Coaching and Mentoring as a Tool for Organizational Change - Coursework Example

Coaching and Mentoring as a Tool for Organizational Change BY YOU YOUR SCHOOL INFO HERE HERE Coaching and Mentoring as a Tool for OrganizationalChange Introduction In order to understand how coaching and mentoring can be used as tools to assist in creating organizational change, it is necessary to define each function of management. Coaching is specific training and a variety of feedback that is given to employees by their immediate supervision; a “continual process of learning by doing” (Mathis & Jackson, 2005, p.323). Mentoring is more involved and is relationship-based between supervisors and the employees. Mentoring involves allowing experienced management to help individuals gain knowledge and skills throughout their business careers, involving technical, interpersonal and organizational skills development. Both functions help employees become self-actualized, this being able to meet performance targets and achieve their highest levels of knowledge and motivation. When attempting to change the organization, both are necessary to achieve a team-based environment and build a positive culture ready and willing to accept change expectations (Ober, 2006). In order to provide effective coaching and mentoring, businesses utilize change agent champions to bridge the gap between performance and ongoing resistance to change. This agent works consistently to create a culture of unity and teamwork and sets the agenda by which motivation is to occur in groups or as individuals. Further, coaches and mentors serve as career and emotional counsellors to facilitate needs fulfilment and improve loyalty. They provide consistent feedback systems to identify strengths and weaknesses of individual employees and managers under a humanistic style of leadership. When structural or transformational change is required, only coaches and mentors can fully develop human capital and satisfy behavioral and emotional needs effectively. Why coaching and mentoring When an organization attempts to change its strategic focus, vision, or internal restructuring, change is often met with considerable employee resistance based on psychological motivations or other unique personality-based attributes (Ford, Ford & D’Amelio, 2008). In many cases, a manager or leader is assigned the role of change agent, one who champions the change and attempts to build a unified employee/management focus to achieve change goals. In most business environments, the change agent is described as one who “is an undeserving victim of the irrational and dysfunctional responses of the change recipients” (Ford, Ford & D’Amelio, 2008, p.362). Because of this phenomenon, tools are required to gain employee commitment and remove the barriers that hinder change efforts. Mentoring and coaching are the most in-depth mechanisms to ensure this is successful by gaining motivation and employee loyalty toward the change effort as it involves identifying strengths and weaknesses and also improving skills development (Mathis & Jackson, 2005). “Great companies rely heavily on their cultures to support their change management efforts. It is a qualitative process that addresses performance, ethical conduct, and work teams” (Want, 2009, p.10). Thus, mentoring and coaching are tools that help to create a culture of loyalty and dedication that can only be accomplished by strengthening the bonds between the management team and the employee population. In order for change efforts to meet with success, the management team must remove the forces that continue to restrain change progress (Ford, Ford & D’Amelio). In the coaching role, whenever it has been observed that employees are meeting change goals and performance targets, they should use positive reinforcement to ensure that motivations remain high. They should clearly explain why the behaviours are desired and provide ample suggestions for improvement when applicable. Thus, the coaching role is one where employees become an integral part of the learning organization. Using these positive reinforcement feedback tools, such as through ongoing appraisals, employees come to experience a positive sense of belonging and will therefore, in theory, be more dedicated to meeting the change goals. The mentor sets agenda related to employee performance related to the change efforts and removes ambiguity from the employee consciousness by helping them to develop a better sense self-confidence and adopt the values that are part of the organizational goals. There is a theory in psychology referred to as the locus of control, which involves how an employee perceives their destinies are being affected internally or due to external forces (Treven, 2005). A person with an internalized locus of control believes they control their own fates (Treven, p.641). An individual that maintains an external locus of control believes others shape their destinies which can lead to de-motivation and stress (Treven, p.642). Mentors help to change the externalized locus of control to an internalized one by showing them opportunities for advancement in multiple business areas so they feel as though they are affecting their own progress