The Difference Between Coaching and Mentoring

The difference between coaching and mentoring is quite marked, although many confuse the two. I am regularly asked by leaders who are convinced they need coaching when, after further discussion, it's clear that mentoring is the best route or vice versa. In many cases, people will engage with both for very different reasons and desired outcomes.

So, to put your mind at rest and ensure you choose the right approach and development support for you at this point in your career, we have explored both and outlined the potential benefits and their value.

However, before we begin, we should say that when we refer to coaching, we're referring to executive coaching in a professional context instead of life or any other niche coaching area.

Focus

Coaching and mentoring focus on different things; understanding this distinction is critical to your professional growth. This knowledge empowers you to choose the right approach for your career development at the right time.  

Coaching

Coaching is a confidential developmental relationship tailored to your needs and context. It lets you draw on and make the most of your experience, skills, and resources. Coaching is solution-focused and strength-based. At its heart is the understanding that the best answers lie within you.

Coaching has a particular focus chosen by you, the coachee. Executive Coaching focuses on your professional development and helps you succeed in an area of professional development or growth or in overcoming a particular challenge.

From the outset, you and your coach will agree on defined parameters around how you'll work, how and when you will meet the desired outcomes and the difference you would like to see at the end of your coaching engagement.

It is essential to recognise that coaching is never a straight journey from A to Z. It is a journey of self-discovery and learning. A good coach will help you understand yourself, your drivers, and your patterns on a deeper level and explore these with you. Coaching will help you see alternative perspectives and options you would be unlikely to discover on your own.

Coaching is an exciting, challenging, rewarding journey and an investment for life!

The length of a coaching engagement depends on several factors, including the level of change you want to achieve and the complexity of your environment.

Mentoring

Mentoring varies and can focus on a particular area in which you want to learn from an expert in this field, developing a broader relationship with someone who has been on a similar career/business journey and has effectively been there and got the t-shirt.

The mentee benefits from the mentor's experience, which they can apply to their own journey. The knowledge imparted will help the mentee make more informed decisions about their future. Mentoring can last from 1 to 2 sessions on a particular topic to an ongoing, longer relationship.

The key to mentoring is looking for someone you respect in their professional field, an area you want to develop in, and being very specific about what you want to learn about and gain from their experience.  

It is unlikely that you will take an identical approach to your mentor. However, their experience and knowledge will be rich enough for you to consider how to use this in your current situation best.

Also Read 

• 5 Key Benefits of Executive Leadership Coaching
• Understanding the Role of CEO

Relationships

The relationships are very different in a coaching scenario compared with a mentoring situation.

Coaching

Coaching is a more formal, professional process that an organisation, as a sponsor or an individual being coached, can initiate in response to a specific area of professional growth and development or a particular challenge.

Clear objectives will be agreed upon at the outset of a coaching relationship around professional development, which will benefit from a more structured approach.

The coach can be someone internal; this can be useful for progressing on a specific career path within an organisation. However, it can limit what the coachee will want to share with an internal coach and how deep they will be willing to go.

An external provider would be more the norm for executive coaching with executive-level coaches, given that executives often work with ambiguous and changing situations and the complexity of the system within which they work, including multiple stakeholder relationships.

Your coach doesn't need to have experience in your industry, but they will have been professionally trained, ideally accredited as professional coaches, and experienced in a range of development tools.  

Mentoring

As mentioned, a mentoring relationship can be a more informal arrangement. Very often, it is a more experienced colleague, peer or someone with more experience in the industry who can help you grow personally and professionally or with a specific challenge or area of learning.

They will have a level of technical expertise that you can benefit from, as well as a strong professional network to which you will be introduced and who may be valuable contacts or sounding boards.

In some cases, where you engage in mentoring as part of a specific programme or learning engagement, the agreement may be more formal, with an agreed commitment and particular goals at the outset.

Approach

As you might imagine, the approach for both processes is very different.

Coaching

The approach to coaching is more formal. After an initial discovery meeting to ensure that you and your coach are a good fit, you will complete a contracting session where you will reach an agreement on desired outcomes and goals.

From there, you will engage in the coaching sessions themselves, which will involve deeper discovery that will supportively challenge you and where you and your coach will work together to identify the strategies and solutions that will work best for you, which you can commit to acting on.

The coaching process will include reflection and review to acknowledge and sustain your learning and ongoing development to build strong resilience rather than reliance on a leader.  

Mentoring

Mentoring can be more unstructured or even more casual, depending on what you want to achieve. It involves the mentor sharing their experience and knowledge for the mentee to learn from.

They will offer advice and support, acting as a sounding board to bounce ideas and concerns off. Mentoring will follow your desired path of learning and focus areas as long as you invest the time to focus on these ahead of meeting your mentor.

Many mentors are very skilled at eliciting from you how you will engage with and use the learning shared and helping you build a plan around this rather than leaving you to figure this out for yourself.

It is less likely to be a formally contracted agreement, and the mentor is likely to have been practically skilled in a particular area and/or have specific experience rather than a mentoring qualification.

Benefits of Coaching

A good coaching engagement will bring multiple benefits that can often be used professionally and personally.

It is an opportunity to step back and reflect on your reality, your strengths, the nature and complexity of your multidimensional roles as a person and as a professional, and how you can lean into who you are as a unique human to bring about the change you want to see and achieve.  

It will also help you identify where you can best engage your strengths and skills to achieve a measurable difference.

Benefits of Mentoring          

Learning from those who have been there and done it cannot be underestimated.

It can sometimes be challenging to apply someone else's journey to your situation, and a great mentor will work on this process with you. They will get to understand the nuances of your business, vision, culture, and stage and help you apply these to this unique setting.

Ideally, your mentor will be independent and not tied to any investment, investors or other stakeholders within your business, though an investor can often recommend a great mentor.

Your mentor can also be a great ambassador and introduce you to a network that would otherwise be unattainable. One suggestion would be to always aim for more than you initially think you may need and ask that person you respect and admire who feels a little out of reach—you'll be surprised.

We hope this outline and guide is helpful.

Gearing for Growth thrives on their successful executive coaching engagements that lead to better executive confidence, which fuels empowered management teams and employees to see a way forward, dig in, deliver and get a win.

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