What is Coaching?

Coaching is defined by some as "the process of enabling individuals to acquire the knowledge, skills and techniques needed to perform effectively in their occupational role by inspiring, motivating, challenging, stimulating and guiding them".

Another useful perspective is that coaching unlocks a person's potential to maximise their own performance; helping them to learn ... rather than teaching them. Other people see that building awareness, responsibility and self-belief is the goal of a coach.

Agreement among practicing coaches, and particularly coaching organisations, is less than complete. So to give more insight into coaching, it may be helpful to look at it on different levels:

• Coaching starts with a belief that people have the ability to address and resolve their own issues if they can approach them in the right way;
• Coaching is a type of leadership that seeks to keep ownership of issues and problems with the individual responsible for their resolution;
• Coaching uses a set of tools, techniques and approaches to enable insight;
• Coaching incorporates a skill-set that can be skillfully employed to support people through a planned process.

So in essence, coaching is supporting individuals to generate the plan and action necessary to achieve their clear goals and to feel empowered to succeed. The role of the Coach is to facilitate, provide context, structure, gently push and challenge – the coachee has all the answers.

What is Mentoring?

Mentoring is a process that uses the same skills and many of the same models as coaching to enable the transmission of knowledge, skills and experience in a supportive and challenging environment.

A fundamental difference is that, typically the Mentor is experienced in the areas to be addressed and can provide pragmatic, practical advice on what could be done, may work or pitfalls to avoid. So an experienced Mentor may provide guidance or insight, for example, to a graduate trainee or high potential candidate as part of a succession planning process.

Typically, mentoring relationships are likely to be much more long term and internal to an organisation; whereas a coaching relationship could be for a fixed number of sessions with an external professional over a number of weeks.

Mentoring relationships work best where, over time, they move beyond the directive or guiding approach of one to another; the relationship becomes one where both learn from each other ... effectively a learning opportunity for both parties.

Mentoring can also work as part of an induction process or as a way of educating people across functional or departmental boundaries and as a means of simple skills transfer.