Difference Between Mentoring and Coaching

Extremely popular recently, both mentoring and coaching serve the same goal: they help individuals embrace their full potential in personal and career development. Both practices are integral on your road to success and cannot be underestimated. However, coaching and mentoring differ significantly from one another, so it's crucial to acknowledge their differences and recognize the ways in which they complement one another.

Same, Same But Different

It is essential to grasp the distinctions between career mentoring and leadership coaching. While mentoring is flexible and frequently focuses more on overall development, coaching is primarily targeted at reaching very specific goals and objectives. 

Mentoring vs. Coaching

The core of mentoring and the essence of coaching are described above.

Mentoring

Mentoring implies a deep and open relationship where a more skilled person known as the mentor offers counsel, guidance, and overall support to a less seasoned person known as the mentee. Mutual respect, candor, and ultimate trust are the cornerstones of the mentor-mentee relationship. 

Coaching

Since coaches require a proper certificate to practice, coaching is a more streamlined approach. A trained coach offers professional tools, counsel, and feedback usually via an established and certified program. Coaching primarily focuses on assisting people in identifying their strengths and weaknesses, setting and achieving their goals, and improving their general performance and productivity. In blunt terms, it is a more structured and less intimate approach compared to mentoring.

In contrast to coaching, mentoring is a more holistic and specifically tailored approach that concentrates on the mentee's overall personal and professional development. Mentors share their personal know-how and expertise. Coaches, on the other hand, help generate inner resources of their coachees without providing any specific tips on how to sort out certain career issues.

Long Story Short

Let’s skip boring layers of unnecessary information and check a side-by-side comparison of the two. 

Approach

The coaching relationship is typically thought of as a more formal arrangement. Meanwhile, mentoring is frequently thought of as more informal and casual. 

Timeframe

Coaching is usually considered a temporary commitment. A coach and his coachee work together to achieve specific goals during this engagement, and the partnership is reconsidered once the career goals have been met. A coaching relationship can, nevertheless, last for years in many cases since coachee's objectives may alter over time. Mentoring, on the other hand, has traditionally been associated with longer-term commitments. A mentor's work with a mentee can span years, with an emphasis on long-term professional development and objectives. On the other hand, there are situations where a mentor provides mentee with temporary support only. Sometimes, even one meeting is enough for the mentee to work out their queries.

The Miranna app does not put any limits on the session schedule. You can handle your issue after one mentoring session only; however, if you are up for more profound and long-term guidance, you are more than welcome to book more sessions with your mentor. Additionally, you can seek advice from several mentors on the platform.

Structure

Coaching sessions tend to be more structured and subject to a regular schedule (say, weekly, once in two weeks, or monthly). Mentoring meetings are often more casual and usually happen when the mentee requests them. However, it’s the case-by-case approach that matters. If your mentor is a hard-to-get mentoring shiner, it’s not you who will decide on the schedule. Mentoring platforms like Miranna offer more flexibility in terms of booking your mentoring sessions in advance and according to your desired schedule.

Steersman

Mentees are the ones who set the pace for the mentoring process. They decide what they want to work on and what the goals of the mentor-mentee relationship are. They approach the mentor with the issues they wish to resolve and ask for time with them.

Since coaching is purely performance-based, it is the coach who provides a roadmap for the alliance. The coach can offer guidance to enhance the coachee's performance or boost a certain skill. They never provide advice that goes beyond assisting the trainee in mastering the skill in question.

First-Hand Experience

A coach in a corporate or business context is usually a person with a certain skill set in training who uses it to help create grab rails that lead coachees toward their targets. It is not expected of the coach to share his personal experience; the coach may or may not have first-hand knowledge of the subject the coachee is willing to master. The mentor provides insights and lessons from their own leadership journey, acting as a source of inspiration and role model. 

Harvest

A coaching partnership will produce results that are quantifiable and specific, proving growth or progress in the targeted performance area. On the other hand, results of a mentoring relationship can take shape over time. Here, interest in the mentee's holistic development prevails over tangible, specific results.

In a nutshell, mentoring is more about guidance, while coaching mostly focuses on training and developing specific skills.

Which of the Two?

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You need mentoring if:

• you prefer less structured and more informal approach;
• you appreciate personal experience;
• you need to sort out a certain career issue.

Choose coaching if:

• you seek structured process to improve specific skills;
• you need to unlock your inner resources;
• you prefer to be a wingman in this relationship.

To Sum Up

As you see, mentoring and coaching have a lot in common. Both practices revolve around the relationship between two individuals. Although the techniques used in coaching and mentoring may vary, they both aim to help fosterlings reach their goals by adopting the experience of the mentor or coach. 

Now that you know how both concepts work, you can make your pick. Are you more into a structured and impartial coaching process or casual and insightful conversations with your mentor?

The Miranna mentoring app can assist you in putting the ultimate program in place to meet your needs, no matter what they are.