SPaMCAST 518 – Leadership, Coaching, and Mentoring, An Interview With Rebecca Staton-Reinstein

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SPaMCAST 518 features our interview with Rebecca Staton-Reinstein.  We discussed leadership, the difference between leadership and management, coaching versus mentoring and who should own your improvement program.  Rebecca and I have known each other for years and I have always enjoyed her wisdom and pragmatic advice. She really delivers the goods.

Rebecca’s bio:

REBECCA STATON-REINSTEIN, Ph.D. is the president of Advantage Leadership, Inc.

Where she works with companies around the world that want strategic leaders and engaged employees to increase bottom- and top-line results and delight customers. Clients achieve their goals through strategic planning and leadership, management, team, and organizational development. Rebecca’s team works with clients to craft customized, successful solutions to their complex business issues in all economic sectors. Rebecca’s says, “Our mission is your success.”

For over 25 years, Rebecca has contributed improved organizational value as a leader, manager, technologist, keynoter, educator, and consultant honored by organizations on four continents. She is a Ph.D. in organizational development, MBTI® Master Practitioner, a National Speakers Association Professional Member, St. Petersburg Engineering Academy Foreign Member, and Board of Directors Chairperson-Elect, Davie-Cooper City Chamber of Commerce.

Contact Information:

Rebecca Staton-Reinstein, Ph.D., President

Advantage Leadership, Inc.

320 S Flamingo Road, Suite 291, Pembroke Pines, FL 33027

Rebecca@AdvantageLeadership.com

Phone: +305-606-9312  

Web:  http://www.AdvantageLeadership.com  

Amazon Author Page: http://tinyurl.com/RSRpage

Join me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccastatonreinstein

Re-Read Saturday News
We continue our journey through Bad Blood, Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou (published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2018).  Today based on the advice of Stephen Adams we tackle chapters three, four and five. The chapters  are titled, “Apple Envy”, “Goodbye East Paly” and “Childhood Neighbors.” The chapters we cover this week paint a picture of a toxic culture full of deceit, naiveté, and vindictiveness; this will be a blockbuster movie someday. While Theranos sounds extraordinary, it isn’t hard to find similar corporate train wrecks. Bad Blood needs to be read as a cautionary tale.

Current Week:  Week 3 — Apple Envy, Goodbye East Paly and Childhood Neighbors – https://bit.ly/2zbOTeO

Week 1 – Approach and Introduction – https://bit.ly/2J1pY2t   

 

SPaMCAST 479 – Mentor or Coach, TameFlow Chapter 21a, Employee Engagement

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The Software Process and Measurement Cast 479 three columns!  The first column features a recent essay on the difference between a coach and a mentor in the form of a simple checklist. Which do you need?  Check out the other three entries in this theme on the Software Process and Measurement Cast blog.

Our second column features Steve Tendon who brings his Tame The Flow: Hyper-Productive Knowledge-Work Performance, The TameFlow Approach and Its Application to Scrum and Kanban  (buy a copy here) to the cast.  Chapter 20 and 21 are extremely important to understanding and applying the TameFlow approach, therefore, we are spending time with the author to get to the heart of the concepts.

Anchoring the cast is Jon Quigley returning with his column, Alpha and Omega of Product Development.  Jon and I discussed why employee engagement is more than an academic topic.

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A Mentor or Coach: Which Do You Need? A Checklist

Everyone should avail themselves of coaching and mentoring.  The question then is when you need a coach or a mentor.  A simple checklist will help the decision-making process, and at the same time help to make a clear distinction between what you should expect from a mentor or a coach.  The seven yes/no questions can be used to distinguish between whether you need a mentor or coach are:

 

A Simple Checklist for Choosing a Mentor

A good mentor can power up your career

Learning and growing is a requirement to excel in a career.  There are many paths to growth. Arguably many of the most successful among us work very hard and take advantage of every opportunity they can find for education, training, practice, coaching and mentoring.  Each mechanism used to acquire knowledge provides a different path to knowledge.  A mentor helps the mentee to grow and develop by transferring their experience over a relatively long period of time.  The length of time the mentee and mentor interact and the level of intimacy can generate an enormous impact on the trajectory of a person’s career. Picking the correct mentor requires effort and forethought. A simple checklist can be used to test whether the person you are considering makes sense.  All of the items in the checklist are yes/no questions; there are no in-between or sort-of answers.

 

Attributes of a Good Mentor

Which way to a good mentor?

 

A mentor is defined by the online version of Merriam-Webster as “a trusted counselor or guide.” As we noted in the article Coaching versus Mentoring, a mentor plays a fundamentally different role than a coach.  A mentor helps the mentee to grow and develop by transferring their experience over a relatively long period of time. A mentor can have an enormous impact on the trajectory of a person’s career. Even though mentors and mentees tend to have long-term relationships, those relationships will not be forever. Most professionals will have to establish relationships with several mentors over their career.  Understanding what makes a good mentor is an important piece of career knowledge.

Good mentors:

 

Coaching versus Mentoring

The difference between mentoring and coaching is slippery.

The coach is a core role in the discussion of adopting agile.  Coaching is important because it can lead it to smoothly functioning organizations, higher productivity, and profits. The perceived value of coaching has caused some practitioners and team members to confuse the concepts of coaching, mentoring and, in some cases, counseling.  Confusion leads to misapplication of techniques, mismatched expectations, and lower value.  Some of the more salient attributes of each role include:

 

Asking Questions: 7 Behaviors to Avoid

Questions, like most tools, can be used correctly or incorrectly.  A hammer used on a nail or on a screw is still a hammer; however, in most circumstances, we would debate the effectiveness of the hammer when used to insert a screw.  Questions are no different than our proverbial hammer.  Used well they can generate information or shape behavior; used incorrectly they can generate misinformation and friction. When questions are used for coaching and mentoring there are a number of poor practices that should be avoided:

 

Asking Questions: A Coach’s Super Power or Kryptonite

Asking Questions Implies Listening

As coaches, leaders, change agents and even parents, the act of asking questions can take on an almost magical power to guide and change behavior. As with any powerful tool, when the tool begins to take on magical attributes, the users of the tool begin to forget that a tool is just a tool.  At that point, to quote Ian Brown, “they just become a fool with a tool.” Questions are a useful tool for a coach because questions: