Understanding the Difference Between Business Coaching and Mentoring
In Business Coaching Certification Training, you will learn to challenge and develop their employees’ skills and abilities to achieve the best performance results to make them more valuable to your organization and to show them you care about their professional development.
How do you become a business coach?
Despite the tremendous effort organizations dedicate towards talent acquisition, many find their key position employees fail to grow. Today, organizations turn to mentoring and coaching programs offered by the Academy of Business Training to foster talent. These programs harness the benefit of internal resources to educate others, which saves money, time, and increases overall employee satisfaction.
Do you have to be certified to be a business coach?
No, but training and certification from the Academy of Business Training will help you will learn to challenge and develop your company’s human resources skills and abilities to achieve the best performance results to make them more valuable to your organization and to show them the organization cares about their professional development.
How Does One Define Coaching Training?
Coaching human resources is about creating a shared understanding of what needs to be done and how to do it. Unlike sports, the coach doesn’t take an authoritarian approach but instead looks to collaborate with the employee to identify, target, and plan for better performance. A coach enables an individual to get the best out of themselves – the potential which was already within them.
There are two types of career coaches: a professional external coach or an internal coach.
Employee coaching increasingly delivers tangible and targeted learning. The performance and development goals set over brief periods help the high potential person develop through the various phases of their career progression.
If This Is How One Defines Coaching, Then What Is Mentoring?
Most of the talent programs will also employ mentoring as a balancing learning method with coaching. Mentoring refers to a potent tool for employees who wish to grow and learn within an organization. Moving or transitioning into a new role, building confidence to develop their career further, taking on new responsibilities, or working in a new environment are all easier with a mentor to support you. There are different levels of mentoring, extending from sponsor to non-directive mentoring.
In a non-directive model, the business mentor acts as a sounding board, a catalyst for the employee’s learning, and possibly a role model. Mentoring is used most frequently to help people transition through the stages of their careers. It is vital as a tool to support individuals who are being accelerated or fast-tracked into more senior leadership roles. Predominantly, it can focus on developing the person as a whole and has a wider-angled lens than coaching.
Coaching Vs. Mentoring Programs
Coaching Programs
- Shorter-term: week or month
- One-way: coach to employee
- Session-based
- Suitable for specific skill development, for example, management training and other job-related skills
- Good for improvement of performance in areas, for instance, diversity training
Mentoring Programs
- Relationship-based
- Longer-term: months, years
- Multiple ways: junior to senior, senior to junior, peer-to-peer,
- Suitable for whole-person development, for instance, overall career development or high potential employee development
- Useful for knowledge sharing and role modeling between employees
The Significance of Employee Coaching and Mentoring
Mentoring and coaching involve pairing experienced professionals with individuals who need help with adjusting to the workplace’s culture and environment. These can comprise pairing a mentor with new employees to help them adapt to the company culture and get off to a good start. Coaching often comes into play when a current employee or new employee requires personal guidance on specific job processes, duties, or responsibilities. Small businesses can use coaching and mentoring skills to help develop employees for management positions.
What Benefits Can You Gain Through Employee Coaching and Mentoring?
On an organizational level, mentoring and coaching can provide a host of benefits and foster loyalty to your organization. When experienced professionals help provide opportunities for and mold mentees’ careers, these candidates may feel a greater sense of commitment and connection to the company. Coaching enables an employee to feel comfortable with management. It encourages open communication, ensuring a positive work experience, enabling the company to save money instead of continual recruitment and training of replacement human resources.
Personal Development
Learning from experienced professionals’ knowledge and expertise can help younger, less experienced candidates excel in company procedures and best practices. Coaching results in increased efficiency across the company, and mentoring can help guide an employee along his/her career path, making him/her well-versed in the organization’s expectations. Coaching enables individuals to positively resolve concerns and issues within the boundaries of a confidential and trusted relationship, help diminish frustrations on a personal level, and augment the individual’s job satisfaction, benefiting the entire organization.
Team Efficiency
Apart from developing employees, mentoring and coaching can improve the department, team, and the entire organization. Mentoring and coaching enable managers to recognize each person’s strengths and weaknesses, allowing the company to capitalize on the current personnel to keep the whole team functioning smoothly when an employee requests a vacation or takes a sick day.
Is mentoring and coaching just for junior or new employees?
Coaching and mentoring is a valuable aid for helping staff develop new skills or enhance current skills while increasing their confidence. It doesn’t matter at what proficiency level an employee is; there’s always something they can learn.
You might be thinking only recruits need leadership coaching —but what about when one of your senior managers needs to learn how to handle that smart piece of new technology? It might be the latest gadget, or it could be a piece of software like QuickBooks. Managers are senior resources, but seniority does not give them the knowledge for using some emerging technology.
To some, it does sound cliched, but everyone in your organization still has things to learn, and who better to train them than a trained mentor or coach?
Coaching and Mentoring Are Learned Skills
No one is a born coach or mentor. Coaches and mentors need to learn to challenge and develop their employees’ skills and abilities to achieve the best performance results to make them more valuable to your organization and show them you care about their professional development. Coaches and mentors need to learn how to motivate, set goals, develop trust, and provide feedback, to name a few.
Conclusion
Great companies mix coaching and mentoring to create efficient and robust teams while identifying company leaders’ next generation. Allowing employees to succeed at what they do and move along a career path helps organizations recruit and maintain top talent. When mentoring and coaching is not a substantial segment of the human resources development model for an organization, they tend to leave the company in search of other opportunities for success and growth. Turnover is a burden on any organization, which is why the coaching model is so popular.