Lately I’ve been asked to help organizations train internal coaches so they can coach their own people and help build strong cultures to retain new and existing talent. I find it ironic that companies have embraced coaching as much as they do today, because when I first go into coaching, many people viewed it a s a punishment, and people wondered what they were doing wrong since they were given a coaching.
Coaching new coaches has been a lot of fun and I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to walk people through the coaching process and help them decide if they even want to be a coach
One thing I found is people tend to confuse coaching with mentoring some people believe the terms are interchangeable when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Coaching is not mentoring and Mentoring is not Coaching. To be fair, you can mentor while you coach and coach while you mentor, but the two things are not the same.
So let’s talk about mentoring for a minute. It used to be for many years that senior level leaders in the organization would simply take young upcoming talent under their wing and mentor them on the ins and outs of the industry. They could do so because they worked in the company and they understood the internal mechanisms of how the business operated. They knew the people that they had to connect with, certain obstacles that their mentees were going to face, and how to navigate those obstacles to increase their chances of success. That’s what a mentor can do.
A mentor has typically had the job that their mentee is now doing and because of that they can help them navigate the waters of the business. They can share their experience of what to do how to do it. They can speak to whom their mentees should interact with, who not to interact with where some of the challenges are going to be and how to maybe work through them.
A coach on the other hand doesn’t need to have any experience with your company, in your job, or even have knowledge of your specific industry to help coach you to high performing outcomes. This is the biggest reason why they are a coach, instead of a mentor.
I’ll give you an example: I once coached a chemist for a large food company here in the US, and the fact is I’m pretty sure I failed my chemistry class in high school. I know nothing about chemistry, but this individual didn’t need coaching on how to be a good chemist or the inner workings of her own company. She needed coaching on how to create buy in with senior level executives. How to motivate and create clear objectives with her own team. How to communicate effectively when people disagreed with her to create good outcomes and drive initiatives forward. A lot of our coaching was about building her own level of confidence to do those things we just outlined.
So as you see I didn’t have to mentor her on the ends and outs of her company or the various roadblocks she was going to deal with because I wasn’t really aware of them. I never worked there and I was never a chemist so I couldn’t empathize with what she was going through and help her work past that. But as a coach I was more than qualified to help her deal with the things that we outlined that she wanted to focus her attention on.
So why does this matter for you? Well if you are going to start a mentoring program in your own company, if you’ve worked in the company for any period of time and understand a little bit about the business, you are qualified to be a mentor to new leaders or new people that enter the organization regardless of whether you believe that or not.
If you want to coach them however you might be required to learn a different set of skills because mentoring is more about how YOU would do things and how YOU have done things. The things that have worked for YOU might help them.
Coaching isn’t about you and your own personal experience, it’s about helping them identify what the issues are and then building a strategy unique to that individual to help them get past their barriers consistently over and over again. Whether you believe it or not if you have an interest and you actually enjoy connecting with people then we can coach you to be a coach as well.
So until next time here’s to you and your continued success and being a coach or a mentor One Quarter Turn at a time.
Thought for the week
A coach has some great questions for your answers. A Mentor has some great answers for your questions. -Unknown
Looking forward to our next connection
Coach Tim
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