Coaching vs Mentoring: Do you need both?

There are many ways to get stuck in your career. You can find yourself feeling unmotivated, frustrated at a lack of progress, confused about what your goals should be, or uncertain about how to motivate your team, manage your workload or get your mojo back. When you hit a wall, it’s time to ask for help. But where should you turn? Should you consider coaching vs mentoring and what other kinds of support might you find to help you out?

Friends are always a good first step, but when it comes to career and professional dilemmas it’s best to turn to people who have a broader view of career advancement and can offer an objectivity that your friends may not have.

Who can help me when I am stuck in my career?

Many people start exploring coaching vs mentoring for career advice, but I want to encourage you to expand your view of support for career challenges. While coaches and mentors will both offer the most direct advice and support, depending on how and why you’re stuck, you’ll find support and good ideas from a variety of other people. Use them all! 

Here’s a quick primer on the different ways people can help you when you’re facing a career dilemma.

• Mentors: The best mentors have achieved some of the success you seek and can offer you insights into the organizational and industry waters you are swimming in; their own work experience is best if closely aligned with your career goals.
• Coaches: Good coaches will have relevant experience, but will put their own experience to the side to focus on you and your specific career, leadership and professional challenges. They will offer practical tools and strategies.
• Sponsors: A sponsor will open doors for you and create opportunities by putting their credibility on the line to support you for promotions and assignments. Sometimes you may not even know they’re there as sponsorship often happens behind closed doors.
• Allies: People you can ally with have aligned goals and needs in your work environment. Their support is usually a two-way street, both of you offering each other some support to gain influence or access to specific stakeholders, information and resources.
• Therapists: Psychological counselors are solely focused on what’s going on inside you and will have less interest in, or insight into, your professional context, persona or success. Therapists tend to focus on core emotional issues that are common across your personal and professional lives.
• Friends: We all need friends and family who love us despite our career frustrations. In addition to allowing us to vent and feel seen and heard, friends can be great referral sources for mentors, coaches and therapists.

There’s no one-size-fits all support person for your career challenges. Make sure to surround yourself with a team of people who can give you different perspectives and kinds of support. 

How are coaching and mentoring similar?

Coaches and mentors provide the two most important types of professional development and career advancement support you can get. The reason their support is so instrumental to your success is because both a coach and a mentor focus their efforts solely on YOU. They’re there for you and your benefit. They offer the gifts of their knowledge, wisdom and expertise, in service to you and your goals.

In this sense they will both offer you:

• General and specific career and leadership advice
• Knowledge about career development and leadership
• Insights on how to navigate organizational dynamics
• Support in thinking through your own goals
• Support in developing a plan to reach your goals

How are coaching and mentoring different?

When you sit down to do the coaching vs mentoring analysis and decide what kind of help you need right now, it’s really useful to look at what differentiates the support you’ll get from both coaches and mentors, and what your takeaways from each may be. 

A lot of people ask me, “What is the biggest difference between coaching and mentoring?” Basically, a mentor will share their own experiences hoping you’ll find it relevant, while a coach will center on your experience and goals, working to help you grow into your higher potential. The mentor offers you insights they’ve learned in their career and can hopefully help you extract what aspects of their learning can help you reach your goals. The coach will listen more deeply to understand what you’re missing and then offer up the information, advice or tools that can support you with your particular challenge. In this sense, coaching is usually a more customized and time-efficient way for you grow.

There are some other differences. Coaches are generally better trained in helping people grow and develop while mentors are trained at what they do for a living. You’ll come out of a coaching engagement with new mindsets, more assignments and practical tools and strategies to apply. Mentors will be more likely to give you more information specific to your industry, job track or company. Usually, you’re more likely to grow, change and develop through a coaching engagement, since that’s what coaches are trained to help you do. While many mentors are often very interested in helping you grow, they may or may not be skilled at it. 

Here’s a good way of comparing coaching and mentoring:

Coaching vs Mentoring: You Need Both

Do you need a coach or a mentor? Most likely you need both. As a human on a career path, you need a coach to help you navigate your personal career and leadership journey most efficiently, but you also need the insights and knowledge of someone who’s walked the path ahead of you, which mentors can do. 

A coach can help you look out for the general challenges and opportunities that lie ahead, giving you tools to succeed in the moment and in the future, regardless of which path you choose. A good mentor will point at specific obstacles and choices in the path you’re on, discuss the pros and cons with you and help you decide how to keep moving. 

