Coaching and Mentoring: Key Differences and Benefits

Welcome back. As you could see in the video, ultimately, coaching and mentoring are both about helping people to get where they want to go. And both coaches and mentors do that by leveraging the experience of the coach or the mentor.

And they can be seen to evolve from the directive, which is the mentoring, to the non-directive, which is the coaching. As we move to that goal of getting somewhere that they aren't already there. But again, coaching is about daily performance.

Mentoring is about a long-term career path. So, as we look at a comparison of coaching and mentoring, you're going to see the relationship between the two and the differences between the two. Coaching, let's go down that side.

Task-oriented. What are you learning how to do today? Today, I'm learning how to do an inward dive in the pipe position. It's in the short term.

It's performance-driven. It's the immediate manager or supervisor or team leader, or even you may be assigned to coach someone, and you're directly involved in the learning of that performance for the coachee. This is much easier to evaluate progress because you can see how Debbie could do the dive today better than she did the dive yesterday, with the coaching that she was receiving.

The manager in this case can be the coach, and that's oftentimes who the coach is. And it is about behavioral transformation, what you are doing and what I'm doing here, can it be improved because of the coaching of the person that is sharing their experience and their ability to teach with the coachee. Mentoring.

Now, this is really relationship-oriented, and it is intended for the long term. Remember, I suggested nine to 12 months is a minimum, but the really wonderful mentoring benefit is that this could be a lifelong friendship, as I was describing with the woman who was my mentor. It's development-driven.

So, the question might be, what are the skills you have to learn for greater leadership effectiveness? What do you have to do to become better at strategic planning? How do you navigate through the different departments within this organization? What kinds of experiences should you be acquiring in your career path? Let's say if your goal is to be yes, yes. In this case, the immediate manager is very indirectly involved. We usually suggest that the immediate manager or supervisor should not be the mentor because that could give the illusion of unfairness if they're mentoring one employee versus another.

It's almost like they're too close to it. So, more ideally, your mentor is someone who is outside, let's say, of your department. Someone else within the organization who sees your potential for growth.

Progress is harder to quantify here because it's a career path. So, we don't say things like, well, you should be your GS whatever by such and such a date. And that's how we calculate whether this is a good mentor relationship or not.

We usually don't do that. This is more about guidance, suggestions, and advice from the experience, knowledge, and wisdom of the mentor. This isn't about fixing what's wrong.

Your mentor probably is not willing to take you on unless they see high potential in you. They may have even come to you and said, I think I can help you if you want to engage in this relationship with me. Sometimes we have to go seek out a mentor and just say, I need some advice here and I have seen your career path, and I would love to get your take on what it is required of me in order to do something similar.

Again, the manager never mentors their own employees. And this is about personal transformation. What kind of person do you become? Employed, do you become? Maybe even better said, a professional.

What kind of professional do you become in this relationship? So, as we look at this, you can see there are probably some skill sets that are very much shared in these in terms of, yes, I have to be a good communicator. Yes, I have to have built trust. Yes, I have to have high emotional intelligence in order to be either a quality coach or a quality mentor.

But I think you could also see it's a different kind of relationship with a different kind of goal. So, let's say you're sitting there and looking at an employee and you're thinking, boy, is this an employee, colleague that I should be coaching or mentoring? Well, when do you want to consider coaching? First of all, if you're seeking to develop your employee in a specific competency, and this is about performance management tools, it is about being the immediate manager. So, let's say you're a team lead, then you would be coaching.

Let's say you're a supervisor coaching one of your employees. That's coaching. You may be an informal leader who is tasked to coach a new employee in their performance.

So, again, it's usually very closely related to you in terms of what you do and how you do it because you are talking about performance. Sometimes we consider coaching when you have a talented employee who's not meeting expectations. What are they not doing correctly? What steps are they missing? Were they not trained correctly to begin with, and now they need some extra training? If you're introducing a new system or a program and you need employees to become proficient, this might be a place to coach.

Coaching, training, teaching. You might have a small group of individuals who need increased competency, and you may be coaching them as a group. Again, you might have a leader or an executive within your organization.

They're not above being coached because they may need assistance in acquiring a new skill in an area that they're not familiar with, because it's an added responsibility. So, again, grade level doesn't dictate who you coach or when you coach. It's about does a person need a skill, a skill improvement, a skill correction, teaching in a new training in a new skill.

Mentoring, on the other hand, is considered mentoring when you're seeking to develop your leaders or your talent pool, and it's part of succession planning. Oh, someone has probably said to you, I see you need leadership potential. You should enroll in a certificate program that will help you build skills.

You get the idea. But it's not your supervisor who is going to develop you as a leader. They may say, Go take the course and find a mentor.

Mentoring is also for developing diverse employees and removing barriers that might hinder success. You may want to develop your employees because they need broader skills around specific skills and competencies. So, think of it as they have the specific skills and competencies, but maybe they need to learn more critical thinking skills about the application.

Mentoring also helps if you're trying to retain internal expertise and experience. We have older generation employees, who know when they're going to retire out. We have to constantly be nurturing the more recent generation of employees in the process.

And so, we want to identify potential leaders within our organization and help them develop a career path, guiding them and supporting them in that. And if, in fact, we want a workforce that we're really looking to mature the workforce and individuals as professionals and as personal human beings, that also can be a place for mentoring. But again, this is not skill-specific.

This is career-focused. So, you can be a coach. What are the coaching skills you might need? Well, inclusive leadership, effective communication, psychological safety and trust, and emotional intelligence are all these words that sound very familiar from the modules we've done before.

Active listening, giving and receiving feedback, empathy, being goal-oriented, and having a growth mindset. So again, for you to be an effective coach, you have to wrap your head around, I want to be a coach because I want to train people up. I want to teach people.