How clear is the difference between coaching and mentoring for yourself? And for your clients? What is coaching and what is mentoring? How can a mentor help me? What is the best option for me?
We read a lot of books, articles and posts where we can find definitions and information about the two different supports and professions. Let me allow this simplification: the mentor is the person who answers your questions, the expert, someone that has more experience in a specific field, area, organisation. The coach is the person who questions your answers, someone that helps you to explore in depth your expertees. Honestly both help you in different ways in your future journey.
But what happens if we put together and we merge the skills and the competences that each of the two professions offer? Let’s think about the coach-mentor. Who is the coach-mentor? She or he is a coach with an expertise in a specific area, field or organisation in which the client intends to work.
So back to the simplified labelling … the coach-mentor is someone who plays the two roles? I would like to answer not really! And let’s give the reason we can answer in this way.
In this article we would like to explore and answer to 4 questions:
- What are the skills for a coach-mentor?
- What is the approach that a coach-mentor should take?
- How should the coach-mentor tailor the program with their client coachee-mentees?
- How can the coach-mentor be more effective with their clients?
What are the skills for a coach-mentor and a coach?
I would like to start from the differences between a coach and a mentor (coach-mentor), as I think the similarities are even more!!!
- Experience: to be a mentor you have to be savvy, expert, knowledgeable of what the mentee would like to learn and know.
- Role model: many mentees look at their mentor as someone that is capable, inspiring, an example or someone that they would like to be (in sport, in life, in their organisation);
- The mutual learning approach: in particular if it is an internal mentorship ( that means that both the mentor and mentee work in the same organisation). In this case there would be a mutual learning process during the mentorship program. This is something that can be planned at the beginning and discussed and shared (explicit learning process) or something that can happened in a implicit way;
- Be a facilitator: with the network of acquaintances, internal procedures, applications in use, etc.
- Advice: understand when is the right moment to share an advice a best practice or your experience
What are the similarities, the skills that a mentor can use because he is a coach as well? If you are a coach and you active practice as a coach you developed all of the following areas are part of
- Building and maintaining the rapport: this is the most important part with the contract at the beginning of the program, because even if the mentee chose us as they were inspired by us or they think we can offer them a lot of answers, we need to clarify what our role is.
- Contract: what is the mentee looking for? They are looking for someone who tells them or someone who asks them! It is very important to clarify during the chemistry session how you can help.
- Build Trust: How can be created and maintained, in particular in a working environment. If there is no trust, the entire program will be affected.
- Empathy: using your emotional intelligence and adapting your language thought to the person you are talking with.
- Feedback: how can we learn from each other through feedback? What can we improve? How can we help mentees build and develop their self-esteem?
- Intuition: if you listen deeply you can use your intuition to help your mentee to explore what is in them.
- Listen actively: this competence, with the powerful questions is one of the two most important virtual muscles that every coach, every person, should have and continue to develop.
- Powerful questions: they need to be useful to the client, the mentee. Think when you are ready to ask a question … Who am I asking this for?
- The agenda and the goal: is the mentee who proposes his own goal or need to be satisfied. We help them to clarify, to identify the way to find out how to achieve the goal.
- The program: how to prepare to work with the mentee, can be easily adapted from a coaching programme, in terms of process, sessions, tools and approach.
- Tools and techniques: a lot of the tools that you know and utilise as a coach can be used or adapted for the mentoring program.
What is the approach that a coach-mentor should take?
- If we love staging in the coaching space and we love the approach, we can use the tenet that the answers are in the client when we move to a mentoring space.
- The first question we need to ask the client/mentee is: What do you think is the main goal of the mentoring program?
- The majority of them think that they want to take the most from the mentor, receive as much as they can (traditional mentoring).
- A small part of them think that can be an osmotic change of expertise, experience and knowledge (reciprocal mentoring).
- Hardly anyone thinks they can find many of the answers within themselves or through research and exploration resulting from mentoring sessions.
How should the coach-mentor tailor the program with their client?
- A good way to start and manage the program is:
to prepare the conversation having in mind what ICF and EMCC code of ethics and framework of competency require and foresee. - Bear in mind that even in this situation it is the client that decides the goal and sets the agenda.
- Clarify with the client the duration, the structure of the program: how many sessions, the chemistry a follow up at the end of the program.
- If the client does not have a clear goal, we can help them with a discovery tool: a welcome questionnaire, the dreamo-grafy, a visual tool with cards or a wheel (for instance the MENTOR wheel, the wheel of the first 100 days).
- It could be interesting at the beginning of the program before the first session, and after the chemistry (discovery) session to share with the client the MENTOR wheel. This tool can help to better understand what is the client’s engagement and the motivation for the mentorship program. Here below how this wheel can be used.
How can the coach-mentor be more effective with their clients?
It sounds like a cliché, but instead it is the essence of the program. As a coach-mentor we have to be interested and not interesting! Because they were already chosen and for this reason on the stage there is the client. If the coach-mentor feels they have an amazing experience to share … before doing it, simply answer these simple questions:
- What is the reason behind that sharing?
- What will the mentee learn?
- If I were the mentee how would I like to listen to this story/ experience?
The MENTOR Wheel as a discovery tool to work with the client
When we start the mentoring program, after the chemistry session, it can be very useful to share with the mentee: the contract, the introductory questionnaire and a tool that can help them reflect.
The mentor wheel can be thought of as a thermometer (i.e. tool to measure temperature, state of interest, motivation and enthusiasm).. We can choose different areas to rate. Here one example:
Here one example of how to populate the MENTOR Wheel and which areas ask to rate:
M ⇒ Meaning or the Motivation
E ⇒ Expectation, the level of the Engagement, how important are their Emotions
N ⇒ How they want to Nourish or how important is to develop their Network
T ⇒ the Time that they can dedicate to this program (priority) or what are their Thoughts
O ⇒ what kind of Opportunities they can take from this program, what Objectives they would like to achieve
R ⇒ What are their expected Results or how they expect to develop their Relationship
Instead of measuring and rating within a scale from 1 to 10, could be emoticons with faces 🙁 😐 🙂 :-)) or colours
And the 👍👎🟰for identifying the areas they would explore or focus more.
If you want to add the MENTOR wheel in your mentor process, feel free to use it and let us know how it worked.
Back to the initial question, what is the best option, in this specific situation? To be a coach or a mentor? A mentor with coaching skills can be more successful with their clients as a coach-mentor can support their clients to explore their reality and offer the space to discover the different options and opportunities, being able to intervene, where intuition suggests it, in a non-invasive way, always keeping in mind that it is the client who must grow in terms of skills and self-esteem and not the coach-mentor to demonstrate its competency.
And last but not least, if the mentor has the ability to listen and ask catalytic and provocative questions, in two words, “being interested” and “not interesting” in the customer’s growth, this will favour and accelerate their growth and development in the areas of interest to them.
About the author
Fabio Garganego is a Faculty Member at Kingstown College and a Life and Career Coach with a particular interest in Corporate Well-Being and team coaching. He has over 10 years experience in coaching and mentoring teams in different organisations. Fabio is a native of Italy, fluent in French, English. He has been working and living in Ireland for the last 7 years.
He has a Master degree in Electronic Engineering and a Master in Organisation, Management and Innovation. He is the co-founder of Pentago, a team coaching company that operates in Ireland, UK and Italy.
