CMI 507 Assignment Example

Coaching and mentoring are effective ways to build skills, knowledge, and potential in people as part of an organisation’s learning and development plan.

Ardsley Metropolitan Borough Council, a unitary local authority in the North of England employing 4,100 staff across adult social care, children’s services, environment and regulatory services, and corporate functions. The author is Head of Organisational Development. Task 2b draws on a workplace mentoring relationship rather than the supplied scenario, as the brief permits. Organisational detail is illustrative and anonymised.

Task 1a: Account examining similarities and differences between coaching and mentoring

AC 1.1 Examine THREE similarities and THREE differences between coaching and mentoring

Similarity one: each rests on a relationship the learner has consented to. Neither works when imposed. Ardsley’s first attempt at a corporate mentoring scheme assigned mentors to a cohort of aspiring managers without asking them, and roughly half the pairings had lapsed within four months. Consent is not a courtesy in either discipline; it is a functional requirement, because the learner controls whether anything of substance is said.

Similarity two: the practitioner works through enquiry rather than instruction, and the learner owns the outcome. Whether the conversation concerns a specific skill or a whole career, the mechanism is the same. Questions are asked, understanding develops, and the decision remains with the person who has to live with it. Examining why this matters in a local authority, a workforce accustomed to statutory guidance and prescribed process finds the shift to being asked rather than told genuinely unfamiliar, and both disciplines meet the same initial resistance.

Similarity three: both require an explicit contract and both are confidential. Purpose, frequency, duration, boundaries and the terms on which the relationship ends are agreed at the outset in either case, and in both the learner must be confident that what is said is not fed back into appraisal or promotion.

Difference one: what the practitioner brings. A mentor contributes accumulated experience and sector knowledge, so the pairing depends on the mentor having travelled a comparable path. A coach contributes process expertise, and subject knowledge is optional and occasionally a hindrance. Examining the practical effect at Ardsley, mentors for social work team managers must have practised social work, whereas the authority’s coaches work across every directorate irrespective of professional background.

Difference two: scope and duration. Coaching addresses a defined objective within an agreed number of sessions and concludes when the objective is met or abandoned. Mentoring is open in scope, covering career, professional identity and navigation of the organisation, and typically runs for a year or longer. Examining the implication for programme design, coaching can be commissioned and closed while mentoring requires deliberate endings, or relationships persist long past their usefulness.

Difference three: the legitimacy of advice and advocacy. A mentor may properly say what they would do, describe what happened when they faced something similar, and use their standing to open a door for the mentee. A coach doing any of these has left coaching behind. Examining the risk this creates in practice, the drift runs one way: managers trained as coaches slide towards advising, because their expertise makes advice easy and the questioner’s discipline is effortful.

Task 1b: Briefing paper on the purpose of coaching and mentoring for individuals, teams and organisations

AC 1.2 Evaluate the purpose of coaching and mentoring for individuals, teams and the organisation

For individuals. Coaching serves the purpose of closing a defined capability gap and raising self-awareness, most commonly at Ardsley for practitioners newly promoted into management who have never held authority over former peers. Mentoring serves a broader purpose of career development and organisational understanding, which in a large authority is substantial, since progression depends on knowing how the organisation actually works. Both also serve a wellbeing purpose in services where the work is emotionally demanding, providing a reflective space outside the line. Evaluating this last purpose, it is real but should not be allowed to substitute for clinical supervision or occupational health provision, and the boundary needs stating.

For teams. Team coaching addresses collective functioning: shared purpose, decision-making, and how disagreement is handled. Action learning sets serve a related purpose, developing individuals through structured collective problem-solving on live issues. Evaluating these against individual provision, team-level work is the better fit where the problem is how a group operates rather than how its members perform, and Ardsley’s experience is that coaching individual managers out of a dysfunctional team achieves little.

For the organisation. Purposes include succession pipeline development against an ageing workforce, transfer of tacit professional judgement from experienced practitioners, culture change towards enquiry rather than direction, and cost-effective development within constrained budgets. Evaluating these, tacit knowledge transfer carries the strongest case in an authority where a substantial proportion of senior practitioners will retire within five years.

