Good, the bad and the ugly

11:28am Thursday 17th August 2006

by Eric Parsloe

For many years the building industry has been well known for its cowboys'- poorly trained and unscrupulous operators who fleece people of their trust and their savings in return for inadequate and incomplete work.

They are a minority but the damage they have done to the public's faith in the construction industry is considerable.

These cowboys' are a nightmare for hard-working and ethical operators and, sadly, they are not limited to the construction sector.

In the field of coach-mentoring we too have been at risk from the adverse affect of cowboys' - people without adequate training and professional behaviour cashing in on the popularity and effectiveness of coaching and mentoring.

As a relatively young profession, we have really come to the fore in the last decade and, through the enterprise and ambition of talented individuals and teams, coach-mentoring has become a recognised and valuable tool that is helping organisations develop through their people.

Surveys show 72 per cent of all organisations now use it as the main business driver to improve people's performance.

But the fact the sector has been unregulated and, until now, there have not been any recognisable qualifications, has meant thousands of individuals and organisations have been exploited and confused by people masquerading as fully-trained coach-mentors.

This is dangerous on a number of levels. Some organisations have suffered because so-called coach-mentoring companies are not sound commercially and have gone out of business having not completed programmes.

Others have not received the quality of coach-mentoring that they had hoped for and the results have been far from satisfactory.

The lack of quality standards and regulation has meant business and life coach-mentors have virtually been able to set up overnight and, to the untrained eye, it is difficult to tell the difference between good and bad.

The bad ones are not typical of our sector - the vast majority of us are investing heavily in training and development and striving hard to guarantee quality standards.

We are certainly not complacent which is why nationally recognised quality standards are so important to us.

There are two major changes just announced that mean we can work to rid the sector of cowboys for good.

The first is the news that the Government's Qualification and Curriculum Authority (QCA) is recommending acceptance of a new suite of national occupational standards for coaching and mentoring after a final consultation with all the major coaching organisations.

The second is the announcement that 12 organisations, including Oxford Brookes University and ourselves, drawn from the academic, professional and employers sectors, have achieved the Quality Standard Award from the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC).

This means we now have a clear, coherent and rigorous framework of definitions and competencies for coaching and mentoring performance. This applies to managers and company specialists, as well as those operating as independent professionals.

These standards offer the market place the ability to: l Understand the quality of what they are buying and make appropriate choices.

l Allow training specialists to choose appropriate programmes for developing their own managers and leaders in coaching and/or mentoring skills, or to develop their own programmes to industry equivalent standards.

l Give the opportunity for training providers to design programmes and gain recognition.

The standards have been created from the basis of the extensive competency research conducted by EMCC last year but go much further to define the levels of practice, the contexts, reflection and planning, as well as the theory.

There are four categories of award - Foundation, Intermediate, Practitioner and Master.

These reflect the different levels of study, practical competencies and skills, and are equivalent to NVQ levels 3 and 4, undergraduate degree level and on to postgraduate certificates, diplomas and masters' degrees.

The awards are not intended as a straightjacket to limit the content, or restrict the organic growth of these programmes, but to help guide buyers of services, programme developers and practitioners on the standards that should be expected.

We know we have a long way to go as a profession to finally send the cowboys off into the sunset.

But in the last few weeks we have made the most significant strides towards that ultimate goal since coach-mentoring made its first impact upon personal and organisational development.

Eric Parsloe is director of The Oxford School of Coaching and Mentoring, 01869 338989; www.oscm.co.uk European Mentoring and Coaching Council, www.emccouncil.org.uk