How Both Coaching and Mentoring Can Best Support Your Staff
When you’re managing employees, you understandably want to support them so they can produce their best work. Successful businesses rely on staff who are driven to deliver solid results within the responsibilities of their position. Regular and meaningful performance evaluations are a great way to assess how the individuals on your team are doing, and what’s needed to help them accomplish more.
However, for the best business outcomes, you should offer your team both coaching and mentoring. While they may sound the same, they are distinct activities, and each has its benefits in certain situations. Here are the fine points of what to understand about each approach, and how to use them to your advantage.
Coaching
What it is:
If you’ve managed others for any length of time, you’ll be familiar with what coaching is. Simply put, it’s about supervising a staff member’s performance and providing direction to help them do better. This may involve giving specific instructions on how to complete some aspect of their work. Coaching also requires working closely with the individual to monitor their progress and continually giving guidance and correction about the tasks they’re completing.
When it helps:
There are certain circumstances where coaching can bring the most value. Employees who are new on the job, understandably, require a fair amount of direction and advice. They need to be shown the ropes, so to speak, and they are bound to have lots of questions about their job duties.
Another time for coaching is when an employee has taken on a new position in the workplace. Regardless of the amount of experience a staff member has with the company and the strength of transferable skills they bring, starting a new job requires some degree of coaching.
How to use it:
When and how to coach someone can be a bit of a judgment call. Some supervisors may be reluctant to use it since they don’t want to be perceived as a micromanager. As a result, they may take more of a hands-off approach and leave coaching until an annual performance review.
Regrettably, this is not helpful to staff. Saving feedback for once a year can come across as criticism rather than coaching. The time to coach is whenever it’s needed throughout the year. And, if you aren’t quite sure whether your employee would benefit from coaching at any point, you only have to ask.
Implementation tips:
To get the most mileage from coaching an employee, it’s essential to get to know them a little. This includes finding out what they like most about their job and how they enjoy working for the company. Express faith in their abilities and remind them that there are no silly or insignificant questions. This builds trust, and it will help you better assess when coaching is needed.
Mentoring
What it is:
In the context of the workplace, mentoring is about building a supportive relationship with someone that’s based on what career goals they’re striving to attain. The mentor seeks to comprehend what personal growth the mentee is hoping to attain and how they believe meeting with the mentor can provide value.
The mentor, in turn, assists with the mentee’s development by giving their time and expertise. They’ll make various suggestions based on their subject matter knowledge and years of experience.
When it helps:
Mentoring can be very effective when an employee wants to learn a new skill set and needs some assistance in sorting out how to begin and/or navigating some of the steps along the way. It can be especially useful if they lack sufficient confidence. In this case, having someone in their corner who is interested in seeing them do well will give the mentee a boost.
How to use it:
As with coaching, mentoring relies on first developing a good level of rapport. Having said that, the mentoring relationship is on a different footing since the mentor is not acting in a supervisory capacity. When reviewing an employee’s performance, you may notice those who could benefit from a mentor and identify someone to fill this role.
Implementation tips:
Formal mentoring programs are a great way to go. These involve structure and regular opportunities to monitor the initiative’s effectiveness. Depending on the employees involved, a novel approach is to set up a co-mentoring program (perhaps pairing staff from different departments, for example).
Coaching and mentoring are invaluable tools for managers, each in their own right. Coaching is often used to make sure employees can complete their job duties, while mentoring is a commitment that can help people get to the next level in their career. Ensuring that your company has effectively implemented both will quickly lead to a high-functioning workforce that’s driven to fulfill the company’s mission.
