Facilitation, coaching and mentoring are important but distinct skills which we all need to develop – especially for leaders and managers. You can read about the role of a facilitator in The Role of a Facilitator – I’s suggest reading that before moving on with this document.
While facilitation tends to focus on working with groups, coaching and mentoring tend to be one-on-one activities. This document gives a brief introduction to these two roles, and highlights some of the differences between them.
Mentoring and Coaching
The advice below is designed to introduce mentoring and coaching and give a few pointers to help you be more effective in these roles.
Exercise: Take 5 minutes to reflect on your gut reaction to the roles of coach and mentor. What's the difference between these two roles? What does each word mean to you? Where are they similar? Where do they differ?
A coach has some great questions for your answers; a mentor has some great answers for your questions
Fundamental Skills
Many of the core skills are common with those of facilitation. The Role of a Facilitator covers five core skills. Although all five are useful in a mentoring or coaching context, the first three are absolutely crucial.
- Listening
- Questioning
- Empathizing
- Leading
- Adapting
Without the ability to listen, question and empathize it's very difficult to coach or mentor effectively. But since I’ve already covered these, I won't talk about them below. Go read The Role of a Facilitator and then come back here.
What is Mentoring?
A mentor is someone who shares their knowledge, skills and/or experience, to help another to develop and grow.
Unlike facilitation and coaching, mentoring always involves sharing your knowledge and skills with your mentees and inspiring them to develop themselves. This might involve one-to-one conversations with others in your organisation, sharing guidance in Slack or via Loom videos, or troubleshooting problems that individuals are having.
Almost everyone has some previous experience that you can share with others, and even if you’re not in a “formal” mentoring position it’s a good idea to give some thought to how you can be a good mentor. It’s not as simple as just throwing advice at people!
Core Mentoring Skills
In addition to the fundamental skills above, the skills below are important to mentors...
- Inspire - Your role as a mentor is to help folks develop and grow. Some of the best mentoring involves providing a little targeted advice and a whole lot of inspiration!
- Be a role model - Role modelling is an incredibly powerful way to inspire learning and personal growth. If you give advice to the people you're mentoring, make sure you are seen to be living it yourself. Failure to do this is the fastest way to loose trust and credibility in the eyes of your mentees.
- Have some knowledge, skills and experience to share - We've already talked about this, but remember that you can learn from your conversations with learners. Make a point of reflecting after any conversations – have you learned anything that you can pass on to others in suturing mentoring conversations?
- Know how to explain - You don't need to be an expert educator, but you do need the ability to make the advice you're giving clear to your mentee.
- Provide corrective feedback - Allowing learners to make their own mistakes (and learn from them) is important, but you need to correct learners when they're heading in the wrong direction.
- Be very approachable - Because a mentor is more expert than the mentee, it's especially important to be as open and approachable as possible. In a relationship where you're advising or teaching, it often takes more intentional effort to create a safe environment for the learner. The more expert you are, the harder you'll have to work to balance the relationship.
What is Coaching?
A coach is someone who helps a person develop by listening deeply and asking powerful questions.
While mentoring involves instructing and advising, coaching is focused on listening deeply and asking powerful questions – eliciting the skills, knowledge and creativity your coachee already possesses.
Coaching is not about solving other people's problems or handling their issues. It's about intentionally creating a space where they are able to do this themselves. Consider the example below...
Creating the Right Environment for Coaching Conversations
We looked at environment in The Role of a Facilitator, and as with facilitation it's important that you can create an environment that's conducive to coaching conversations.
This needs to be safe enough that the coachee can be honest with you and themselves, and take risks. It also needs to be a courageous place where the coachee can approach their choices with motivation, creativity and commitment. We should be aiming to create an environment which...
- Puts the coachee first
- Is calm and spacious
- Is trusting and confidential
- Is safe (but not necessarily comfortable)
Co-Active Coaching Principles
There are a huge number of frameworks and models that we can draw on as coaches. One that I particularly like is Co-Active Coaching. It focuses on creating a relationship between coach and coachee where both parties contribute equally. The only difference between coach and coachee is that this "designed alliance" exists to serve the coachee, not the coach.
The Co-Active model is also underpinned by some great cornerstones...
- People are naturally creative, resourceful and whole
- Focus on the whole person
- Dance in the moment
- Evoke transformation
Core Coaching Skills
The core skills of coaching are very similar to those of facilitation. By far the most important skills to master are listening and asking questions. We'll spend some time looking at these in more detail in one of our synchronous workshops.
