"Coaching, mentoring differences"
By Ron Baynes

Plug those key words into your search engine and watch the page fill with answers. Articles in H.R. journals, websites of executive development firms, in-house PowerPoint presentations, the curricula of coaching workshops - and that's just the first page of returned matches.

Coaching and mentoring - what's the difference? is a question that Hélène Beauchemin, an Assistant Deputy Minister at Environment Canada, is able to answer with the confidence that comes with experience. In both cases she has been there, done that.

Her mentoring came during some 25 years in management and most recently during seven years with the Canadian Customs and Revenue Agency (CCRA. Some of the mentoring experience was informal, some as a participant in a structured mentoring program.

On the coaching side, she has two workshops under her belt, has received six months of professional coaching and is currently on her way to certification as a professional coach.

While demonstrating the difference between the two approaches, Hélène's experience shows what they have in common. The best coaches and mentors enjoy helping people to realize their potential and have a flair for doing so.

Hélène was a line manager, a Director General, and later an ADM, at CCRA. From early on she developed a reputation as the person to talk to if you wanted to know how the organization worked and how to get things done. Even more remarkable was her approachability. When she said she would be delighted to help, she meant it.

"Two years ago in a conversation with someone from The Leadership Network (TLN). I heard about their coaching program and got interested. I didn't know much about coaching - in fact, I didn't see how it could be applied outside sports. I called TLN to find out more and they invited me to come in for a talk."

What she heard at TLN piqued her interest enough to sign up for a six-day coaching workshop at the Canadian Centre for Management Development (CCMD). "It was a brief glimpse but it gave me a better understanding of coaching and what it might do for me."

As a result, Hélène committed to a coaching program with a certified professional coach. The process included twice-monthly sessions and keeping a daily on-the-job journal to bring the issues that concerned her into focus. That and reading - lots of reading - of books recommended by the coach. "Not management theory stuff, which I've read all my life, but books you don't usually associate with professional development. For instance Soul without Shame, a Guide to Liberating Yourself From the Judge Within, by Byron Brown, and Leadership from the Inside Out, by Kevin Cashman."

Skeptical at first, Hélène says she eventually became "very excited about the changes in myself and also about the process itself. There was a discipline and an intellectual rigour there that I appreciated and a focus on the whole person."

Having experienced the benefits of coaching first-hand, she decided to pursue certification as a professional coach. She was halfway through the course when she took time during a quick desktop lunch, to talk about the differences between coaching and mentoring.

"The most fundamental difference is in the process itself and what's going on in it. "Mentoring, as the term's generally understood, is mainly the transfer of knowledge from someone who knows to someone who doesn't.

"Coaching is more. In coaching, the name of the game is not to prescribe answers for the client but to draw answers out - in part by listening with a professionally-trained third ear to what's said and what isn't. A mentor often tells you what to do. A coach helps you to see what you are unconsciously doing or not doing, and how that affects what you're trying to accomplish.

"A second difference is scope. Mentoring will tend to focus on the task. Coaching is about the person - the whole person. You start with the premise that every human being is a combination of specific traits, talents, needs, values, aspirations and past experiences. They aren't detachable - you can't take them off and put them on like a suit. You bring them to work every morning, where they influence your behaviour and your performance. You take them back home at night and they affect the situation there."

The factors include things like health, job satisfaction, interpersonal relationships and balance between physical and mental activity. They even include, as Ebenezer Scrooge would have been unhappy to hear, "happiness" and "work/life balance" as in "is my family seeing enough of me?"

"A third difference is the knowledge base. The questions I got as a mentor were the kind I could answer from my own experience. Coaching requires the application of a specific body of expertise. Unlike mentoring, it is systematic. It follows a defined path to results that are measurable.

"Fourth. Mentoring, by definition, is for more junior and middle managers. It isn't usually a feasible option for managers at the top of hierarchical organizations. In our culture the captain of the ship can't ask the helmsman what to do."

"This doesn't mean people at the top don't have mentors by other names. I know a very senior official in this town who makes a point of calling his predecessors in the job to get their take on current issues. Some managers get advice from informal networks of friends built up over the years. There are people I mentored at CCRA, who have moved up the ladder, who still call occasionally for advice. I try to help where I can. In some cases that means coaching."

Which brings up the question: if the coachee works for the coach, couldn't that be awkward for both parties? "Yes, it could. As a general rule, I don't accept requests for coaching from people in Environment Canada - I refer them to another coach. Having said that I have made an exception for someone I mentored earlier in the person's career

Another question, as the lunch-hour wound down: where does an ADM Corporate Services in one of the largest government departments find 25 hours a week for coaching and being coached?

"It isn't easy," she says, "but it is doable. It calls for careful time management. I keep the number of people I coach within manageable limits. I also keep my coaching learning activities outside normal working hours. Most important of all, I am blessed with an office staff that does a great job of helping me manage my agenda."

How has her six months of coaching benefited Environment Canada?

"The most obvious benefit is the one that you find in most situations. The organization gets a more effective manager, less stressed-out, making better use of time, more aware of her strengths and weaknesses and for all these reasons making a greater contribution to corporate goals.

Becoming a trained coach produces its benefits too. In some respects a manager is a coach particularly when the task involves assessing the full potential of individuals or building balanced teams.

"In addition to direct benefits there's a ripple effect that's been noticed in organizations when word gets around that a senior manager is into coaching. Suddenly it's OK to talk openly about coaching issues - issues that were formerly off limits on the job. You find people revealing sides of themselves they had previously kept out of view - hobbies, creative pursuits, sports interests and so forth."

As the number of managers involved in coaching increases, coaching values are beginning to take hold in the federal government culture. One sign is that some of the management success stories on the management grapevine are now coaching stories.

"For instance, the DG who was legendary in his department for working 18-hour days, in response to crises that, by the way, were very real. In six months of coaching, he realized that what was really driving him was addiction to the adrenalin rush a crisis generates. He was a total challenge junkie," says Hélène. "He still faces crises and he handles them as well as ever. But he does it without all that midnight oil. Everyone's better off for that - at work and at home."

"As stories like this make the rounds the ripple widens. TLN told me recently that over 30 ADMs received coaching last year. I know of at least 12 managers in our department, who are being coached, and one division is using a professional coach to give group training."

As Hélène sees it, coaching has achieved momentum. "First, because it isn't a radical option any more - it's a mainstay of professional development. Second because it's relevant to the management issues of this era. I am thinking in particular of the need for 'cultural coaching' for scientists managing non-scientists, or people from one ethnic or religious background managing people from another.

"Third, because coaching is part and parcel of the evolution of modern management, Remember: the principles and theories it's based upon are not new - philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and social psychologists have been writing about them for generations. What is new - and what largely distinguishes modern management from old-fashioned management - is the systematic transfer of these insights to everyday practice by people professionally trained to do so. That's what coaching has done, that's what it's doing now and that, in my view, is what it will continue to do."