How can you get the most out of your time with a coach or mentor? 

The best way to get a coach or mentor talking, quickly giving you the most specific and helpful suggestions, is to share your goals with them. Ask them for help refining your goals and figuring out the next steps to take to reach them. Even if you’re not sure what goals you want to focus on, or what questions to ask, give them a nugget of what you do want for your future. The best coaches and mentors will quickly pick up on this and start asking you questions that make you think more deeply. They’ll ask you if you’ve tried certain strategies and help you sort out which ones are worth pursuing right now.

Here are some other tips for making the most of your relationship for coaching relationships:

• Come on time, set aside distractions
• Keep a journal or notebook with notes from your sessions to refer back to and track your thoughts and experiences related to coaching
• Set aside time between sessions to review your notes, decide how to put your coaches advice into practice and reflect on what’s going well and what is challenging you so you can discuss with your coach
• Prepare for each session and be open with an overview of your progress and obstacles since your last discussion and areas you’d like to focus on in the current discussion

Here are some other tips for making the most of your relationship for mentoring relationships:

• Come on time, set aside distractions
• Check In regularly, especially in remote/hybrid work environments
• Agree that the mentee/protégé will set the agenda, manage scheduling logistics and come prepared to brief the mentor on progress and challenges since the last conversation
• Agree on goals and duration of mentor relationship
• Agree on allowed/not allowed confidentiality topics and communication protocols (specifically, text and phone, which are more intrusive)
• Follow Up in integrity on any commitments made to each other

What you should definitely not ask a coach or mentor is for them to do any of this work for you or tell you what you should want or do. Coaches and mentors are not mind-readers. They don’t know what’s best for you; only you know that. Their greatest gift to you is in spurring your thinking, revealing paths and strategies for you to consider and supporting you and guiding you as you move forward.

For more resources on mentoring women on the leadership track, check our InPower free resources and paid mentoring toolkits.

Are Coaching and Mentoring Confidential?

Most mentors and coaches know that they need to foster trust with you, and will treat what you discuss with them confidentially. Coaches in particular are ethically conscious of their obligation to treat what you say to them as confidential. That said, both coaches and mentors are human and, especially if they’re not aware of the sensitivity of what you share, may mention something to others you may wish they hadn’t. 

For these reasons, it’s always good to discuss confidentiality early in your relationship. And even if you’ve agreed to hold information in confidence, before sharing anything particularly private, it’s a good idea to ask that it be held in total confidentiality. In particular here are two situations that can make it easy for coaches and mentors to compromise confidentiality unintentionally, and where a specific reminder can be very helpful.

Coaching confidentiality challenge: If your coach is hired by your company and has an independent line of communication with your boss it’s likely they will be asked, or want to offer, information that can help your boss manage you more successfully. While you can presume your coach would only have your best interests in mind, when you want their advice on something you or your boss would consider sensitive, call it out to your coach with a request for confidentiality. In a situation where you don’t trust your boss, you can ask that everything be held in confidence. If the trust problem is of dangerous proportions, you may want to consider hiring a coach that you pay for yourself and who has no relationship or access to your boss at all.

Mentoring confidentiality challenge: If your mentor is part of your network, and has connections with friends and colleagues in your company or industry you have to remain aware of this fact. Especially in informal relationships (as opposed to structured programs with which mentors and mentees may have contractual relationships) you must remember your mentor is a free agent with their own goals unrelated to you. Generally, you cannot assume that they will treat what you tell them with complete confidentiality, so it’s always important to flag specific things and ask them to keep your thoughts private. 

How Can You Help Others?: Mentor vs. Sponsor vs. Ally

Especially when you develop experience with coaches and mentors who have helped you, please pay it forward and find ways to help others, passing on what you’ve learned. As someone willing to help others there are three primary roles you can play, within your company and more broadly among your colleagues.

Of course you can mentor others, but consider also using your influence to sponsor others. Look for opportunities to help talented younger employees gain visibility and access to opportunities, especially among underrepresented leaders such as women, Blacks and people of color generally. This makes you a talent scout and allows you to open doors for people, who otherwise may not get the opportunity. 

You can also become an ally for people who have aligned interests. This is particularly valuable for underrepresented leaders who may not have the natural cultural alliances that come from common race and gender demographics.

Just like coaching vs mentoring is not really an either/or choice, neither is deciding how to give back to others. Never stop learning and never stop passing on what you’ve learned–in all forms. This is how we all grow.