Your Career

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Adopting a few coaching techniques can make your mentoring both better and less time-consuming

Academics are increasingly aware of the value of faculty and leadership coaching, yet they still mostly rely on private, off-campus providers. A trained and credentialed professional coach can offer you things you won’t often get from your mentors, including meticulous attention tailored to your needs, strict confidentiality, and structure and accountability for goal setting. But what if academics learned how to do some of that coaching themselves?

In fact, with a modest investment of time and effort, you could learn some of those coaching techniques and use them to help your own mentees. That wouldn’t require an extended formal training program, either. A two-hour workshop can be enough to teach you how to execute a basic coaching conversation, and the more you practice these new skills, the better you’ll get. If you’re motivated to up your game as an academic mentor, five coaching behaviors can get you started.

Continue reading: “How to Mentor Like a Coach,” by Maria LaMonaca Wisdom

Send questions or comments to Denise Magner, an editor at The Chronicle, at denise.magner@chronicle.com.

What we’re reading

Here’s more on career issues and trends from around the web. See something we should include? Let me know.

• In an essay in The Atlantic, Alan Lightman argues that “the dark ages are back” and calls for a stronger public defense of academic freedom.
• In The Wall Street Journal, a look at companies that laid off too many people and are now recruiting ex-employees to come back to work.
• A report in the Harvard Business Review on how, despite all the predictions about the demise of middle-management jobs, they have actually increased in number.