Julie’s Ideas Blog 37: Stages of a developmental alliance

In my last blog I wrote that I am now producing a second edition of my 1995 book about transformational mentoring, and extending it to apply to developmental coaching. I have therefore been looking back at the various ways I have classified the stages of mentoring and coaching. 

For mentoring (Hay, 1995), I previously played with starting each stage with the letter A so that I had the stages I listed in Blog 19: alliance, assessment, analysis, alternatives, action, autonomy, and appraisal. For coaching (Hay, 2007) I used the letter S and had: starting off, setting up, stocktaking, strategising, and saying goodbye, together with an overarching element of supervision and an underpinning element of self-awareness.
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I have now combined these, and realise that I can find more words that start with the letter A so in the new book the stages for either will (probably – unless I have some more ideas before then) be:

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• Anticipation – how do the mentor or coach, and mentee or coachee, perceive the nature of what they are going to be engaging in and what information do they already have about each other and the nature of the process?
• Alliance – how do they create the relationship between them, how do they establish rapport with each other, how do they start getting to know each other and what they will be doing together?
• Agreement – I am referring here to the need to establish a clear contract, that will include the procedural or administrative level (times of meeting, fees, etc), the professional level in terms of what the practitioner is providing and what that requires of the client, and, most importantly, addressing the psychological level that might otherwise lead to unwitting sabotage of the process (e.g. client expecting the practitioner to be solving problems for them).
• Assessment – a kind of stocktaking – what is the client’s situation, what are their strengths and weaknesses, are there any stakeholders whose perceptions, requirements, opinions, etc, should appropriately be taken into account (e.g. employers, family)?
• Analysis – what patterns are there now that the assessment has been completed, what typically happens to the client, how do they typically interact with others and/or with their work, are there typical patterns of how things go well and how things go wrong?
• Alternatives – what options does the client have, encouraging the client to stay as open-minded as possible and consider as wide a range of options as possible – they can reject any that are truly unworkable at the next stage.
• Appraisal – now the client can consider the various alternatives with a view to choosing the best options – what are the pros and cons of each, how might they overcome any deficiencies or pitfalls, might they need to acquire additional skills or resources?
• Action planning – mapping out what they are going to need to do to implement their chosen option(s), producing a detailed action plan that will include taking into account the likely reactions of others as well as the more obvious activity planning.
• Application – the stage during which the client will implement their action plan – during which time they may or may not be staying in contact with their mentor or coach.  There may of course be a need to revisit some of the earlier stages if it becomes evident that aspects have been overlooked.
• Achievement – a stage of celebration of what the client has achieved or accomplished.
• Adieu, Adios, Au revoir - saying goodbye – perhaps temporarily if there might be more to come in the future.

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​Running alongside all of the above stages should be: 
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• Auditing – by which I mean continual self-reflection and regular professional super-vision.  I use the hyphen to indicate that the aim of super-vision is for the supervisee to be facilitated so that they can create their own super-vision, or meta-perspective, of their own professional practice. I emphasise this because ‘supervision’ is often taken to mean that the supervisor is like a manager who is making sure that the practitioner is doing what they should be doing. This is not possible unless the supervisor is there watching what happens between the practitioner and the client, which would of course completely change the dynamic.

​References

Hay, Julie (1995) Transformational Mentoring: Creating Developmental Alliances for Changing Organizational Cultures Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill
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Hay, Julie (2007) Reflective Practice and Supervision for Coaches Maidenhead: Open University Press
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© 2018 Julie Hay​
 
​Julie is a fan of open access publishing so feel free to reproduce any of these blogs as long as you still attribute it to her.
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If you’re interested in learning more TA, Julie runs regular workshops and webinars –  we currently have an offer of a free place on one of our webinars. You can use these toward your CPD and as credit hours in pursuing professional TA qualification