and skills development. Again, this is accomplished by strengthening the visibility of the management team and building a more interpersonal relationship with leadership. This requires patience and positive communication skills in order to build a more internalized sense of purpose in the organization as it relates to the change goals. Both coaching and mentoring are a new type of human resources function. HR is modelled with flexibility on behalf of the management team, “emphasizing teamwork, employee commitment, and through the development of a strong value system that promotes corporate identity” (Panayotopoulou & Papalexandris, 2004, p.499). Having positive relationships with the employee population promotes fairness and equal opportunities and also supports teamwork participation and total change-related involvement. Human resources, using coaching and mentoring as key tools for development, builds a sense of personal employee empowerment and strengthens the lines of communication between management and employees (Panayotopoulou & Papalexandris). During a change practice, whether complex or simply related to a job function, it is necessary to gain employee support and allegiance to ensuring an outcome of long-term success (Ober). Because it has already been identified that many change practices meet with dysfunctional and irrational resistance, the role of the mentor becomes a mix of psychological counselling that is necessary to build motivation (Weiten & Lloyd, 2005). Abraham Maslow, a 20th Century psychologist, developed what is referred to as the Hierarchy of Needs to explain basic human emotions that require fulfilment in order to achieve their greatest sense of self and performance. It is a five-tiered hierarchy starting with the fulfilment of physiological needs that must be met, these might include hygiene factors in the workplace and ergonomics as two examples. After meeting these needs, an individual requires next security and a sense of belonging, both requiring fulfilment until they have achieved the next tier of self-confidence (Gambrel & Cianci, 2003). This is why the role of coach and mentor is so important in facilitating organizational change, since these are basic human characteristics that apply to virtually everyone in the organization. A coach identifies opportunities for growth in the employee, thus meeting their motivational needs for security and belonging. By constantly maintaining a role of assessor and staying visible with feedback, it builds self-confidence when the manager uses reinforcers to ensure a desired behaviour continues (Weiten & Lloyd). These might include small-scale rewards or even promises of job promotions if particular criteria is met by the employee through these feedback adjustments when they occur. The mentor takes this a step further by including the employee in all change situations, thus giving them a sense of purpose and identity within the organization. This, therefore, meets the basic psychological needs of belonging in order to remove the barriers that often lead to dysfunctional or irrational change resistance. “Recent analyses have come to define coaching as a mixture of coaching and counselling, making it more difficult than ever to separate the roles of coach and therapist” (Black, 2006, p.24). Again, this is why the mentor, especially, requires fundamental knowledge of what drives human motivation and needs so that tools can be utilized to gain commitment by appealing to these cognitive and emotional drivers in order to meet with change expectations. A business cannot succeed without the efforts of its most valuable capital component, the employee, thus in order to be an effective counsellor or analyst, these skills are critical to avoid resistance to change (Black). Consider the following potential change effort in a typical organization. A recent merger has created an opportunity for expansion and the new change effort is to blend employees from the merged company with existing employees in the same business environment. There are going to be cultural differences and even ethnic differences that could impede success in building a unified, merger-friendly team environment. The role of the mentor is to model positive social behaviours that can be learned and adopted by employees with the use of cultural communications practices to help others adapt to this new employee population as they consolidate or incorporate new job roles. This can be done by conducting employee feedback surveys or needs analyses to act as the foundation for how to proceed in ensuring there is limited resistance to blending both cultures. He or she must emphasize that these job consolidations do not serve to interrupt job security (a fundamental Maslow-recognized need) and then facilitate group meetings to discuss reservations or concerns involving all members of the existing and new staff members. In this role, the mentor acts as a sponsor for all employees and can therefore influence others to improve their interpersonal skills, perhaps by using theory from Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions or other team-based literature as a foundational tool (Donnison, 2008). The main aspect of