Coaching vs Mentoring, Counseling and Consulting
If you’ve perused my website, you probably noticed quite a dedicated effort to describe what coaching is and links to scientific studies on coaching outcomes.
This is for two primary reasons:
1) The differences between coaching, mentoring, counseling and consulting are important to understand when considering the type of professional service most appropriate for your situation. Among these professional services, less is typically known about coaching versus the others.
2) Coaching is highly effective and reaps multiple positive business outcomes when implemented in the right context.
We’ll discuss in detail the context that each type of service may be utilized in and why coaching, when implemented correctly and strategically, is a powerful tool to drive performance of key individuals and their teams.
What is Leadership Coaching?
Coaching involves engaging someone to look inward to develop a greater awareness and perspective that helps identify one’s own best solution and/or path forward.
The coach never has the best answer for the client—the client does. The coach’s role is to be unbiased in the coaching session by supporting the client’s deep thinking. A coach’s job is not leading, informing, inserting personal experiences, judging or otherwise impeding the client’s independent thinking.
What Leadership Coaching is Not
Mentoring involves teaching the mentee a mentor’s experiences and training so that the mentee can perform a similar function as proficient as the mentor or better. Professional coaching standards guard against "teaching" or "telling" on the part of the coach.
Counseling involves a mental health practitioner addressing temporary or permanent mental or behavioral challenges of someone that can involve diagnosis and therapy. Coaching standards exclude the practice of diagnosing and/or counseling. Coaches are not trained to perform these responsibilities.
Consulting relates to exploration and due diligence of a business challenge or goal followed by the consultant’s recommendations of alternative solutions. Coaching standards prevent the coach from offering recommendations, as solutions must come from within the client within a coaching engagement.
What makes coaching effective?
2) Over the duration of my coaching practice, I’ve personally witnessed how the coaching process does, in fact, empower the client to look inward to identify the very best solution or path forward. This approach ensures that objectivity on the part of the coach remains fully intact.
This allows the client to “own” the outcome, which has a much higher probability of success upon execution than a less than well-informed recommendation from the coach or any other person. It also shows immense respect to the client as someone perfectly capable of identifying their own best path forward!
If you have questions on coaching or consulting, please contact me. I’d be delighted to help!
