Spouses, friends and family can sometimes know as much about your career and work life as your colleagues. The simple question “How was work today, dear?” can unleash a two-hour monologue on a problem that, at that moment, seems insurmountable to the speaker – and often incomprehensible to the listener. Everyone needs a sounding board sometimes, but there are ears out there that are better suited to this job than your long-suffering partner.

Coaching and mentoring are both one-to-one relationships which allow someone to talk through a problem or issue – but they’re not interchangeable terms. A mentor is normally selected because they have a skill or have achieved something that the ‘mentee’ aspires to, and the discussion may be as much about how the mentor got where they are as what the mentee is doing or needs to do. Mentors can receive training, but informal mentoring relationships can easily spring up between two people in an organisation.

Coaches, by contrast, are usually trained and there are professional qualifications available. Another difference is that they don’t need to know anything about the area their charge works in, or have experience in the issue they are grappling with – whether it be trying for a promotion, struggling with a lack of confidence or wrestling with staff management issues.

Carole Moore, learning and development adviser at the Communities and Local Government department (CLG), explains coaching thus: “Coaches ask the person the correct questions to help them explore what the options are and help them to find the answers.” CLG, like most departments, offers a mentor-brokering service – Moore has 150 mentors on her list – and 12 members of staff have just completed coaching qualifications.

Some departments have made such schemes mandatory. Three years ago, Child Benefit Office and Tax Credit Office (CBO/TCO) director Richard Summersgill instituted an unusual coaching scheme designed to involve all 6,000 of the offices’ staff. Operational managers Alison Cook and Cheryl Wright were among the 18 managers of varying seniority chosen to train and then coach 1,000 manager colleagues in an attempt to counteract what Cook calls the offices’ “command and control” culture. Those 18 were later expanded to 35 admin staff, who in turn coached all 5,000 CBO/TCO staff members. Cook and Wright believe that the scheme has encouraged all staff to take responsibility for solving their own problems, rather than simply asking their manager what they should do.

Summersgill’s decision to trust staff with delivering the scheme, rather than leaving it to a consultant or HR professionals, is one of the reasons for its success, Cook says, and has boosted the engagement of frontline staff. “We have suddenly got this buzz with 5,000 of our admin grades feeling that they can make a difference, can challenge processes and tasks,” she says. “We would like to see everybody in the front line [across government] engaged to the same extent,” Wright adds.

Such department-centric solutions will not suit everybody, says Ken Smith, responsible for strategic HR at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). A qualified coach, Smith set up the cross-government Coaches in Government Network two years ago because he was concerned that people might not want to discuss work issues with close colleagues. The network now consists of 30 qualified coaches, who provide a free coaching service, and around 120 HR and learning and development professionals.

“Coaching can be expensive and can be the preserve of our most senior grades, so we have tried to open it up to all sorts of people,” adds Smith. The cross-government approach also allows both parties an insight into how another organisation works, Smith adds. “You are learning about the client and their world.”

A fresh perspective

This desire for a fresh perspective led Teresa Norman, from the Cabinet Office’s governance and change team, to take part in a collaborative coaching scheme which brings together staff from public and private sector organisations. Having always worked in government, she says, “I thought it would be really interesting to have the perspective of someone in the private sector”. Programme director Kåre Sivertsen, of the scheme’s providers Coaching Squared, believes that cross-sector partners are valued for their fresh point of view. “Solutions to a problem can often be as clear as day to someone who is not part of the civil service,” he says.

Norman is clear that the programme benefited her employer as well as her own career: “People are better able to handle the complexities of their jobs because they are getting an insight and an external perspective”, she says. Her coaching partner Louise Beddoes, a senior business development manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), agrees that organisations profit from employees who are more confident, manage their careers better and gain new skills. “You can be a lot more helpful to customers and colleagues if you have a more enquiring and coaching approach,” argues Beddoes. Developing existing staff means there is less need to recruit new employees, she adds.

Beddoes’ and Norman’s co-coaching programme was established by Mary Shaw, head of corporate equality at the Ministry of Justice, with PwC partner Tina Hallett because they could see a bottleneck of women at the junior ranks failing to make it into senior positions. Shaw had established a women’s network, but found women “are not very good at working the room; they talk to their friends or shuffle off”, and wanted something more structured. The success of the project – now running in six public and six private sector organisations – means it is now run externally, and Shaw has turned her sights on other under-represented groups, running pilot co-coaching programmes for Black and Minority Ethnic (BME), disabled and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) staff.

Shaw’s concern – that “we have got huge numbers of people feeling disengaged”, particularly BME staff in junior grades – is shared by the civil service leadership, right up to permanent secretary and cabinet secretary level. Consequently, Shaw’s initiative is by no means the only development programme to focus on the groups that are plentiful in the feeder grades – six and seven – but underrepresented in the senior civil service (SCS).

The National School of Government, for example, runs Leaders Unlimited: a training scheme for these groups that includes coaching, mentoring, work placements and classroom learning as it prepares junior officials for what will be expected of them in the SCS. “One-to-one coaching and mentoring really help people to think about what sort of leader they are and what is holding them back,” says David Sweeney, head of the school’s Centre for Strategic Leadership.

