Mentoring plays a crucial role in various facets of personal and professional development. Often confused with coaching, mentoring can help an individual to achieve his or her true potential. While there is sufficient focus on coaching or training, companies should invest more on mentoring their staff.

Let us first understand what mentoring is because it is not the same as training or coaching.

Mentoring Vs Coaching

Coaching or training is always objective centric. There is one specific objective which has to be achieved through the training or coaching sessions. For instance, a presenter may need to hone his or her oratorical skills or voice modulation and a coach or trainer will work on that particular attribute. All training or coaching activities is solely focused on helping the presenter improve voice modulation or oratorical skills. Mentoring will focus more on the relationship between the mentor and the presenter, in this case, which will facilitate the honing of the specific skill and overall personality development.

Coaching is a one-way approach. The trainer or coach guides the trainee throughout the process without focusing on what the trainee has to say, share or discuss. There can be discussions pertaining to the problem or the solution but there is seldom any relationship between the two. In mentoring, the mentor shares a frank and honest relationship with the mentored and they both participate in the latter’s grooming, development or progress.

Unlike in coaching, the focus of mentoring is more on holistic development. From striking balance between work and social life, developing self confidence, optimism, thinking right to stress relief, counseling and guidance on specific aspects of a profession, mentoring involves working on all facets.

Coaching is often a time bound exercise and it usually is for short spells of time but mentoring is long term. In many cases, people stay connected with their mentors throughout their lives and discuss anything that they think would need the mentor’s intervention or thoughts at least.

Benefits Of Mentoring

The holistic development of an individual, including personal and professional life, makes mentoring extremely significant. A person can think better, feel better and also perform to the best of their potential through mentoring. Also, the impact of mentoring is manifold. Coaching or training will only have an impact on the skill or aspect worked on but mentoring will have a positive impact on everything about an individual.