Recently I had the pleasure of anchoring a fireside chat on ‘mentoring', with Kris Gopalakrishnan, CEO of Infosys, held under the aegis of the PAN-IIT mentoring movement. I found one of the questions – “what is the difference between mentoring and coaching” – a thought-provoking one.

In its simplest form, coaching can be thought of as the practice of supporting an individual through the process of identifying areas for development, allowing them to explore alternative solutions and helping achieve specific personal or professional improvement. For example, I am currently working with coachees to try and improve their skills in managing high-performance teams or, say, building ‘executive presence'.

Mentoring, on the other hand, has been defined as “a relationship between an experienced person and a less experienced person for the purpose of helping the one with less experience”. Mentors use their knowledge and experience to open doors to otherwise out-of-reach opportunities. For example, an ambitious new entrant into an organisation may seek a mentor's support in understanding the ‘dos and don'ts' in developing requisite competencies and navigating the organisation dynamics for getting on to the fast track to become a P&L head in, say, less than ten years!

The common thread uniting all types of coaching and mentoring efforts is that it offers a vehicle for analysis, reflection and action that enables the individuals to realise their true potential.

Coaches and mentors no doubt share many similarities in discharging their roles. First, off the bat, they facilitate the exploration of motivations, desires, skills and thought processes to assist the individual in making real and lasting change. They both use questioning techniques to facilitate bringing clarity in an individual's own consciousness.

A case in point was a coachee of mine - the founder-CEO of a medium-sized IT product and services company, who continued to be a hands-on sales person. He was puzzled by the organisation's lack of commensurate growth or profitability in spite of having a product that was well received and a set of good clients for several years. During our coaching sessions, he realised that he wore multiple hats as an owner/promoter (investor - looking for returns), CEO (professional leader of the ship) and head of sales (functional– intent on increasing sales at any cost) – each with valid but potentially different – and at times, conflicting – goals, expectations and business drivers. When he realised this, he brought in an outside investor to fund his growth capital, freed himself up from his dual responsibilities by appointing a new head of sales and chose to remain a full-time CEO. With all these strategic changes, he was able to bring about a significant inflexion point in his business.

The coach or mentor continually encourages his ward to improve competencies and to develop new ones, where necessary, on their own in order to be successful. They actively discourage unhealthy dependencies on the coaching or mentoring relationship, thus striving to be seen as a catalyst and not a crutch.

Just as there are a lot of similarities, there are also differences between coaching and mentoring. As we have seen, mentoring in its traditional form enables an individual to learn from the wisdom of an older and wiser colleague and is thus undertaken on a pro bono basis. A coach, on the other hand, helps unearth the ‘blocks' that are preventing their coachees from achieving their innate potential. Coaches thus tend to be professionals external to the organisation and coaching is undertaken on a paid basis.

Coaching is focused more on developmental or specific issues and is typically for a short duration. The sessions are usually held monthly and the coaching journey for CXOs could take around 6-9 months, while, according to globally-acclaimed CEO coach, Marshall Goldsmith, CEO coaching could last for one to two years. Mentoring, on the other hand, is on a “need basis”, lasts for a much longer duration and the mentoring meetings could take place frequently and informally.

While coaches were largely drawn from outside, ‘managers as a coach' philosophy enables coaches to be appointed from within organisations. Similarly, experienced persons external to an organisation as mentors could be just as powerful too. I remember once being approached by a young, US-educated MBA who was employed at a mid-management level in a medium-sized, family-owned concern, being offered an elevation to the role of Head of sales. His dilemma was whether he should continue at a senior level in his smaller organisation or shift to a larger organisation with a recognised “brand”, if necessary at a slightly-lesser level. After our mentoring interactions, he figured that he had the vision, the capability and the confidence to impact the growth of his organisation enormously and so decided to continue with his company. Today, his organisation has super brands, grown significantly and he is the CEO!

The mentor often passes on not only tangible knowledge, but also advice and insights gleaned from years in the field and thus will be visibly seen as more effective. A coach on the other hand (as so nicely pointed out by Timothy Gallwey in his series of books on “The Inner Game”), attempts to unlock a person's potential to achieve maximum performance through a facilitative approach to coaching and may thus be perceived as being less explicit in passing on knowledge.

Once the organisation has clarity on the leadership and developmental needs of an individual or group of individuals and the indicative time-frame for such intervention, it may now be easy to decide whether coaching or mentoring is the right way forward.

(The writer is an accredited CEO coach/consultant and can be contacted on >dash@gossamer-consultants.com )

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