The BME-focused mentoring programme run by the Minority Ethnic Talent Association (Meta) aims to provide learners with face-to-face time with someone who has made it to the top. Claudette Sutton, the chair of Meta, who is based at the Department for Children, Schools & Families, says mentees have come away from meetings with a new belief that their talent could take them into the senior civil service.

She set up Meta because, after eight years in the civil service – with its “unimpressive” number of BME leaders – she decided she wanted to help level the playing field. “It is no good just sitting back and expecting it to be done by others,” she says – and she has been rewarded with the financial support of her department, the backing of the Cabinet Office and cabinet secretary, the the volunteering of mentors for the 12 Meta mentees right up to permanent secretary level.

Department for International Development (DfID) permanent secretary Minouche Shafik, who believes that “we often learn the most from watching other people”, is one such mentor. Having been mentored throughout her career, usually by bosses, Shafik enjoys  mentoring others – both formally through programmes such as Meta’s, and informally in day-to-day management.

“If you can give that support to other people, it is hugely important,” she says; not just for the mentee, but for the department as a whole. “At DfID we have a lot of formal and informal mentoring programmes, and it is quite clear that it improves the performance of the department as a whole. If people are getting good advice they perform better and, as a result, the organisation performs better,” she says. “It is really, really important.” Schemes such as the Threshold programme for women and BME staff have seen an increase in promotions. “As a result we have got a more diverse staff,” Shafik says.

At a time of belt-tightening, managers may be tempted to reduce even these kinds of cost-effective staff-development methods – perhaps worrying that time spent coaching and mentoring is taking people away from their day jobs. Indeed, Coaching Squared’s Sivertsen reports that it has been “tricky” to fill some of the private sector slots because of a reluctance to spend on training. “We are in the middle of a recession,” he says. “There were a few who were willing in the past but have had to withdraw because they’re cutting funding.” But the Cabinet Office’s director of leadership and talent management, Helen Dudley, insists that the public sector  won’t pull back; these methods of investing in staff skills and capability, she says, will be part of the civil service’s leadership framework, to be published soon.

“Senior managers are almost expected to put something back into the organisation by spending some time working with more junior people beyond their own team,” she says. It may take up an hour a month of a manager’s time, but Dudley says the time should be found – even as staff, time and budgets become scarcer. “If anything, we should make a case that people should do more of it,” she suggests. “It is a cost-effective way of helping people to develop and learn, and to bring them on.”

Case study: coaching

Coaching can be used to tackle any issue, from career planning and lack of confidence to staff management. “There are as many agendas as there are clients,” says qualified coach Ken Smith. The key is that the coach asks the right questions, without making any judgements about the answers, in order to help the client answer their own question – and this requires some training. Smith, whose network provides free access to coaching, argues that a qualified coach is preferable because they are working to established professional standards and within an ethical framework.

But MoJ HR professional Mary Shaw says the kind of collaborative, peer-to-peer coaching she established, at around £400 for a nine-month programme, is cheaper than paid-for professional coaches – and, she believes, in some ways better. “You are also getting an insight into another organisation at close quarters and, because you are in a group of 12 other co-coaches, there is a very strong network there,” she says. Less formal relationships still need to be tightly structured, says participant Louise Beddoes. “We made a conscious effort not to let the relationship slip into a friendship, which is easy to do,” she advises. And you have to know what you want to get out of the relationship, according to her coaching partner Theresa Norman. “I was really lucky with my partner Louise because she was doing a course in coaching at the time, so she was full of insight.”

As with mentoring, coaches and their subjects need to be carefully matched, depending on what the person being coached needs help with. Kåre Sivertsen, who runs collaborative coaching for departments, is careful to match grades, for example, because otherwise a more senior person can slip into a mentoring role. “That becomes very unbalanced,” he says. “Both participants are supposed to help each other.”

And while some relationships can break down, many can become permanent arrangements: around 50 per cent of the last women’s group continued meeting their coach after the nine-month programme had finished, says Sivertsen. Founder Shaw has been a member of the same action training set – a peer group providing advice and support – for several years, and knows of some pairs that are still meeting after a decade.


Case study: mentoring

Mentoring can take many forms. Supportive managers can become mentors almost by default, while staff can seek out a mentor elsewhere in their department, or even go outside the organisation. Adeola Eleyal, a senior lawyer at the Criminal Appeal Office, looked outside her busy but small office, based off Whitehall in the Strand, and was matched by Meta with DfID perm sec Shafik.

“I have done very well,” Eleyal says. “She is an excellent coach.” Covering everything from career plans and how to network to combining work and childcare, Shafik has also made up for her lack of a legal background by introducing her mentee to SCS members in the legal field. “That has made a huge difference,” says Eleyal. Mentoring has also been very practical, she adds: even watching the way Shafik speaks and maintains eye contact has been helpful. “You see this woman who is very experienced and powerful but she is open to share her experiences, and that gives you a lot of confidence and reassurance,” she adds.

Shafik, who describes mentoring as “a great experience for both sides”, says mentoring is part of day-to-day management, although Helen Dudley, talent director at the Cabinet Office, adds that often “with your own boss you don’t get the time to reflect and stand back. You are usually too focused on the task in hand.”

Sutton admits that, when setting up the Meta scheme, she worried whether her high-flying mentors would find time for their mentees. “Actually, it has worked quite well because the mentors are really committed,” she says. “Also, the mentees have learnt to make the absolute best of their time with their mentors.”