Coaching or mentoring?
It is now widely recognised that coaching and mentoring are vital components of professional and personal development and are a highly effective way of raising the quality and impact of management and leadership. They are different and can work in a complementary way.
Coaching focuses upon specific developmental or change issues with defined goals, enabling individuals to identify ways forward and improve their performance through structured sessions, often over a short time scale.
Mentoring is generally more informal and is often provided by more experienced colleagues, leaders or peers and can be more wide ranging in its focus with longer-term relationships.
Both differ from counselling in that their primary focus is not to resolve personal problems or issues of personal well-being in a therapeutic way.
More about coaching and mentoring can be found in the following sections:
Coaching
Coaching will particularly help you if you have specific issues, problems or skills that you want to address - goals and outcomes that you want to achieve. These will normally be work related, but there is often a strong overlap between these and other non-work issues.
Your coach will work to enable you to define your priority issue(s), set clear goals and identify some actions. They will do this by careful listening, skilful questioning and a range of other coaching techniques. Your coach is not there to give you advice but will challenge your thinking, ask questions that deepen your own perceptions and create the space for you as the coachee to ‘advise yourself’. If you do not have any top priorities - but want to talk around issues or get advice on, for example, specific technical matters, then coaching may not be so effective.
Coaching is normally time limited to an agreed number of sessions. Coaches will usually be independent professional people, working outside your organisation, that make a charge for coaching sessions. They do not necessarily need to have any detailed knowledge of your work sector or context - so you could choose a coach with little social care experience if you wanted to. You might also choose someone with a strong background in this field.
Some coaches offer telephone coaching and this can be effective and is often used as an add-on to face to face coaching. It doesn’t, of course, offer the face to face advantages of richer contact, and time away from the office!
You can find out more from the following websites:
Mentoring
The term mentoring is normally used to describe a more informal relationship in which a range of issues are explored, including:
- The management of change,
- career and personal development,
- general support and guidance.
Your mentor will probably be a senior colleague or peer from the social care sector who can bring their experience into the relationship, which might be quite long term. It may be helpful, though not essential, to have a mentor that understands the social care environment and who can give advice and guidance and understand your context.
Nevertheless, increasingly, good mentoring adopts some of the principles of coaching - including avoiding advice giving when possible and appropriate. Mentoring is normally free. The National Skills Academy for Social Care will develop its work in relation to mentoring and we are keen to explore ways in which we can encourage the widespread use of mentoring in social care.
If you are an experienced and senior leader in social care and would like to offer mentoring support, or are looking for a mentor, please contact us at
You can find out more about mentoring from: