When I recently spoke to a large room full of consultants at a conference in Telford, I discussed the differences and similarities between Business Mentoring and Business Coaching. It was interesting how many consultants and coaches came up afterwards to discuss this further and how differently they experience the terms being used in the market place.

This blog is written for coaches and mentors, who would like some thoughts on how to describe the differences between mentoring and coaching to prospective business clients.

Definitions how many do you want?

In reality there are no commonly agreed definitions of Mentoring and Coaching. Even the professional bodies have not come up with clear definitions to explain the differences.

You can look at the dilemma this way: Coaching and Mentoring are like identical twins. They are very similar, but definitely not the same. They have different names, but are often confused with each other. From a distance they can look very different – when they have been dressed up differently. When you get closer though, you realise that they are in fact very similar.

There is a myriad of different descriptions of coaching and mentoring. Various organisations and bodies will describe them differently depending on how they want to differentiate mentoring from coaching.

The general differences

However, let me give you some of the generally agreed differences between a business mentor and a business coach:

• A business mentor bases a lot of his/her credibility on experience from the same environment as the mentee (the business owner or manager). The mentor has been there got the T-shirt so to speak
• A business mentor is expected to share his/her experience and provide guidance to the mentee
• The business mentor may bring contacts, networks and knowledge
• The business mentor will be able to bring a certain perspective to the conversation e.g. from
  • being an industry insider or
  • successfully growing a business or
  • experience in getting private equity finance or
  • leading teams, etc.
• A mentor relationship will often stretch over longer periods with less frequent conversations than coaching

Other writers on the subject will differentiate between the two in terms of the focus of the subjects being discussed.

The definitions also vary between organisations depending on how they use the terms to differentiate between two types of support, styles or other aspects.

Let me give a couple of examples:

1. Inside one organisation, a mentor will be a senior person, outside the line of hierarchy, who mentors a younger talent. Coaching is what managers do with their direct reports.
2. In another public service organisation, coaching is what the leaders receive from external coaches, while mentoring is what the organisation provides to the public.

In some settings business mentors are expected to help businesses pro-bono, whereas the business coaches get paid for their services – so be careful what you sign up for 😉

Skills the same

However fundamentally, a good and well trained mentor will use the same skills and approaches as a good coach. However, as an expert, who is expected to use their experience and background to help, the mentor is likely to use the skills of giving feedback, input and suggestions on a more frequent basis than a coach would.

Mentors therefore need to be particularly good at

• not making too many assumptions
• avoiding giving advice
• ensuring that the business owner or manager genuinely feels ownership for the chosen solutions (even if the chosen solution was a suggestion from the mentor)
• avoiding creating dependency
• not talking about their own greatness

So what to do?

My advice is very simple: Make sure you have a strong set of coaching skills and stay agile.

Skills: If you have a strong set of coaching skills, then you can do both (assuming you have the T-shirt of course) and you can adapt your service message accordingly.

Stay agile: Understand how the client approaching you defines coaching and mentoring and adapt your story accordingly.

Mentoring as an excuse

And to finish off on a cautionary tale:

I hear this line regularly:

I’m more of a mentor than coach .

What do they mean by that then?

Well, in most cases it is actually just an excuse to cover that they give lots of advice and suggestions, rather than coaching. But, mentoring is not a poor relative of coaching!

When digging a little deeper, the reality is mostly that the coach/mentor simply does not have the right mindset and skills to coach effectively, so he/she quickly reverts back to giving advice.

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I hope you find this helpful and a bit thought provoking.

Please comment and share your experiences and stories.