This “Leading Through Relationship Building” series highlights the complementary roles of coaching and mentoring in professional development. It outlines the characteristics, goals, and best practices that support effective relationships in each capacity.
Key Insights
- Coaching focuses on short-term skill development, with the coach acting as a content expert to improve immediate performance.
- Mentoring supports long-term career growth through shared experience, guidance, and broader professional insight.
- Coaching is more inquiry-based, while mentoring relies on storytelling, guidance, and perspective sharing from the mentor.
This lesson is a preview from our Leading Through Relationship-Building Course Online & Emerging Leader Certificate Program. Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Welcome back to Module 4 in Leading Through Relationship Building. We have spent a fair amount of time on our first three modules, have we not, on building, first of all, a network of relationships. We have built our emotional intelligence, and we have built conflict resolution confidence.
And now we're going to take those three concepts and skills into Module 4, which is now about building relationships as a coach and mentor. Let's take a look at the objectives that we have for this module. First of all, I think it's important for us to describe the difference between coaching and mentoring.
They are similar in some aspects and very different in other aspects. And because of that, we have to look at strategies for establishing, first of all, a coaching relationship, and also strategies for establishing a mentoring relationship. Again, some similarities between the two, but overall, a different goal in those relationships.
As we take a look at the definitions, let's start with coaching. A coach, and think about the coaches you've had in your career and maybe in school as you were growing up, and maybe in sports. A coach is someone, that person, who provides guidance to an employee on their goals and helps them reach their full potential.
Now that sounds rather broad, but think of it this way. Coaching involves a content expert, and that content expert, who could be you as an emerging leader, and as a subject matter expert, is working closely with an individual so that this individual learns a particular skill or acquires a piece of knowledge. Coaching, then, is about skills and knowledge acquisition.
Coaching sometimes involves the personal side. The primary focus is professional. Coaching is teaching, if you will.
The way I think of it, to always keep my mind sorted out between am I coaching or mentoring, I am coaching today's performance. I'll give you an example. Back in the high school days, I was on the diving team, springboard diving team, and I had a coach, and I had a wonderful coach.
His name was Jim Cimprini, and he took it upon himself to teach me daily how to do a successful dive, whether it be a front dive, a reverse dive, a back dive, an inward dive, and do it in such a that I would be doing it properly, that I would be safe in doing it, and that ultimately, I could compete and win. So, every single day I was at practice with Jim Cimprini, he was teaching me how to dive, daily performance, to be used in the fairly immediate future. On the other hand, mentoring is about being that person who shares their knowledge, skills, and or experience to help another person develop and grow in their career path.
So, in a true mentoring relationship, the mentee and the mentor are working together and working with one another over the course of a longer period of time. We tend to say a minimum of nine to 12 months, but quite honestly, in my case, some of my mentors have been lifelong, and I still rely on one particular woman who began as a mentor to me when I was only in my twenties, and we have maintained this relationship for about 50 years or so, and I still lean into her for her wisdom and understanding when I feel like I just need another person who I value intensely. I need their perspective.
The mentor's focus then is on the overall development of this mentee. Mentoring should be transformational for both the mentor and the mentee because it is a long-term relationship, and it is going to include the professional as well as the personal. So, you might see mentoring as a type of counseling, but I hesitate to use that word because you don't need to be a psychotherapist or anything like that, but you do have to be someone who has wisdom and guidance to share about how to navigate a career.
I think one of the most distinct differences that you're going to see is that mentoring is more directive while coaching is less directive, and what that means in practice is that in mentoring, the mentor might be doing most of the talking, whereas in coaching, the coach is more likely to be posing questions. How would you do this? How would you do that? How do you think this went? Because you're talking about daily performance, there's a lot of give-and-take questioning on that. In mentoring, you're talking because you're sharing your wisdom, you're sharing your guidance.
It doesn't mean that the mentee has nothing to say. Obviously, it is a conversation, but it is a different type of conversation, obviously. Now, as we go on, you're going to take a look at a video in exercise 4.1, and it is going to, again, describe whether or not you're coaching or mentoring, or sometimes you might even be doing both, so take a few minutes to look at the video.
