Mentoring is the activity of supporting and advising someone with less experience to help them develop in their work.
Coaching is a process that enables learning and development to occur and thus performance to improve.
Use of mentoring and coaching :
- Building leadership and interpersonal skills is accelerated through coaching and mentoring.
- It helps organizations understand ways to develop and support high potentials.
- It improves office culture and environment, leadership and learning; all of which contribute to more productive work places.
Even though mentoring and coaching both are important for an organization, both are not same.
Below are the major differences between mentoring and coaching :
| Mentoring | Coaching |
| Mentoring can be a long term ongoing relationship | Coaching has a set, short term duration |
| Focus is on career and personal development. | It is task oriented. The focus is on specific issue at work. |
| It is development driven. Objective is to improve performance of an individual for the specific job. | It is performance driven. Objective is to improve performance of an individual in all aspects considering future as well. |
| It can be more informal and meetings can take place as and when required. | It is more structured in nature and meetings are scheduled on regular bases. |
| Learning is focused on attitude. | Learning is focused on abilities |
On top of developing employees, coaching and mentoring can improve the function of the team, department and entire organization. Mentoring and Coaching allows managers to identify the weaknesses and strengths of each employee. This allows the organization to capitalize on the resources at hand to keep the whole team working smoothly when employees request vacation or take a sick day.
JZero believes that Mentoring is a valuable tool for learning, so we have created a way of managing Mentoring relationships in our LMS. From applying to be a mentor/mentee through to evaluation surveys, we have the whole process covered.
Why not see it for yourself by signing up for a free JLMS Cloud account today?
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