Reach and equity of access. A further organisational purpose concerns who gets developed at all. Ardsley funds external coaching only for chief officers, so internal provision is the sole route for the roughly 400 managers below that tier. Evaluating this, internal delivery is what makes development available to frontline team managers in social care and environmental services, who are both the largest management population and the group with the highest turnover. The compromise is variable practitioner quality, which is the case for the supervision arrangements recommended at AC 2.3.

A caution about what coaching cannot carry. Evaluating the purposes together, authorities regularly load onto coaching burdens it will not bear. It does not substitute for competent line management, and providing coaches to staff whose managers never hold developmental conversations relocates the cost without touching the cause. Neither is it a therapeutic service: a participant in genuine distress needs occupational health or counselling, and a coach who continues anyway is working beyond their competence.

Evaluative conclusion. The three levels do not automatically reinforce one another. Individuals can be developed extensively while organisational capability is unchanged, because the structures and decision rights they return to have not moved. The organisational purpose is only served where developed capability can actually be exercised.

Task 2a: Account examining the use of coaching and mentoring models in the workplace

AC 2.1 Examine models used for coaching and mentoring individuals and teams in the workplace

The STEPPPA model for coaching individuals. McLeod’s model works through Subject, establishing the topic; Target objective, defining what is wanted; Emotion, surfacing the feelings attached to the issue; Perception and target reframe, testing whether the objective still holds once emotion is understood; Plan; Pace, checking the plan is realistic within the coachee’s capacity; and Adapt or act. Examining its distinctive feature, the explicit treatment of emotion before planning separates it from goal-focused models, which assume a coachee who can state a rational objective. In social care management, where the presenting issue frequently carries considerable emotional weight, this ordering matters. Its limitation is length, since working the full sequence needs more than a standard hour, and coaches who compress it lose the element that makes it distinctive.

Clutterbuck’s phases of a mentoring relationship. The model describes five phases: building rapport, establishing whether the parties can work together; setting direction, agreeing goals; making progress, the productive working period; winding down, as the mentee’s needs are met; and moving on, in which the relationship ends or converts to friendship. Examining its practical value, the model treats rapport building as a distinct phase with its own outcome, a decision on whether to proceed, which legitimises ending early. Its limitation is that scheme designers often impose a fixed duration that ignores where a given pair actually is.

Action learning sets for team and peer development. Originating with Revans, an action learning set is a small standing group in which each member brings a real problem, the group questions rather than advises, and the member commits to action before the next meeting. Examining its use at Ardsley, sets have been used with cohorts of new team managers across directorates, and the value is twofold: members develop questioning discipline by practising it, and the cross-directorate composition breaks down service silos. Its limitation is that a set requires skilled facilitation to prevent it collapsing into mutual advice-giving, which is its most common failure.

Task 2b: Plan to deliver mentoring to an individual in response to an identified business need

AC 2.2 Develop a plan to deliver mentoring to an individual in response to an identified business need

The business needs. A senior social work practitioner has been appointed as a Team Manager in children’s services following an eighteen-month vacancy covered by agency management. The service carries a workforce stability risk: agency turnover has been high, the team has had four managers in three years, and the authority’s improvement plan requires stable permanent leadership. The mentee has strong practice credibility and no management experience. Two development areas are identified: establishing authority with former peers while sustaining case quality, and working with partner agencies in health, education and police whose cooperation the team depends on.

Design decisions and rationale. Mentoring rather than coaching is appropriate because the mentee needs the mentor’s knowledge of how the authority and its partnerships operate, and needs introductions. The mentor is a Head of Service from a different directorate, deliberately outside children’s services, so that nothing discussed can bear on the mentee’s appraisal or on case decisions. Ten sessions run over twelve months, weighted towards the first six. Following Clutterbuck, session one is rapport building with an explicit decision point at its close, and the final session is a planned ending rather than a lapse.

Outline programme.

