I am sure this title will confuse many, especially those who have been taught that mentoring and coaching are distinctly different and independent of each other. To many, the notion is when you are coaching, you do not mentor at the same time - and the same goes the other way round.
I am one of those coaches who often gets caught in this situation, especially when I am asked to facilitate mentoring programmes for corporations. When this happens, the burning question in my curious mind would be, "what then is mentoring and coaching to you?" More than half of my clients have mixed up the meaning between these two.
My training as a professional coach (other coaches also included) has taught me (and others) that coaching (and not mentoring) is the process of eliciting solutions from the coachee using the tools of listening, questioning and challenging. Mentoring, on the other hand, is a structured process of skill and knowledge transfer using the tools of teaching, advising and guiding.
However, many people have the reverse meaning for both of these.
One reason for this is that mentoring has been around longer and is generally more familiar and commonly heard and used than coaching, due to its ease in application by most people in many situations. For example, parent and child, doctor and patient, counsellor and client, teacher and student, elder and younger sibling, clergy and parishioner, friend and friend - the list goes on and on. Mentoring is natural as long as there are people with superior knowledge that needs to be shared with others who have less knowledge. It is directive, meaning the approach is usually to share, teach, guide and even instruct the other person.
There is another reason. Like many breakthroughs in the world, people development has undergone revolutionary change as well, moving from directive to non-directive. Because coaching came later, it was logical to pin this revolutionary approach to mentoring and push this directive approach to coaching instead.
The truth is, it is the advent of coaching that sets a revolutionary way in developing people through stretching their minds to find their answers, with mentoring remaining the same as it always has been.
Rather than changing this situation or the meaning in people's minds, it is best to offer mentoring and coaching as part of the same leadership-learning continuum - as opposite sides of the same coin.
This is not for the sake of dealing with the semantics alone, for indeed whether it is in coaching or any type of helping relationship, both coaching and mentoring should always be leveraged upon to increase the effectiveness and the success rate for positive results to emerge.
Even from my personal experience as a professional coach, I find myself using mentoring (or a certain degree of directiveness) in many parts of the coaching relationship; from setting agreed goals and taking appropriate actions to tracking performance. It helps the person move forward faster, with more confidence, determination and patience.
The rationale is that people can work out their solutions better when they have some ideas about their situation, which mentoring helps to fill in. When it is used simultaneously, mentoring also helps to raise the coachee's consciousness further through reminders and reinforcements until their goals are achieved.
MICHAEL HEAH is a credentialled professional coach from the International Coach Federation.
