Coach or Mentor? Why Both Can Add Value to You and Your Business
Building and running a business can sometimes feel like a very lonely affair. Steering the ship is all well and good, but as business growth coaches we’ve seen many business owners and entrepreneurs who were so lacking in advice and support that they could no longer see either the open water or the rocks.
And that phrase - “advice and support” – is absolutely key here, because it gets to the very heart of the difference between coaching and mentoring, two separate (but related) disciplines you must understand to ensure you and your business turn to the right people for the right help.
What’s coaching and what’s mentoring?
Definitions of the difference between coaching and mentoring abound (although it’s also critical to understand the similarities and complementarities between them, as we explore a little later in this blog.)
But for now, let’s put it this way: coaching tends to focus on immediate tasks or challenges at hand, and therefore provides guidance on how to achieve specific goals and outcomes. A coach will help you improve your performance in your role, whether this means acquiring better presentation skills, learning how to have effective sales conversations, managing time more effectively, and so on.
A mentor, on the other hand, in the words of best-selling self-help author Bob Proctor, is someone who sees more talent and ability within you than you see in yourself, and then helps to bring that out.
Now, that’s quite a broad remit, but in essence, a mentor focuses on personal and professional development, listening to problems and challenges and helping the mentee find the solution within themselves, through guidance and moral support.
As business growth coaches, the analogy we often use is that of bringing up children: teaching your kids to use a knife and fork, or do up their shoelaces, is coaching. Helping them through exam stress when they complain to you about it is mentoring!
This also reveals another key point about the two disciplines. Coaching is coach-driven, proactively identifying issues and shortfalls, and proposing solutions. Mentoring, on the other hand, is typically mentee-driven and reactive, depending on the mentee to raise issues and ask questions.
Coaching versus mentoring? No!
But it’s critical to understand that coaching and mentoring are not in opposition to each other – it is not a “versus” relationship, but a complementary one.
In fact, this is why we offer – and have always offered – both services. Qualified coaches who have a background both in running their own businesses and in managing teams in direct employment often have extensive prior experience of both giving and receiving mentoring advice.
Just take a look at the table below, for instance; what it shows is yin and yang by any other name!
The two halves fit together perfectly - and what emerges is a holistic approach that answers both coaching objectives (e.g., what skills do I need to improve my conversion rate? How many clients do I need to meet my income goals?) and mentoring questions (e.g., do I want to leave a legacy, and if so, what? Am I overwhelmed and/or struggling with motivation?).
The figures show the need
Any business owner or entrepreneur who has taken advantage of coaching or mentoring will know that both approaches deliver real help to address real issues, but if you’re sceptical, just take a look at the industry figures.
Over half of all UK business owners have experienced poor mental health over the last 18 months, according to recent media reporting, with one in three experiencing burnout. There’s the case for mentoring, right there.
At the same time, research has also shown that the reasons many UK small businesses fail are shortcomings in skills and capabilities that can be learnt - leadership and management, poor staff communication and feedback, lack of clearly defined systems and processes, an absence of clear goals or strategy…
Those are textbook coaching needs if ever there were any.
Coaching and mentoring: two sides of the same coin
In summary, for many business owners, and the lonely search for advice and support they often find themselves confronted with, it’s far less a choice between mentoring and coaching as a choice between having to find a separate provider to cover each, or one provider to cover both, as and when the need for each arises.
In fact, that sounds like a great point to raise with us when you get in touch!
To find out more about how we can help you and your business find a better way, with advice and support, whether coaching, mentoring, or both, get in touch today.