mentoring is to ensure that the mentor provides consistent feedback and opportunities for how to improve the environment and the employee role in the business (Mathis & Jackson). This might include providing job promotional packages to employees who excel in their job roles, thus constantly ensuring an ongoing learning environment that also satisfies their security and belonging needs. Any change effort requires commitment and dedication from the employees, and these are positive tools a mentor can use to ensure that employees remain devoted to meeting all change goals. It seems that the important element of both coaching and mentoring is to ensure that the manager or leader models these same behaviours so that employees do not perceive hypocrisy or sense any feelings of injustice or insincerity. The coach continues to reinforce that change is necessary and provides the reasoning and rationale as to why the change is occurring so there is no confusion about its relevance to new goals that have been set by executives. If training is necessary, the coach acts as the sponsor and ensures that all employees successfully complete the training packages and then provides a positive reinforcement so that these learnings and behaviours continue throughout the entire change effort. An effective tool is the performance appraisal or even the 360 degree feedback system to ensure that all employees are involved in building a team-focused culture of change. The mentor might use succession planning as a tool to gain commitment if each change effort as it relates to the employee has been met (Mathis & Jackson). A business simply cannot meet its change goals without employee involvement and therefore a humanistic and people-focused management strategy is necessary to achieve change goals and avoid resistance. Employees each have their own individual motivations and needs, therefore the mentor, especially, must be more involved with building a strong relationship with employees to identify what creates commitment and faithfulness at the individual level. While the coach provides feedback and training, the mentor becomes a form of therapist that constantly reinforces the opportunities that the new change vision holds (Weiten & Lloyd). Conclusion It is clear that the possibilities for resistance to change are substantial and not easily defined, nor are the resistance situations that likely occur during change efforts. By staying focused on meeting security, belonging, and self-confidence needs in employees, they can reach their highest levels of dedication and stay focused on motivation in order to satisfy the change goals and even those of the change agent. It is the change that occurs as a whole, at the cultural level, that will largely determine whether or not a change effort meets with long-term success. Therefore, it should be said that coaching and mentoring are positive tools for organizational change since they alter negativity and de-motivation at the individual level and then further build a harmonious team-based culture. The models of humanistic leadership provided by coaching and mentoring agents in the organization satisfy human emotional needs and also, in the process, reduce resistance to transformational or structural changes occurring within the organizational environment. Human capital development is necessary to create competitive advantage and ensure a harmonious, team-based culture of loyalty, dedication, and knowledge exchanges. Positive change simply cannot occur without coaches and mentors to guide employees forward and satisfy change goals as these agents provide the feedback and reinforcement necessary to satisfy corporate change goals and meet performance targets. The models of coaching and mentoring identified answer the question as to how to bring about organizational change successfully and drive human capital development. References Black, R. (2006). Coaching versus therapy in business management, Development and Learning in Organizations, 20(1), pp.23-26. Ford, J., Ford, L. & D’Amelio, A. (2008). Resistance to change: the rest of the story, Academy of Management Review, 33(2), p.362. Donnison, P. (2008). Executive coaching across cultural boundaries: an interesting challenge facing coaches today, Development and Learning in Organizations, 22(4), p.17. Gambrel, P. & Cianci, R. (2003). Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: does it apply in a collectivist culture, Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship, 8(2), pp.143-162. Mathis, R. & Jackson, J. (2005). Human Resource Management, 10th ed. Thomson South-Western. Ober, S. (2006). Contemporary Business Communication, 6th ed. Houghton Mifflin Company. Panayotopoulou, L. & Papalexandris, N. (2004). Examining the link between human resource management orientation and firm performance, Personnel Review, 33(5/6), p.499. Treven, S. & Potocan, V. (2005). Training programmes for stress management in small businesses, Education & Training, 47(8/9), pp.640-652. Want, J. (2009). Saving the company, Leadership Excellence, 26(6), pp.10-11. Weiten, W. & Lloyd, M. (2005). Psychology Applied to Modern Life: Adjustment in the 21st Century, 7th ed, Thomson South-Western. Read More