Mentoring and Coaching in the Personal Framework

These are two words used interchangeably and with confusion.

In order to overcome confusion and define the usage which is applied in this practice the following paragraphs are informative.

Coaching or mentoring is about you, the individual, about you in your job, you in your family, with friends, in the community and in your career which is a bigger topic than your job. The nature and extent of the engagement is agreed by the participants.

In coaching mode the process is to overtly instruct tending to be task orientated leading to operational outcomes. The coach will regularly want to observe and monitor as well as correct performance.

A mentoring program has a different culture and approach and requires the individual to take the initiative and to share with the mentor. The individual discloses the circumstances and environment in which that person has to function, the behaviours of supervisors, peers,
subordinates partners, friends and family; shares goals, aspirations, anxieties and fears with the mentor with growing confidence. With the mentor, the individual will consider various options to improve or remedy situations and be accountable for the actions.

Consider a sports team subjected to a coach.  The coach will initiate and supervise training, prescribe moves and responses to be made by the team as well as the individual players in a game such as tennis, soccer, basketball or golf as well as review the results and correct deficiencies. The coach will school the athlete who does what the coach considers appropriate for the circumstances. The coach would read the environment/circumstances/behaviours (opposition or competition) recognising how different competitors compete and school the athlete in the ways of winning.  Some contributions are accepted from the participants which may influence the coach who has however adopted a position from which each might be hard to move.

The mentor on the other hand helps individual to self instruct in the processes and procedures which you should be adopting to achieve the results which you wish to achieve. The mentor will ensure assumptions and processes are tested by deft questioning and envisioning scenarios which might previously have not been considered and which might lead to unintended consequences from the activities of the individual.

So the brief is for the individual being mentored or coached (sometimes including the supervisor) to initiate the process, identify greater goals and priorities, problems and opportunities across a broad front.  The coach/mentor will then, with agreement of the individual, determine a course of action best suited to achieve the desired results. In all likelihood this will be a combination of the mentoring and coaching methodologies.