Meeting workplace challenges

New guidelines to further raise standards are set to benefit both the clients of coaches and mentors as well as practitioners themselves.

The guidelines have been issued by the European Coaching and Mentoring Council (EMCC), an independent not-for-profit organisation created specifically to further improve standards within this dynamic and youthful industry.

Members of the EMCC already subscribe to its Code of Ethics. One of the code's requirements is that coaches and mentors have regular supervision.

Julie Hay, a founding member of the EMCC and an internationally accredited supervisor, drew up the guidelines on behalf of the EMCC Standards Committee. She explained: "Membership of the EMCC is wide-ranging, from well-established organisations that already have supervision procedures in place to individual practitioners who have no previous experience of supervision or lack access to a suitably accredited supervisor.

"These guidelines have been introduced after requests for advice from these practitioners and include a comprehensive list of criteria against which to judge potential supervisors."

Unlike supervision in industry, which emphasises control and oversight by a 'boss', coaching and mentoring supervision is far more developmental and is designed to prompt the supervisee to step back and review their own work.

Julie explained: "This is to ensure their work is professional and ethical, serves as continuous professional development in helping them further develop their skills, and provides support in what can at times be a challenging occupation."

The guidelines have been designed to cater for the wide range of coaches and mentors in practice today, from full time independent coach/mentors to managers whose coaching or mentoring duties take up just a fraction of their time.

Julie Hay said: "These guidelines will also benefit clients of the coaching and mentoring industry because they are another way of ensuring the all round competence of the practitioners they use."

She added: "What we have done here that's truly ground-breaking is to stress - for the first time - to coaches and mentors who don't yet have experience of supervision, that this is a really valuable process for both themselves and their clients, and to encourage them to get started."

The new guidelines are interim and entirely non-proscriptive, and the EMCC hopes they will evolve through consultation with other coaching and mentoring organisations as the industry itself matures and moves forward. They can be viewed at the EMCC website: www.emccouncil.org

- The EMCC's Standards Project is expected to make a major contribution to the debate on the future of the industry. Its results are set to be announced later this Spring. More news coming soon...

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