readiness for change, internal
transformation capabilities and skills, awareness and communication, cultural barriers,
sheer human issues and fears, and many other critical success factors. There is no
substitute for executive leadership and implementation experience in hundreds of
different organizations. These competences enable the seasoned mentor and coach to
begin on day one leading executives, the core steering team, and individual project
teams on the unpredictable journey of transformation. With the right set of conditions in
place up front (e.g., leadership, aligned transformation strategy and vision, planning and
deployment infrastructure, baseline metrics and performance, goals, program
management and monitoring, progress reporting, communication, talent development,
etc. ), executives and their organizations power up the learning curve quickly.

Technology-Enabled Improvement Expertise  

This competency has to do with new and emerging technology that can
frame transformation in more of a near real time mode. It is predicted that 50%

of the workforce will be virtual in the next 10-20 years.


Transformation practitioners and their organizations need to become familiar with,
embrace, and not fear technology. We are not advocating a proliferation of technology,
but integrating the right enabling technologies. Data warehousing (a single version of
the facts), predictive and preventive business analytics, digital multi-layered
performance dashboards (production, quality, improvements in progress, etc.),
virtualization, mobility, cloud technology, data visualization, etc. are having a
significant impact on how great organizations can become in the near
future. Technology is a huge game changer for a Lean Business System or major
transformation initiative because it is converting the task-based linear waterfall
approaches of incremental improvement activities of the past into living, real-time/on-
demand, rapid execution breakthrough improvements.

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The most successful and admired leaders are great mentors, coaches, and
influencers. For sure, they always make or exceed their numbers. But they always make
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the concerted effort to challenge, mentor, teach, coach, engage, empower, communicate,
develop, and grow people beyond what was thought to be possible in their
organizations. Think about some of the great leaders you worked for/with and how they
made a lifelong impression on your career and your life. In today's environment of
instant gratification and short term performance, there's a real talent shortage of these
leaders.

Unfortunately, there are still many short-sighted leaders that may be verbally
or intellectually committed to mentoring and coaching, but their actions say that it's a
big waste of time. Everyone has the potential to be extraordinary in their own way, and
mentoring and coaching is a relatively small investment for the incremental benefits. It's
not a waste of time at all to get people emotionally committed to a common goal,
working positively together as a unified team, developing the capabilities of
engagement and empowerment, shared learning and development, and feeling the
success of professional and personal accomplishment. These are happy, high
performing organizations.

It's not a waste of time at all to get people


emotionally committed to a common goal,
working positively together as a unified team,
developing the capabilities of engagement and
empowerment, shared learning and
development, and feeling the success of
professional and personal accomplishment.
These are happy, high
performing organizations.

Mentoring and Coaching is the New Management. Mentoring and coaching are
complex human activities that require a career-long commitment to do it well and with
consistent positive results. Why? Because one never knows what to expect from when
dealing with diverse individuals or groups of people at different levels and places in the
organization. There is no standard practice or improvement tool to develop and grow
people because everyone is unique and different. Successful mentoring and coaching
across all the dimensions discussed in this post is a rare commodity in most
organizations.

I have a saying: "The answers are usually obvious, but getting a thousand people
to agree, embrace, and act uniformly in the same direction is the real challenge
of transformation." For the Toyota KATA disciples, recognize that successful
mentoring and coaching goes much deeper than four principles and five questions
printed on pocket cards, or a few canned, manually maintained storyboards scattered
around the production floor. Most previous treatments of KATA tend to be academic,
grossly oversimplified, and totally missing the deeper emotional, self and
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cultural development, and higher human potential discovery aspects of Essayez Premium
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transformation. We refer to this procedurelized recipe approach as a KATA Sonata
Journey, the wrong journey. Mentoring and coaching certainly has its limits when
viewed as a defined set of procedures and practices in a production area.
Terence T. Burton 102 20 505

For the Toyota KATA disciples, recognize that


successful mentoring and coaching goes much
deeper than four principles and five questions
printed on pocket cards, or a few canned,
manually maintained storyboards scattered
around the production floor. Most
previous treatments of KATA tend to be
academic, grossly oversimplified, and totally
missing the deeper emotional, self and
cultural development, and higher human
potential discovery aspects of
transformation.

The largest opportunities for improvement are enterprise-wide, not within a particular
function of department. In successful business transformations, 90% of the effort is a
much larger, enterprise-wide human transformation in spirit, behaviors, culture, and
personal and professional growth.

*****************************************************

Let's engage and share Mentoring and Coaching stories. Please post a
comment and share with your peers.

Follow or connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter, visit our website


www.ceobreakthrough.com or feel free to contact me directly at
burton@ceobreakthrough.com

For additional guidance about enterprise and cultural


transformation, contact me directly or refer to my new book.

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Vincent Rocco 2 mois


Resume

a very informative article, it seems to incorporate some of the 14 Toyota principles too. thanks!!
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Patrick Trottier - Emergent Organizational Development and Change® 2 mois


Emergent Change ® Emergent Organizations® From Industrial Age Silos to The Interconnected Age of Coll…

An excellent article Terrence. 'Emergent learning' is the most effective learning. You bring this
out in your article. Re-framing leadership and management practices is critical in the 21st
Century as new forms of organizations are created. Thank you. Patrick
J’aime Répondre 1 J’aime

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Terence T. Burton
Passionate CEO and Chief Client Officer, Strategic and Operations Improvement Leader, Turnaround Expert

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