5 Ways You Can Use Coaching and Mentoring in Your Nonprofit's Talent Development Strategy
A good coach or mentor can be powerful. That’s why on today’s episode, I’m sharing five ways you can use coaching and mentoring in your nonprofit’s talent development strategy.
There are so many benefits to coaching and mentoring and these tools can be used in a variety of ways. While this isn’t an exhaustive list, it’s a good place to start.
Listen to the episode or scroll down to read the blog post ↓
Key Points:
00:58 The power of a good coach or mentor
02:54 Five ways you can use coaching and mentoring in your nonprofit’s talent development strategy
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5 Ways You Can Use Coaching and Mentoring in Your Nonprofit's Talent Development Strategy
What is the power of a good coach or mentor?
Maybe you've had one. Take a moment to think about what made that experience so good.
I do CrossFit and while all the coaches are great, I want to analyze one in particular. What does this one coach do to be such a good coach?
He's a welcoming face. When we walk into the gym, he calls everyone by name.
He sets the energy for the class and we all lean into that energy.
He explains the movements, why something is the way it is, what muscle group it's working, or why you shouldn't do it a different way if you don't want to get hurt. And we listen.
He demos the movements and guides us through step by step.
He watches us and gives us feedback to improve. And we practice.
He pushes us to go farther, lift heavier, and go faster. He supports us wherever we are, but also sets high expectations, pushing us just a little bit more. And we want to meet those expectations.
It's personal. It's practical. And it's powerful.
Do you have your good coaching experience in mind?
Maybe it was at work?
Maybe it was on a team?
Maybe it was your kid's coach?
Maybe you were the coach?
Here's what I know - we can take those lessons, and we can apply them in L&D.
That's why in this blog post, I want to share five ways you can use coaching and mentoring in your nonprofit’s talent development strategy:
There are so many benefits to coaching and mentoring and these tools can be used in a variety of ways. This isn't an exhaustive list by any means, but it's a good start.
And if you need to “sell” anyone in your organization on using coaches or mentors, I'm sure you can find a point or two from this episode to emphasize in those conversations.
1) Use Mentor Programs to Improve Onboarding at Your Nonprofit
A coach or mentor can be someone inside or outside of your organization. But if you're using someone inside of your organization, that can be a huge asset when you think about onboarding staff to your organization, to a new role, or to a new team.
That coach or mentor can help you improve the onboarding process because they have institutional knowledge:
They can share cultural norms.
They can answer questions.
They can share organizational knowledge.
They can help create a smooth transition to your organization or even inside of your organization to a new team or a role.
2) Enhance Skill Building with Wrap Around Coaching or Mentoring
A coach or mentor, from inside or outside of your organization, can also be used to enhance skill building. They can help transfer skills from training to practice.
We know that training is often not the solution, but part of a solution. And so if we want to increase behavior change and see those skills being built we need things beyond just a training.
A coach or mentor is a great way to help your learners, your staff, or whoever it is that you're training, transfer those skills from training into practice and it's a great wrap around support that you can provide.
That coach or mentor can support skill building closer to the flow of work. And so because of that, the skills are:
easier to learn,
easier to practice,
and easier to get immediate feedback on, so that they can continue to grow that skill set.
Ultimately, that's going to result in improved performance.
3) Support Career Development with a Coach or Mentor
A coach or mentor can also help support career planning.
When you're working with a coach or a mentor, it opens up the opportunity for you to reflect on:
What you like.
What you don't like.
Where you want to go in your career.
What skills you are bringing with you.
What skills you might still need to develop.
That intentional time of working with a coach or mentor can really support the career planning process. It helps that individual think about what's next and what they need to do to get there.
It’s also a way to provide an inside look at what other roles are like. Think about mentorship, you could pair people together and now this person who is thinking about this other role in the future can get an inside look at what that role is like.
4) Use a Coach or Mentor for Better Change Management
A coach or mentor can also provide change support.
Nonprofits go through a ton of change all the time. It's a constant. And we often need a little bit of support as we're going through the change process.
We need extra communication, we need to know what's happening and how it's happening. And we need time to process what's happening.
A coach or a mentor can help with that change process by providing that communication, providing that outlet so that you can process what's happening.
A coach or mentor can also help with motivation and figuring out what that underlying motivation is that’s going to help you get through that change process.
Going back to skill building, a lot of times an organizational change is also going to result in some sort of behavior change. And so building new skills is an important part of that change process. And that coach or mentor can support that skill building process, in the name of a change as well.
5) Promote Well-Being as Part of Your People Strategy
Finally, a coach or mentor is a great way to promote well-being in your organization.
When you provide someone with a coach or a mentor, you're really providing them with a trusted adviser, someone that they can build that trusting relationship with.
If it's somebody inside your organization, that's a huge benefit, because they're building a trusting relationship with people inside the organization. That's going to take your organization really far. People want to have friends and relationships at work.
If that coach or mentor is outside the organization, then you're able to give them that outside perspective, which can be nice when you think about well-being.
Is it just me?
Is it just my organization?
Is there something else going on here?
That coach or mentor can help them work through that process.
I have some other episodes on well-being at work if you want to check those out:
Episode 80: How to Add Well-Being to Your People Strategy with Dave Allman
Episode 67: A Well-Being Approach to Leadership Development
Episode 38: Dealing with Corporate Burnout? One Easy Way to Manage Stress as a Nonprofit Leader with Jessie Pagliari
Episode 30: Why Well-Being Is The Secret Sauce to Change Management with Mandy Sharp Eizinger
I'm a big believer in coaching and mentoring and using that inside of your nonprofit's talent development strategy because there are so many benefits. There are so many different ways that you can use a coach or a mentor that benefit both your organization and your staff, volunteers, or whoever it is that your audience is.
As leaders within the L&D function, we really have to think beyond just training. We have to think about wraparound support and other things that we can provide, like coaching and mentoring, because at the end of the day, we do want to create behavior change. We want to have that impact within our nonprofit.
To hear the full conversation I had on the Learning for Good Podcast, scroll all the way up and tune into episode 90.
Apply what you learn.
Grab this free resource from the Learning for Good Playbook!
The Nonprofit Learning and Development Collective
Helping to change the world for good is hard enough as it is. Finding good support shouldn’t be difficult, too.
I know what it feels like to want someone to bounce ideas off of and to learn from, someone who really understands you and your work.
Nonprofit L&D leaders have been overlooked for too long. You need a place where you can meet like-minded talent development pros, learn from industry leaders and tech vendors, and find the support you need to make a real impact.
Thankfully, great nonprofit support is no longer hard to find or financially inaccessible.
Welcome to the Nonprofit Learning and Development Collective – the only community specifically for nonprofit talent development professionals.
When you join this community, you will walk away with a new, diverse, and powerful network – and a sounding board for your staff development needs.
So if you're ready to exchange ideas and collaborate with your peers, come join the Nonprofit L&D Collective.
