Training Managers to Excel
at Coaching and Mentoring

Bring your coaching and mentoring program in house.

Increasingly companies expect their executives, managers, and frontline supervisors to lead through coaching and mentoring. For many this is a tall order.

Good leaders — even great ones — are not necessarily great coaches. They must master the artistry of being a coach or mentor.

To that end SLDI offers two special services for managers and leaders. First, we provide training in basic coaching and mentoring skills. Participants in the course learn how to incorporate these capabilities into day-to-day interaction with their team.

The second service is for organizations wanting to establish a structured in-house mentoring program or to strengthen an existing one. This service has two prongs.

One is a training course which show you how to set up and administer a formal mentoring system. The second prong is a consulting engagement which helps you put the program together and launch it. (Our training package and our consulting package can be purchased separately or as a unit.)

Courses on Coaching and Mentoring

The following training courses anchor our class offerings for on building greater mentoring strength within your organization. (Click on any item for an expanded description.)

►  Coaching and Mentoring Skills for Executives

Learning to lead as a coach or mentor is a challenging transition for many people, people with otherwise successful careers.

  • As successful executives and managers, they have built their identity around solving problems and providing answers. Now, as coaches and mentors, their job is to ask probing questions, not offer brilliant solutions.
  • Accustomed to being in a "directing" role, they must now accommodate themselves to a facilitating role. They are guiding others through a process of self-discovery.
  • Having been bottom-line oriented, they must now become "holistically" oriented in order to be effective as coaches and mentors.
  • Trained to monitor organizational behavior, they must now become knowledgeable enough of personal psychology that they can understand the "inner workings" of people they coach and mentor.

This course gives them baseline skills to accelerate this transition and make it smoother.

►  Create Your Own Internal Mentoring Program

For a dozen years we have helped companies put together a formal in-house mentoring program. From that experience we have garnered the best practices which we have seen and have packaged them in this course.

At the end of this course your leadership team will have a clear roadmap for pulling together the many elements of a strong mentoring program.

This course integrates smoothly with our consulting services on starting a mentoring program. But the course is also designed to stand alone, even if you choose to forego our consulting service.

The Facilitator for These Trainings

Both of these courses are taught and facilitated by Dr. Mike Armour, SLDI's founder and managing principal. He is an ideal coach's coach. Not only has he coached over 700 executives, managers, and entrepreneurs himself, he has also taught MBA courses on coaching and mentoring skills. In fact,these trainings derive much of their material and many of their exercises from his MBA presentations.

Moreover, Dr. Mike excels at teaching people how to build effective rapport and to maintain the trust of those they mentor. And equally important, he is an experienced specialist in ethics, with the insights to help coaches and mentors work through difficult ethical issues which often arise in their work.

Consulting Package for Setting Up Your Mentor Development Program

Today companies expect executives to be coaches and mentors for their employees

When establishing a structured mentoring program, most companies benefit from drawing on consultants like SLDI who have extensive experience in putting such programs together. Among other things, our consulting assistance helps your organization

  • define the scope of your mentoring program
  • design your program and its implementation plan
  • set up reports and procedures for monitoring your program
  • screen potential candidates for coach and mentor training
  • structure the promotional effort which should precede the launch of the program
  • facilitate pairings of mentors and mentees
  • put together kick-off and wrap-up events for mentoring cycles
  • conduct periodic refresher training for manager-coaches and manager-mentors
  • provide occasional one-on-one coaching to help members of the team perfect their skills