Leadership coaching vs mentoring

Too many employers lack an understanding of how leadership coaching and mentoring work and how to deliver them correctly.

This results in wasted budgets, hundreds of hours lost, and minimal-to-no positive behaviour change.

Learn the fundamental differences between coaching and mentoring and what’s best for building high-performance leaders now.

What is leadership coaching?

Leadership coaching helps managers improve their performance under the guidance of a coach.

Let’s say one of your IT managers is constantly missing project deadlines. Why is their time management letting them down? A qualified coach will work with the manager to understand the issue and help them build a strategy to stop it from happening again.

Plotting tangible goals and the journey to achieving time management mastery, great coaches will also challenge managers to take the right actions every day.

Studies show the impact of good leadership coaching has positive results. Employee engagement is 8% higher at companies with strong coaching cultures than those with weak ones.^[1] Some employers have reported nearly 600% ROI from executive coaching, alone.^[2]

What is leadership mentoring?

Senior leaders have taken less experienced proteges under their wing for centuries.

Steering them away from mistakes and introducing them to new, valuable colleagues are just a few of mentoring’s advantages.

That’s why a 2019 survey suggests 76% of employees think mentors are important.^[3]

Mentees gain the support of someone whose already navigated the minefield to achieve leadership success, and mentors grow from being challenged by fresh ideas and experiences.

Peer-mentoring and reverse-mentoring have also become popular methods for helping more women and ethnic minorities excel in leadership positions.

When evaluating data from its mentoring programmes between 1996-2009, a large US technology company found that their ROI was over 1,000%,^[4] and mentored professionals were five times more likely to be promoted than those without mentors.

Where leadership coaching and mentoring differ

Focus:

Coaching is performance-orientated. Coaches support managers to learn the skills they need to overcome their biggest leadership obstacles.

Mentoring can inspire individuals to be better performing leaders, but it focuses on a much wider range of issues than just performance – from helping leaders handle stress to showing appreciation to employees from underrepresented communities.

Approach:

Mentoring is typically directive. The onus is on the mentor to advise the mentee on how to achieve their goals, based on their own experiences.

Coaching is different. Coaches probe with investigative questions and give control to the learners to dictate their own path to leadership growth.

Format:

Coaching tends to be more rigorous than mentoring.

Mentoring is typically more casual, relationship-based and can cover any number of issues, while coaching is usually only offered to managers that need immediate improvement in their leadership skills to achieve a business goal within a set time frame.

This often provides the basis for how coaching sessions are scheduled, administered and the topics discussed.

What’s best for improving leadership performance?

Although mentoring is a great tool for connecting people throughout an organisation, sharing different ideas, and giving emerging talents confidence to succeed, coaching is a better solution for driving leadership performance.

However, to maximise coaching results, leaders should use the Precision Coaching methodology.

Other forms of coaching focus on the relationship between coach and coachee, with 84% of coachees believing that the relationship dynamic with their coach was critical to the coaching success.^[5]

But scientific evidence shows only 8% of performance improvements are explained by the coach-coachee relationship.^[6]

This is because typical coaching approaches focus on ‘matching’ coaches and coachees on attributes that have little evidence of impacting positive outcomes for individuals or organisations, such as personality and gender.^[7]

By contrast, the Precision Coaching methodology is built on a framework that drives performance.

Precision Coaching builds better leaders by ensuring they are focused on solutions-based goals, mastering their targeted skill and within a nurturing environment that facilitates positive behaviour change.

Read more information about Precision Coaching.

If you have any question about Precision Coaching, please get in touch and speak to one of our experts.

References:

1. Jenna Filipkowski, Mark Ruth, and Abby Heverin, “Building a Coaching Culture with Millennial Leaders” (The International Coach Federation (ICF) and Human Capital Institute (HCI), May 18, 2017).
2. Joy McGovern et al., “Maximizing the Impact of Executive Coaching,” The Manchester Review 6, no. 1 (2001).
3. “Study Explores Professional Mentor-Mentee Relationships in 2019.” Olivet Nazarene University, 2009.
4. Katy Dickinson, Tanya Jankot and Helen Gracon. “Sun mentoring: 1996-2009.” (2009).
5. Joy McGovern et al., “Maximizing the Impact of Executive Coaching,” The Manchester Review 6, no. 1 (2001).
6. Tim Theeboom, Bianca Beersma, and Annelies E.M. van Vianen, “Does Coaching Work? A Meta-Analysis on the Effects of Coaching on Individual Level Outcomes in an Organizational Context,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 9, no. 1 (2013): pp. 1-18, https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2013.837499.
7. Simmy Grover and Adrian Furnham, “Coaching as a Developmental Intervention in Organisations: A Systematic Review of Its Effectiveness and the Mechanisms Underlying It,” PLOS ONE 11, no. 7 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0159137.