Session	Focus	Intended outcome
1	Rapport building; contracting; decision to proceed	Signed agreement; confidentiality boundaries clear
2	Setting direction: development goals against the two needs	Three goals agreed with success measures
3	Authority and former peers: role transition	Approach agreed for two specific relationships
4	Sustaining case quality: supervision practice	Supervision structure in place for the team
5	Partnership landscape: who matters and why	Stakeholder map; two priority relationships identified
6	Mid-point review against goals	Documented review; remaining sessions adjusted
7	Escalation and challenge with partner agencies	Rehearsed approach to a live disagreement
8	Managing upwards and using the improvement plan	Clear line of sight from team to corporate priority
9	Winding down: consolidating, reducing dependence	Mentee leading the agenda
10	Moving on: closure and future contact	Learning summary; ending agreed

Session record template. A single sheet per meeting captures who was present and when, what the pair set out to cover, which of the previously agreed actions had been carried out, anything the mentee recognised or worked out during the discussion, what they undertake to do before meeting again, when that will be, and confirmation from both parties.

Evaluation. Reviewed at sessions six and ten against the two identified needs, drawing on the mentee’s self-assessment, team stability indicators including agency usage and turnover, supervision compliance, and structured feedback from two partner agency contacts. Defining these measures at session two rather than at the end is what makes closure a judgement rather than an expiry date.

Task 2c: Account recommending a coaching process

AC 2.3 Recommend a coaching process to support an individual’s development needs in the workplace

The process recommended below is for Ardsley’s internal coaching pool, in which trained managers coach colleagues from other services.

Stage one: screen the request. The recommendation begins here because coaching is routinely proposed for problems it cannot address. A knowledge gap needs training; a capacity problem needs workload intervention; a conduct issue needs a management process; ill health needs occupational health. Coaching fits where capability exists and application is the difficulty.

Stage two: match with a coachee veto. Matching is done by development need, excluding anyone in the coachee’s management line or involved in their appraisal. The recommendation that the coachee may decline without giving a reason is deliberate, since an imposed pairing rarely recovers and the alternative wastes both parties’ time.

Stage three: contract on three sides. Coach, coachee and the coachee’s manager agree the focus and, explicitly, what the manager will and will not learn. Recommending this addresses the most frequent cause of failure in internal schemes, which is a sponsoring manager who expects progress updates that were never agreed.

Stage four: define the starting point and what success looks like. The coachee names the behaviours they intend to change and how they and others would recognise the change. Recommending this before session one is what makes the evaluation at stage seven possible.

Stage five: run sessions to a consistent structure. Six one-hour sessions across four to six months, each following the STEPPPA sequence examined at AC 2.1, with agreed action between sessions. The recommendation to use a single structure across the pool is about consistency of quality: coaches vary, and a shared structure narrows the variation.

Stage six: review at the mid-point. At session three, progress is assessed against stage four and the remaining sessions are adjusted. The recommendation includes an explicit option to stop, because a relationship that is not producing anything should end rather than run its full allocation.

Stage seven: close and evaluate. A final session consolidating learning, then evaluation against the stage four definition using the coachee’s own reflection and their manager’s observation of what has changed.

Stage eight: supervise the coaches. Group supervision every six weeks. Recommending this as part of the process rather than an optional extra reflects that internal coaches hear things that trouble them, and need somewhere to take that which is not their line manager.

Task 3a: Account analysing the skills and competencies of an effective coach and mentor

AC 3.1 Analyse the skills and competencies of an effective coach and mentor

A serviceable structure comes from the European Mentoring and Coaching Council, whose framework runs across eight areas: knowing oneself, staying committed to one’s own development, contracting well, forming the working relationship, opening up insight and learning, keeping an orientation to outcomes and action, and drawing appropriately on models and techniques.

Skills common to both. Listening that attends to what is avoided as well as what is said. Questioning that is genuinely open rather than advice in disguise. Rapid establishment of rapport, particularly across professional boundaries where suspicion of another directorate is common. Tolerance of silence, which is the most frequently missing skill, since inexperienced practitioners rescue pauses the other person needed. Specific behavioural feedback. Contracting and boundary maintenance.

Competencies particular to coaching. Analysing what distinguishes the coach, the central discipline is withholding a solution while holding one, which experienced managers find harder than any technique. A coach also needs the diagnostic judgement to recognise an issue outside coaching’s scope, and enough self-awareness to notice when their own reaction is steering the conversation.

Competencies particular to mentoring. Relevant credible experience; the judgement to know when telling one’s own story helps and when it imposes one’s own route on someone else; organisational knowledge; and readiness to advocate. Analysing the paradox, the mentor’s greatest asset is also the source of their greatest risk.

