What are the differences between Coaching and Mentoring?
This is a question that is asked quite frequently in todays business climate. When this question was asked only a few years ago, the answer was much more clear and defined, because there were fewer professional coaches, less performance emphasis and pressure on a manager to coach his/her employees and fewer developmental programs to teach individuals how to implement the skill/competency of coaching. Add to this, very tight economic conditions in which professional coaches were a luxury that an organization could not afford and training and development in such a soft skill/competency as coaching was just not in the budget. Before we begin, it is important to make the distinction between managers/supervisors that perform the skill/competency of coaching and coach their direct reports and professional coaches. It is also important to understand that because organizations are at different levels of development, there are many varied interpretations of this terminology. The resulting behav
