What’s the Difference Between Coaching and Mentoring?

It can be a truly rewarding task for any person to guide others through life. At the same time it can be a daunting challenge. The person who has taken on the role of guide needs to walk a very fine line.

On one hand the person must be strong enough to be able to reprimand the follower when that person ignores advice or strays from the path. On the other hand, it is also his responsibility to allow the follower to stray. This freedom to make mistakes is essential to the learning process and enables the person to learn and understand why things should be done differently.

The people doing the guiding are generally called coaches and mentors. The two roles are similar in some ways but in fact are very different. Before attempting this role laden with responsibility it is important to understand the difference between coaching and mentoring and to find out what is best for your relationship with your potential followers.

Mentoring generally involves a closer and more meaningful relationship than is seen in coaching. The leader and follower is most often referred to as mentor and protégé. The mentor is often older than the protégé, and is certainly more knowledgeable, wise and more experienced dealing with life experiences than the follower. The mentor’s task is to guide the more inexperienced protégé. The main objective is to allow the protégé to grow closer to the mentor’s level of knowledge and experience during the course of the mentoring program.

The mentor-protégé relationships has been around for a long time. Most commonly “mentorships” are found in the work environment where a new employee on first entering the company is assigned a mentor. This is somebody who has been in the company for a long time.

This particular mentorship program is designed to ease the new employee into his position as easily and quickly as possible. The mentor will introduce the protégé to work processes and procedures and advise on how to advance in the workplace. This could lead to the protégé eventually taking over a mentoring program himself.

The concept of coaching, on the other hand, is quite different from mentoring. The coach is a leader or supervisor who directs the movements of one person or an entire group. The instruction and training the coach provides have a specific goal in mind. The instructions given could include motivational talks or the purpose could be to improve performance. The coach could use seminars or workshops. In sports the coach would focus on instruction and practice.

In mentoring, a mentor teaches a protégé how to live better or how to function better in society. In coaching a more specific method is used to attain an end goal. For sports coaches this would be the winning of games or an event. For marriage coaches, the goal would be to work towards stronger marital bonds. And for coaches specializing in working with families, the end goal would be to foster stronger familial bonds between all members of the family unit.

There are many different kinds of coaching and mentoring. In the same way there are many techniques associated with each of the two practices. Each situation will need to be evaluated to ascertain whether coaching or mentoring would be the more appropriate relationship to enter into.

What’s your experience of either being mentored or coached, or being the mentor or coach?