Not everyone agrees on what constitutes coaching and what constitutes mentoring. From my perspective as a coach and mentor, there’s a great deal of overlap in what coaches and mentors do, but each tends to have a unique set of skills, establishes a different type of relationship with their clients, and offers distinct services as well. Very generally, the breadth and format of engagement reflect the difference in services.
Just a note of caution. Provided here are just snapshots of the strengths and best uses of different types of coaches and mentors.
Although different, all of these practitioners offer important professional development services. But, the focus of the services is not the same. And, human resource (HR) managers need to identify the best resource given their specific objectives.
What Are Mentors and Mentoring
What Is Mentoring:
Mentoring is readily distinguishable from training and coaching in a couple of ways. Training is typically a short-term impersonal process that focuses on new knowledge and skills acquisition. In contrast, mentorship is a prolonged learning experience. More significantly, it takes the form of regular interactions whereby the mentors share their expertise and experience in a more personalized relationship based on trust.
What Is a Mentor
Mentors have more real-life professional experience in a given field or industry than their clients (those being mentored). In a sense, mentors groom their clients enhancing and refining their professional talent. Some key areas of focus include strategic and innovative thinking, deepening problem analysis and resolution, and expansion of professional alliances.
Companies and organizations often use mentorships for grooming as part of internal promotion and succession of leadership.
Although there are mentors who can offer some assistance on more personal matters as they relate to the client’s work life and professional relationships, this is more commonly the domain of coaches – professional or leadership coaches but especially life coaches.
What Are Coaches and Coaching:
Some authors distinguish coaching from mentoring by describing it as short-term and goal-oriented. This is not my understanding. While it’s true that coaches can be, and often are, hired to work with someone on a specific issue; this is definitely not the most common arrangement.
More typically, a coach engages with a client for the long term and perhaps over a complex transition. Many coaches work on emotional and mental blocks and facilitate a process of self-discovery. This type of work can entail considerable self-reflection, exploration, and staged transformation.
Types of Coaches Focused on Workplace Issues
A professional coach works with clients to enhance their professional performance and potential. Their focus is on the workplace and opportunities for professional growth. Employers often employ professional coaches to help specific employees in their advancement process such as when and how to seek a promotion within a technical or managerial track. They also facilitate issues related to the client’s communication and collaborative skills.
Professional coaches’ work overlaps that of career coaches. To a lesser degree, they work on topics more closely resembling those of life coaches when they delve into personal issues that influence their clients’ professional lives, choices, and performance.
Leadership Coach
A leadership coach tends to work one on one with a single individual. The client defines the agenda in terms of business-related goals. Often the coach helps in this process, sometimes fine-tuning specific workable goals. As the name implies, these coaches work with leaders or those who are being groomed to be leaders. Typically leadership coaches have considerable relevant professional experience themselves, although, not necessarily in the same industry or field as their clients. Depending on the approach of the specific leadership coach, they may function like a mentor.
Career Coach
A career coach helps individuals define, develop or transform their careers, clarify goals, and identify strategies to achieve these goals, e.g., secure a new position or transition to another profession. Career coaches may also offer clients tests and ways to assess their strengths, weaknesses, likes, and dislikes related to specific jobs or general career categories in order to identify a suitable career path. Their work tends to be narrowly defined and limited in duration. There is a great deal of overlap with professional coaches, who can also provide many of the services of the career coach.
Business Coach:
This type of coach supports a business owner, CEO, etc to better define, manage, and grow a new or existing business. They typically specialize in helping clients articulate, focus, and/or strengthen their vision, strategy, operations, marketing, negotiations, and profitability. Contracts can be short and narrowly defined. Longer contracts generally cover a number of business topics. The work of these coaches is goal oriented and procedural. The word “business” is a bit of a misnomer because these coaches may also work with companies, institutes, institutions, nonprofits, and organizations.
Life Coach:
Life coaches tend to have a dual role to help clients address both professional and personal challenges. For example, they’re often hired to assist clients with stress management and work-life balance covering a wide range of inter-connected issues.
In truth, the boundaries between the private and public and one’s personal life and work life are blurred. In reality, these two spheres overlap, shift, and intertwine or even become entangled. Life coach services are valuable to managers and employees alike.
A strength of many life coaches is their ability to create an objective and supportive space in which their clients can honestly self-reflect, challenge their thinking, expand their perceptions, and shift their perspectives. Life coaches, more than any other type of coach, have a wide range of coaching tools and many can offer a holistic approach that encompasses the mind, body, emotions, and sometimes even spirit. They may work on an analytical or cognitive level or on a deeper emotional and/or subconscious level.
Because life coaches address a whole range of issues and objectives, they are the most versatile type of coach. In the workplace, they can help staff manage stress, address performance issues, assess and prioritize goals, alter their communication and collaborative style, and provide valuable services to those nearing retirement. Consequently, the engagement of a life coach can be short or long-term: flexible to meet the objectives. They can work with individuals, teams, or groups.
The important thing for HR to consider is what specific skills and approaches a given coach has to offer, and do these match the expressed needs of management and the overall staff.
Updated May 17, 2023