Underlying attributes. Emotional intelligence, ethical judgement, and a commitment to their own continuing development through supervision. Analysing how these relate to skills, technique can be taught in days whereas attributes develop over years, which means selection of internal practitioners matters more than the training given to them.

Where Ardsley’s practitioners most often fall short. Three weaknesses recur. Contracting is treated as paperwork to be completed before the real conversation begins, and pairs that hurry it spend later sessions arguing about boundaries that should have been settled at the outset. Tolerating a participant’s discomfort is the second: the impulse to make someone feel better closes down exactly the exploration that was becoming productive. The third is ending, since practitioners who have built something valuable are reluctant to conclude it, and relationships continue long past the point at which either party is gaining anything. Analysing the pattern, none of these is a knowledge gap, which is why repeating the training changes nothing and supervision changes a great deal.

Task 3b: Account assessing approaches for responding to challenges in delivery

AC 3.2 Assess approaches for responding to TWO challenges faced in the delivery of coaching and mentoring

Challenge one: misuse of approach, where the practitioner tells rather than supports. This is the most prevalent quality failure in internal schemes. A manager trained to coach reverts to advising, the session becomes a briefing, and the coachee leaves with the coach’s solution rather than their own. The coachee frequently rates the session highly, which is why the problem persists undetected.

Assessing the approaches available, training alone is a weak remedy because the behaviour is not caused by ignorance. Practitioners know they should ask rather than tell, and revert under time pressure or when the answer seems obvious. More effective approaches address the conditions. Supervision in which practitioners bring recordings or detailed accounts of sessions surfaces the drift, because it is visible to an observer and invisible to the person doing it. Peer observation, with two coaches sitting in on one another’s practice by consent, has similar effect at lower cost.

Assessing structural approaches, requiring a consistent session structure such as the STEPPPA sequence constrains drift, since a practitioner following an agreed sequence cannot skip to their own conclusion without departing visibly from it. Selecting practitioners for disposition rather than seniority also helps: the most technically expert manager is often the least able to withhold an answer.

Assessing detection, coachee feedback should ask what the coachee decided rather than whether the session was useful, since the second question will not reveal the problem and the first will.

Challenge two: organisational barriers. These include workload preventing attendance, managers declining to release staff, absence of private space, no budget for practitioner time, and a prevailing culture in which asking for coaching is read as an admission of difficulty.

Assessing the approaches, the first is diagnostic honesty about which barrier actually applies, since the responses differ entirely. Where the barrier is release, senior sponsorship converting participation from a discretionary favour into an expectation is the effective lever, supported by building the time into service plans rather than assuming it can be absorbed. Where the barrier is physical, the answer is practical: bookable confidential space and acceptance of remote sessions, which at Ardsley increased completion rates markedly among staff based in area offices.

Where the barrier is cultural, assessing the options, communication alone will not shift a belief that coaching signals weakness. What works is visible participation by senior figures who describe what they used it for, and framing provision around transition points such as promotion, where needing support is self-evidently normal.

Assessing the limits of all these approaches, some organisational barriers are genuine resource constraints rather than attitudes, and a scheme that persists in a service which cannot release anyone will simply fail there. Recognising this and concentrating provision where it can be used is a better response than uniform rollout and uniform disappointment.

Task 3c: Account discussing strategies to evaluate impact

AC 3.3 Discuss ONE individual and ONE organisational strategy to evaluate the impact of coaching and mentoring

Individual strategy: personal reflection. The participant maintains a structured reflective record through the relationship, capturing what they intended, what they tried, what happened and what they concluded, reviewed formally at the mid-point and at closure.

Discussing its application, the strategy’s strength is that it captures the internal shifts no external measure detects. Much of what coaching changes is how a person construes a situation, and a team manager who has stopped interpreting every challenge from a partner agency as an attack has changed something real that has no behavioural checklist records. Structured reflection also has a second effect: the act of reflecting is itself developmental, so the evaluation method contributes to the outcome it measures. At Ardsley this is supported by a simple prompt set to prevent the record becoming a diary of events.

