This is an interesting question, particularly as Coaching and Mentoring can both mean different things to different people. Not to mention, coaching and mentoring are basically types of ‘relationships,’ and relationships can be complex and vary from person to person. As a coach with many clients, I can tell you that the relationship I have with every one of my clients is different, because each of my clients has different needs, different degrees of experience, and different personalities and communication styles.
Both coaches and mentors act as trusted advisors. They will have had experience in some of the challenges that you face day-to-day in your business, and will often be able to share their own experiences with these challenges and how they’ve overcome them. A mentor will more likely be somebody who has had similar experiences to those you are experiencing now, or wish to experience. For example, if you are growing a young engineering company, you might have a mentor who has already successfully grown an engineering company of their own. When you go to that mentor (or advisor) for advice, they will likely be able to share with you what they did when they experienced the same challenge, and what the outcome was for them. A mentor probably should have had more experience than you in similar areas, and you may benefit from that experience.
A coach tends to approach their coach-client relationships slightly different. Whilst a coach may also offer advice based on their own experiences, they don’t necessarily had to have similar experiences in a similar industry to yours. A good coach has been trained to act more like a guide – they are there to help you clarify your own thinking about your business, or about a situation, helping you to arrive at your own conclusions and solutions. A good coach “slows down” your thinking, getting you to think rationally about a problem and helping ensure that you’ve exhausted all possible options logically (rather than emotionally), so that you can make the best decision. And a coach makes sure you make the decision.
In my experience, the key difference between a coach and a mentor is accountability. Whilst a mentor helps you by giving you valuable advice, it’s not really the mentor’s job to make sure you follow that advice, or indeed make a decision at all. A coach pushes you. A coach applies pressure – what we call in ActionCOACH “perturbation” – which pushes you out of your comfort zone so that you are making decisions quickly, taking risks, and learning and trying new things, so that you are achieving better results than you have before.
Most of all, while a mentor gives you advice or answers your question, a coach compels you to take action. My coaching sessions tend to finish with me asking questions such as, “So based on our conversation today, what actions are you going to take? When are you going to do them?” And then our next coaching session will begin with reviewing those actions from the previous week, to make sure they were done and the results measured.
In a way, a mentor eases the pressure by giving advice. A coach increases the pressure by getting you take make decisions and take action. Both the right coach and mentor can add massive value, a coach can sometimes be a mentor and a mentor sometimes a coach, but in order to achieve our absolute greatest potential, we really need both.
Find out more about what ActionCOACH can do for your business. Or if you simply have a question about something you’ve read here, don’t hesitate to get in touch. Email me at andrewgoldberg@actioncoach.com.
