Mentoring vs Coaching: Key Differences in Employee Development

Another piece of the growth of the employees on your team is mentoring. We're going to talk about mentoring and coaching, but we'll begin with mentoring. So the definition of mentoring is that it is a process that provides guidance, direction, and career advice.

A mentor is typically somebody that stays with you for a long time and you might find yourself in a mentoring role for people on your team while they're working for you, reporting directly to you, and then later on, after you're working in different places, you may continue in a mentoring role for people that you developed a good connection with. There are formal mentoring programs, often within the agency, and those mentoring programs are quite prescribed. They set very specific, clear goals.

They set outcomes. They consider it an agreement between the mentor and the mentee, which those agreements will define how often you see each other and what the expectations are of the mentor of the mentee and the mentee of the mentor. So the benefits of having a formal mentoring program would be, of course, that you can use that program to attract and retain top talent, not just because of the mentoring itself that helps nurture talent, but also being able to advertise that you have these mentoring programs, that you care enough to commit people to being mentors to help bring people along.

These kinds of programs typically have great success in increasing employee engagement and supporting employee succession, and everyone is able to learn from each other. It's not always top down. The mentee has as much to teach, in some cases, as the mentor, although most typically, of course, it's the mentor that is sharing information and understanding that typically has a lot of institutional knowledge to pass along to an often younger or new in that position employee.

Informal mentoring programs, of course, happen all the time. They can happen ad hoc. We sometimes refer to them as flash mentoring, which is just a single meeting with an experienced employee who can share experience and insight.

That could be a lunchtime. That could be a quick meeting at a coffee or an all hands meeting where people are talking before the meeting actually starts. That's a flash mentoring moment.

Speed mentoring, similar to the old speed dating concept, is actually a little bit more organized. You could actually literally have a room full of people who are moving around, meeting new people with time limits set, getting opportunities to ask a group of people about the different areas they're interested in learning about. These mentees can benefit from the mentors.

And again, mentors stand to benefit as well. Even if there is a huge gap in experience and age and time in position in the agency, somebody who is fresh to the agency or the office or the department is going to bring fresh ideas, a fresh perspective, see things that people who've been in place for a long time just can't see anymore. You know, the old can't see the forest for the trees.

That's real. And someone who's new to the organization will see it in ways that can be really valuable for mentors. So these informal mentoring programs can be truly valuable, even though they're not necessarily something that you can advertise and say, hey, we always have this.

So you can have those in combination with your formal mentoring programs. In addition to mentoring, coaching is a valuable support for the employees on your team. Coaching is when you are partnering with employees in a very specific process that can also be creative, helping your employees maximize their potential, maximize their talent.

Coaching is a specific skill that you can gain in order to help other people change skills or change behaviors. It's typically a short-term arrangement, and it begins with benchmarking someone's existing skills and behaviors and then identifying areas where there can be potential behavior changes. And so often coaching can come up when you have had an assessment of an employee and have recognized there are areas where this person needs to be helped along, and that's not quite the role of the mentor.

And so you can arrange for short-term skill enhancement or behavior changes through the help of a coach. So there are similarities between the two. What are the real operational differences? Well, focus and purpose are really where we begin in terms of how to compare the two.

Coaching really does that targeting that I was just talking about. Let's say that your employee really does have a specific behavior change you're looking for. This is where coaching can come in because they can help the behavior immediately.

They can help with performance goals. They can help with specific skills, whereas mentoring would be supporting that broader, the bigger overview of bringing somebody along over a period of years, even personal growth, long-term potential. Building on that concept of the short-term goal achievement versus long-term, the time frame then is a big difference between coaching and mentoring.

Coaching, again, is structured around those defined objectives, whereas mentoring evolves as the mentee evolves. As the mentee's career aspirations grow and get more focused in many cases, the mentor can work with the mentee throughout all of those changes. Approach and style are also big differentials.

The coaches will use formal techniques. They are often trained in the art of and skill of coaching. They provide structured feedback that is research-based.

They help with very, in some cases, formula-driven goal setting that will drive improvement, whereas mentors can offer guidance through storytelling. They're going to tell the story of how they got where they are and offer some guidance that way in formal conversations, and they are always there to make a quick phone call on someone's behalf as well. That's not expected, but it can happen.

So going back to coaching, just to take a deeper dive here on those key concepts of coaching, they are, again, for career and professional development, typically, or at least in this context, they are. We know there are opportunities for coaching in other areas of life as well. Changes in people's personal lives can also be achieved through the help of life coaches.

They are part of effective management on behalf of the leadership team, recognizing that this kind of support can be significant in helping employees reach their potential. And again, that's something that you want to pay attention to and be invested in as part of your overall leadership success. So the basics of coaching would be that they are balanced, actionable, specific.

They have a targeted impact. There is a focus on continuity of coaching, and they are supportive. So that brings us to Exercise 4.1. Please fill in the blank on each of these sentences in the next exercise.

You are exploring the key differences that we just talked about between coaching and mentoring for this exercise. There is an answer key. You can use that to check your work.