Discussing its limitations honestly, the evidence is entirely self-reported by a participant with an interest in the process having been worthwhile, which makes it vulnerable to justification bias. It is not comparable between individuals, so it cannot be aggregated. Reflective quality also varies enormously, and participants who find writing difficult produce thin records that reflect their writing rather than their learning, which raises an equity concern. The strategy evidences meaning rather than magnitude and should be presented as such.

Organisational strategy: succession planning. Impact is evaluated by examining whether the coaching and mentoring provision is producing people who are ready for, and who actually move into, the roles the organisation needs to fill, tracked through succession data over several years.

Discussing its application at Ardsley, this is the most strategically relevant available measure, because the authority’s stated reason for investing is an ageing senior workforce and a thin internal pipeline. Concrete indicators are the proportion of senior appointments filled internally, the proportion of participants appearing as ready-now or ready-soon successors, time to fill senior vacancies, and agency management usage. These are held already, which makes the strategy inexpensive.

Discussing its limitations, the lag is severe: succession outcomes take three to five years, so the strategy cannot inform decisions in the current cycle and must be paired with something faster. Attribution is weak, since internal appointment rates respond to labour market conditions and restructuring at least as much as to development provision. There is also a perverse incentive, in that a scheme evaluated on progression may quietly concentrate on the most promotable participants and neglect those whose development need is greater but whose promotion is unlikely.

Discussion of the two together. They fail in opposite directions and are therefore complementary. Reflection is immediate, rich and unverifiable; succession data is objective, organisationally meaningful and arrives years late. Used together they cover both the question of whether individuals changed and the question of whether the authority got what it invested for.

Task 3d: Account assessing approaches to sustain results

AC 3.4 Assess approaches to ensure that coaching and mentoring programmes continue to deliver results

Named ownership with executive sponsorship. A programme lead, a steering group including participants, and reporting into the corporate leadership team. Assessing this, schemes decline when ownership becomes diffuse, and the recurring pattern in local government is a scheme launched by an enthusiastic sponsor that fades when that individual moves on.

Maintaining practitioner supply and capability. Continuous recruitment and training against known attrition, plus continuing development for existing practitioners. Assessing the common failure, most schemes train one cohort and never repeat it, so the pool shrinks and its practice ages.

Supervision as the quality mechanism. Regular group supervision, which as assessed at AC 3.2 is also the principal defence against practitioners drifting into advice-giving. Assessing its secondary benefit, supervision sustains practitioner motivation, which matters because mentors contribute time they are not paid for.

Actively generating and shaping demand. Identifying candidates rather than waiting for applications. Assessing why this matters, self-selection favours the confident and the already-networked, so a scheme that only responds to volunteers will systematically under-reach the groups the authority most needs to develop.

Evaluating on a cycle and acting visibly on what is found. Assessing this, evaluation that generates a report and no change is among the more reliable predictors of decline, because participants notice.

Embedding in the authority’s core people processes. Linking provision to appraisal, the leadership development framework and succession planning, so it forms part of how Ardsley develops people rather than sitting alongside it. Assessing the six approaches comparatively, embedding is the most decisive, because a scheme that remains a separate initiative depends on discretionary goodwill, and discretionary goodwill is the first thing lost when budgets are set.

References

Barends, E., Rousseau, D. and Janssen, B. (2023) People managers: an evidence review. Scientific summary. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Buchanan, D.A. and Huczynski, A.A. (2023) Organizational behaviour. 11th edn. Harlow: Pearson.

Capezio, A., Barends, E., Rousseau, D. and Wietrak, E. (2023) Psychological safety: an evidence review. Scientific summary. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (2025) CIPD Good Work Index 2025: survey report. London: CIPD.

Chartered Management Institute (2023) Taking responsibility: why UK plc needs better managers. London: CMI.

Clutterbuck, D. (2014) Everyone needs a mentor: fostering talent in your organisation. 5th edn. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

European Mentoring and Coaching Council (2021) EMCC Global competence framework v2. Brussels: EMCC Global.

McLeod, A. (2003) Performance coaching: the handbook for managers, HR professionals and coaches. Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing.

Mullins, L.J. (2022) Management and organisational behaviour. 12th edn. Harlow: Pearson.

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