Coaching & Mentoring: What's the Difference?
The process of training and supervising a person to better their performance is known as Coaching. Look the other term Mentoring, which is some counseling process to guide and support a person for his career development. In an organization, both coaching and mentoring is a part of human resource development. Sometimes people find it difficult to distinguish the two. After a detailed research, we have compiled the difference between Coaching and Mentoring, have a look at it.
Definition of Coaching:
Coaching is a capacity development process, in which an individual or a group learns to improve their performances through workshops, seminars, and other similar activities. In this process, an expert is provided to the learners who may be a senior employee or an external brought to the organization, to give training to the employees and analyze their performances and other job behaviors for the purpose of increasing efficiency and identifying training needs for further improvement. Coaching is time bound and well planned.
The person who directs or instructs is known as coach while the person who is being directed is known as coachee. Coaching helps in uncovering their professional capabilities of an employee, understanding their strengths and weaknesses, knowing their potential, building key skills, etc. which are helpful for the accomplishment of the organizational goals.
Coaching process has been classified into the following steps:
Contracting
Assessment
Feedback and Action Plan
Active Learning
Review
Definition of Mentoring:
Mentoring is a human development activity, in which a person known as a mentor, possesses good knowledge and experience shares it with another person called 'mentee' who is having less knowledge and expertise to help him out in the development of his career, improving his self-esteem, enhancing productivity, etc. It is all about general development and psychological well-being of a person. Mentoring can be provided either by a person outside the organization or an individual who is within the organization.
It provides encouragement, insight and counseling to the protege for the development of his career. The relationship between the parties is considered as 'mentorship', which is a long-term informal one. The Mentor may include teacher, guide, adviser, consultant, host, counselor, etc. The main purpose behind mentoring is to provide open and face to face communication between the mentor and mentee to help an employee to attain social & emotional maturity and effectiveness.
Conclusion:
Coaching and Mentoring both plays a vital role in the human resource development of an organization. All individuals need supervision and support at various stages of their life whether if it is about their performance and efficiency or career and effectiveness. The ultimate goal is development must be there or else they will lose their morale which will result in the decrease of their efficiency and effectiveness. So, at periodical intervals, Coaching and Mentoring should be provided to the staff of an organization which will benefit the employee as well as the entity too.
