Coaching, Mentoring and Training: I’m confused!
Coaching, consulting, mentoring and training are commonly used terms in the organisational context and can be easily confused. These terms differ in the corporate world from how they are used in other industries such as sports. The post aims to tease out the differences so that you understand who to engage to benefit your business.
I’ll explain these terms in the business context. Given how the use of each term can vary, I don't hold these up as definitive explanations. I only hope that they can provide some useful distinctions.
Here’s a quick summary followed by a more detailed explanation of each. I’ll also devote a special section to explain what is understood by Agile Coaching.
| Term | Description |
|---|---|
| Coaching | Generally one-to-one and sometimes with a whole team. The Client is the expert in their context. Coach asks questions and rarely contributes content. |
| Mentoring | One-to-one. The Mentor offers wisdom, experience and opportunities. |
| Training | Developing competence through the teaching of specific knowledge, information, and skills. |
Coaching
The International Coaching Federation (ICF) defines coaching as:
"partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential.”
In general, a coach uses a coaching framework to guide the client to find their own solutions rather than providing them with solutions. Coaching helps the client think in new ways, see their situation from a different angle and identify what existing resources, strengths and skills they can use to shift their situation in a direction they want to go. Coaching is a partnership, or even “leading from behind”, to assist the client to achieve their desired outcome.
The most important distinction from the other modalities is that, in coaching, the client is the subject matter expert. The Coach is an expert at asking questions but rarely contributes answers or solutions as this shifts towards an expert mindset which is part of Mentoring or Coaching.
One misconception about coaching is that it is used for performance remediation. Someone only gets coaching if their performance is not up to scratch. Instead, coaching is for performance development and enhancement. A coach will help keep you focused on your goals, and the process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership.
Given that coaching can be a deeply personal and private experience, the content of coaching sessions is confidential, even if paid for by an employer. What is discussed in a coaching session remains between you and your coach. This is part of the strong Code of Ethics of any professional coaching organisation.
Different Coaching Focuses
An Executive Coach is specifically focused at the C-Suite and Senior Management levels. There’s an expectation that the Coach is comfortable exploring business-related topics, as well as personal development topics, with the Client to improve their personal performance. Improving the performance of the Executive then has flow-on benefits to the organisation as a whole.
Executive coaches serve as neutral sounding boards to clients, giving organisational leaders a listening ear when they’re working through decisions or seeking personal improvement. Executive coaches can also help these leaders learn how to better work with, guide, and lead their people.
A Leadership Coach is very similar to an Executive coach but with a wider mandate to work with leaders throughout the organisation rather than just senior management. The coaching helps to support the development of leadership skills and awareness.
An Organisational Coach focuses on supporting an employee, either as an individual, as part of a team, and the organisation to achieve improved business performance and operational effectiveness.
And then there’s a Career Coach who provides the support, help, and guidance you need to figure out how to reach your career goals. Career coaches help with career planning, career changes, career advice, and other career decisions.
You might notice that there is a common pattern throughout which is that the coach is there to help you achieve your goals in whatever context is important to you.
The Solution-Focused Coaching Approach
Understanding the problem is not always necessary, nor the most direct path to a solution.
As the name of our consultancy suggests, the approach we use for coaching and organisational development is called the Solution Focused approach. Solutions-focused (SF) coaching is a goal-directed, collaborative approach to change that is conducted through a series of precisely constructed questions.
The SF approach is an incisive way to build positive change in tough, and often complex, situations. It is a rich and multi-dimensional approach delivering breakthrough results in many contexts including organisational change, conflict resolution, coaching and leadership.
The SF approach focuses on what’s wanted and investigates what’s working already (even a little bit) to find resources, skills and strengths that can contribute towards the preferred outcome. The focus is to discover what's wanted, what's going well, and practical progress that leads to a culture of collaboration and long-lasting results.
SF Coaching doesn't use diagnosis or complex mental models to figure out what the problem is before it can be addressed. Instead, SF Coaching focuses on what the client wants to achieve and how to move towards it using their existing resources, strengths and skills. SF Coaching usually only requires one or a few sessions - as many as the client feels is useful - rather than a fixed number of contracted sessions.
Mentoring
Mentoring is usually a semi-formal ongoing relationship. The Mentor has the experience to guide and share with the Mentee and also provides support and encouragement. For example, a Mentor might help a recent graduate with advice about how to progress their career and provide access to their professional network. The Mentor is expected to have experience to pass on in a given field or a closely related field.
Compared to coaching, where the coach doesn’t contribute subject matter content, the mentor contributes expertise and experience to the conversation.
One of the most interesting ways I’ve seen mentoring applied is reverse-mentoring where a new, junior member of an organisation mentors a senior member of the organisation. This helps bridge generational divides and keep older members of the workforce in touch with younger generations.
Training
Training is usually about teaching people specific knowledge, information and skills and helping them develop competency in applying what they’ve learned.
The development of competency requires supervision and mentoring over time combined with teaching events. The teaching event is usually classroom or online training. Unfortunately, most organisation stop there.
Effective training is a process not an event. Is it a realistic assumption that someone can attend a two-day training course and walk out of there immediately competent? No matter how good the trainer is, this would be a pretty special accomplishment.
The best that an isolated training event can do is lay the foundation for improved capability. It is managers, supervisors and colleagues who must assist the learner in developing competency on the job after a training event. The competency development process includes four stages.
Create readiness in
the learner (personal relevance)
the learner’s manager (how to support the application of new skills)
the work environment (allow space so that the learner can apply what they learn)
This is the traditional course attendance associated with training.
At the end of this stage, the learner is not yet competent in applying what they’ve learned.
Most learning occurs in the application of what was learned in real-world work.
This requires strong support from the learner’s manager to provide the space and time required.
A professional coach may provide additional application support, especially with soft skills.
The learner provides examples of how they applied what they learned, and what they learned in the process.
Knowing that they will have to demonstrate what they have learned in applying their new skills helps learners pay attention to each step in their journey.
Agile Coaching - where things get blurry
Agile Coaching Competency Framework
The role of Agile Coach is different again to the definitions used above and may include aspects of all of the above. An Agile Coach uses a combination of coaching, mentoring and training. The purpose of an Agile Coach varies from guiding an individual team to do Agile software development well, to guiding an Agile Transformation for an entire organisation usually working in a team with other Agile Coaches. It's no wonder this term creates such confusion.
Broadly, an Agile Coach is someone who:
Appreciates the depth of Agile values, principles and practices
Supports a team to understand, appreciate and implement Agile values, principles and practices in a given context
Helps management, at all levels of the organisation, to understand the benefits of working in Agile ways
Helps managers and other organisational roles to adopt Agile values and principles
Brings ideas from professional facilitation, professional coaching, conflict management, mediation and other realms of expertise to help an Agile team become high performing.
An Agile Coach needs to understand the values, principles and process of Agile ways of working and be able to pass on this information with one on one or team conversations and sometimes more traditional training sessions.
The Agile Coach needs to work not only with a given team but also with the wider organisational ecosystem to remove blockers that restrict the speed at which the team can adapt and respond as needed. This takes their skills into the field of Change Management.
The Agile Coach would ideally also have deep technical skills and be able to teach agile programming practices such as Test-Driven Design. However, it is rare to find someone who has this full range of skills so the context for a given Agile Coaching role needs to be clearly defined.
The Agile Coaching Competency Framework gives an overview of the breadth and depth of an Agile Coach.