Mentoring and Coaching

After mastering the science of Listening, aspiring leaders sharpen mentoring and coaching skills in their toolbox to unlock the full potential of their team members. 

Mentoring and coaching are both forms of professional and personal development. Although two distinct skills, they have similarities that are important to highlight. But, indeed, they have differences that make each unique, not just in execution but also when using one versus the other.

Through mentoring, the leader imparts knowledge by guiding, advising, and sharing insights from personal experiences. Conversely, coaching involves guiding the discovery of solutions on their own, fostering confidence and raising responsibility.

In mentoring, the relationship is between the mentor and the mentee. In coaching, the relationship is between the coach and the coachee. This article will refer to these terms generically as facilitator and apprentice.

These activities can have nuanced differences, and it’s one of those instances that AI tools, like ChatGPT, have difficulty getting it right. So, let’s dive in and define these two skills and how they are similar and different.

Mentoring

Mentoring involves a more experienced or knowledgeable individual supporting a less experienced person in their personal and professional development. For example, a junior marketer will want to look for a senior or lead marketer for conversations where the mentor shares his experience and how that can be applied to the mentee’s context.

Mentoring differs from teaching or training sessions regarding agenda setting. In teaching or training, the teacher/trainer sets the agenda and topics of discussion. In contrast, in mentoring, the mentee sets them. Moreover, it’s up to the mentee to organise and run the mentoring sessions.

How to get started?

As a leader (and again, we are not defining a leader here as someone with authority), you want to make yourself available for your teammates. Let them know that you have experience with specific relevant topics they might be interested and it would be a win-win. As they grow, your team grows, allowing you and the team to reach for higher and higher achievements.

Speaking of which, mentoring can also happen outside of a team. Still, we’ll use this constraint for the context of our leadership series.

Coaching

Unfortunately, there is much confusion surrounding coaching in the general vernacular.

When the word “coaching” is used, people often refer to the teaching or training. Furthermore, in our context, coaching is not the sports or fitness coach. Unfortunately, these different contexts use the same terms. However, the approach of a sports or fitness coach is more similar to that of the teacher or trainer and provides more direct guidance and feedback. That’s different from what coaching is in our context. Yet, a sports coach can use coaching in their approach.

The International Coaching Federation defines coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential.” That means the coach helps clients unravel, explore, and discover new insights into the topics they are interested in discussing and act accordingly.

The analogy I like to use for coaching is solving a jigsaw puzzle, where the coachee already has all the pieces. Still, some might be upside down, and their connections might not be apparent initially. The coach will support the coachee in “solving the jigsaw puzzle”.

This approach is one of facilitating discovery and awareness and of giving the learning responsibility to the coachee.

“Don’t tell, ask.” The primary tool of the coach is asking questions that widen the coachee’s thinking. Leading or directing questions like “Have you tried X? Why don’t you try Y?” don’t fit here. On the contrary, open-ended questions, “What are your options here?”, “What have you tried so far?”, for example, trigger the right thought processes. They prompt the mentee to discover their own solutions.

When the insights happen this way, the ownership of that insight transfers to the coachee. They didn’t simply receive the answer; they took the steps necessary to get there and understood where it came from. The transformation happens at a deeper, long-lasting level.

The key here is to stay curious. It’s very tempting to jump into problem-solving along with your coachee. Don’t! Let them find their own way, even if it takes a few coaching sessions, and reap all the benefits of self-discovery.

How to get started?

First and foremost, get coached to glimpse what coaching is! Find an ICF-certified coach or someone working on their certification and enquire about their coaching sessions. Then, try applying some of the curiosity to some of your conversations. Coaching is a high learning curve skill, but don’t get demotivated. As with any new skill, learning and improving requires practice and determination. On top of that, the rewards of mastering coaching are enormous for both the coach and the coachee.

Similarities

There are a few similarities between mentoring and coaching. The first one is that the initiative comes from the apprentice. Leaders shouldn’t be mentoring or coaching someone who doesn’t want to receive them. When managers set up mentoring or coaching sessions with their people, that’s not really mentoring and coaching. As a leader, you can leave the door open, but the apprentice needs to make the final decision.

Also, both activities are designed to facilitate growth and involve a one-on-one relationship building between the individuals involved. Both need to be willing and able to put time into developing this relationship for a successful mentoring or coaching session.

Differences

There are also quite a few crucial differences.

Hierarchy: Coaching can occur between peers or people from different industries, whereas mentoring usually involves a more experienced individual guiding someone less experienced from a specific industry or having a particular know-how.

Role of the facilitator: In coaching, the facilitator’s primary role is to facilitate the coachee’s self-discovery and improvement. In mentoring, the facilitator may play a more active role by sharing experiences and providing advice based on their career journeys.

Insights: In mentoring, the mentee gets new insights from the mentor. In coaching, the coachee gets new insights from his own knowledge but is guided by the coach to look at things from different perspectives. It reminds me of Wayne Dyer’s quote: “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

Time invested: In mentoring, when the apprentice has a question, the mentor can share his knowledge or experience immediately. In coaching, the coach wants the coachee to discover the solution themselves. It’s a process that takes longer.

Empowerment: Consider an example when a team member approaches a leader, proclaiming they are stuck on a particular issue. When the leader mentors, sharing their experience (“try X”), the team member will try to execute that insight without understanding the steps it took to get there. They are trying their leader’s idea. The leader could, instead, coach the team member, asking the right questions. When the team member has the insight themselves (“Oh, maybe I should try X”), the ownership of the insight is higher. They feel more empowered as they are trying their own idea.

When to use mentoring? When to use coaching?

Deciding when to use one or the other is also a skill in itself. The obvious case is that when the apprentice needs specific technical knowledge that the facilitator has, mentoring is a good approach. Conversely, coaching is a good alternative when the facilitator doesn’t have the particular expertise that the apprentice requires (because it might be specific to the apprentice’s context).

In other cases, leaders need to balance empowerment and time invested. If the topic at hand is time-sensitive, mentoring might be a better fit. If the leader wants to focus on the apprentice’s development, more time is required, and coaching is the better choice.

	Mentoring	Coaching
Where insights come from?	Mentor	Coachee
Time invested	Lower	Higher
Ownership of solution	Lower	Higher

Conclusion

Coaching and mentoring are the best and easiest ways to start developing people, which is a leadership behaviour we will tackle in the following article. Distinct yet harmonising, mentoring sees leaders guide through shared experiences, while coaching empowers individuals to unravel personalised solutions. In the pursuit of mastery, leaders are encouraged to experience coaching firsthand and to make themselves available to mentor others, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and achievement.