What’s the Difference Between Coaching And Mentoring?
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It can be a truly rewarding task for any person to guide others through life. At the same time it can be a daunting challenge. The person who has taken on the role of guide needs to walk a very fine line.
On one hand the person must be strong enough to be able to reprimand the follower when that person ignores advice or strays from the path. On the other hand, it is also his responsibility to allow the follower to stray. This freedom to make mistakes is essential to the learning process and enables the person to learn and understand why things should be done differently.
The people doing the guiding are generally called coaches and mentors. The two roles are similar in some ways but in fact are very different. Before attempting this role laden with responsibility it is important to understand the difference between coaching and mentoring and to find out what is best for your relationship with your potential followers.
Mentoring generally involves a closer and more meaningful relationship than is seen in coaching. The leader and follower is most often referred to as mentor and protégé. The mentor is often older than the protégé, and is certainly more knowledgeable, wise and more experienced dealing with life experiences than the follower. The mentor’s task is to guide the more inexperienced protégé. The main objective is to allow the protégé to grow closer to the mentor’s level of knowledge and experience during the course of the mentoring program.
The mentor-protégé relationships has been around for a long time. Most commonly “mentorships” are found in the work environment where a new employee on first entering the company is assigned a mentor. This is somebody who has been in the company for a long time.
This particular mentorship program is designed to ease the new employee into his position as easily and quickly as possible. The mentor will introduce the protégé to work processes and procedures and advise on how to advance in the workplace. This could lead to the protégé eventually taking over a mentoring program himself.
The concept of coaching, on the other hand, is quite different from mentoring. The coach is a leader or supervisor who directs the movements of one person or an entire group. The instruction and training the coach provides have a specific goal in mind. The instructions given could include motivational talks or the purpose could be to improve performance. The coach could use seminars or workshops. In sports the coach would focus on instruction and practice.
In mentoring, a mentor teaches a protégé how to live better or how to function better in society. In coaching a more specific method is used to attain an end goal. For sports coaches this would be the winning of games or an event. For marriage coaches, the goal would be to work towards stronger marital bonds. And for coaches specializing in working with families, the end goal would be to foster stronger familial bonds between all members of the family unit.
There are many different kinds of coaching and mentoring. In the same way there are many techniques associated with each of the two practices. Each situation will need to be evaluated to ascertain whether coaching or mentoring would be the more appropriate relationship to enter into.
What’s your experience of either being mentored or coached, or being the mentor or coach?
Hi, Andrew Rondeau here. I have over 25 years of hands-on management experience within a diverse range of different industries including retail, manufacturing, finance and IT. I’ve managed teams of up to 1000 individuals, managing numerous $multi-million projects, mergers, acquisitions and company sales.
Thank you for the clarification. However, I think that coaching, or at least coaching tecniques can be part of (or within) a mentoring relationship. I am actually teaching coaching tecniques to a group of volunteers mentoring young people on their way to choosing their profession. And it seems quite to help them to shape their mentoring processes in a more goal-oriented way.
One way I distinguish between mentoring and coaching is by the focus of the relationship. i.e the mentor is focused on the individual, the coach is focused on the performance of the individual.
.-= Nicole@Life Coaching Courses´s last blog ..Considering Becoming a Life Coach =-.
When it comes to time duration, mentoring is more long-term and takes a broader view of the person while coaching is short-term (sometimes time-bounded) and focused on specific development areas/issues
Having understood the differences between them, I would say that both coaching and mentoring also involve facilitating the exploration of the person’s needs, motivations and desies, in line with what skills they have.
The aim is to assist the person in making progress towards their appropriate goals.
Twitter: rtmixmktg
Andrew, nice post. I think of the mentoring relationship as longer-term, it can include a focus on a whole career vs. one company or one job and sometimes the informal mentors more important than officially assigned ones. Coaching I see as more focused on a specific task, goal or function and involves more regular guidance and assistance in completing the desired project or task (whether big or small).
Twitter: Tony Goddard Exec_Coach4U
I’m not sure I’d totally agree with these definitions. I am an Executive Coach and would not say my role is instructional or related to training. My aim is to enable an individual to get a new perspective on their topic by good awaereness raising questions. In this way they find and are more committed to their own solutions. Whereas in mentoring I’d say there is much more advice giving and the relationship can be more consultancy related.
Somewhere in the middle the two processes meet – I’m still not sure where!
Tony Goddard
Tony Goddard Consulting