THE HIDDEN FRONTIER - Mentoring: Counseling or Coaching?
by Suhail Iqbal, PE, PMP,MCT
When we talk about a mentor, an image of a father-figure emerges in our mind, whom we always look up for guidance and advice. It may be your real father or mother, an old teacher or even your ex-boss. Have you ever considered how this person got to be placed at that highest pedestal of respect? Even people with high level of expertise have their idols and they adore some mentor to whom they attribute all their success. Do they really expect something from their mentor at this stage? Or have they been getting any such support from them while building their own careers? You will be amazed to find that mentors of some of the most successful people are not even alive but they are still respected as if they are the arch-angels always guiding them on the right path. This is purely a matter of adoration and highest level of respect. It probably does not matter if the so-called mentor is able to provide his or mentoring services to the said individual. Then what is the mentee getting out of this relationship. I would say, in this specific case, it is purely inspiration which is indicative of support.
So the mere concept of mentoring is very spiritual and does not place any great demands on mentor except for mentee seeking guidance or sometimes anticipating support in an indirect manner. The person believed to be the mentor must have provided a useful advice to the mentee at some stage of life which had proven to be the guiding light for this individual. Can you see the pattern in this relationship of a mentor and a mentee? The mentoring relationship in this case is ad hoc. It is completely unstructured and is based just on the whim or beliefs of the mentee.
A lot of research has gone into the matters of mentoring, counseling and coaching and many authors have come up with structured methods and mechanisms to address these issues. Due to similarity in function these three terms are widely confused amongst themselves. On one extreme, we do not expect anything from a mentor when we are looking at the concepts from spiritual angle, but when we are structuring the mentoring drive, we start looking at mentor in the role of a counselor or a coach. The purpose of this article is to highlight the differences amongst these three concepts and to put them in their respective perspective.
Let us start from Coaching, which is a pure student-teacher model where teacher is transferring some knowledge to a student. The communication is largely from teacher to the student, even if it is interactive. The source of knowledge is held by the teacher and student is always the recipient. Most popular type of this knowledge transaction is a classical lecture, but other variants can also be possible in varying orders of interactivity. The core principle is that the teacher is disbursing knowledge to student who has no or lesser amount of knowledge on the subject.
Counseling, on the other hand, is an advisory service which is provided on need basis and usually by a more experienced person to a less experienced person. Usually counseling services are provided on specialized subjects on temporary basis, or they can be seen in practice where senior members of the organization provide suggestions and advice to newbies, till they learn to find their own way. Counseling can be a continued service and can be provided at any stage of career by a senior person, generally to improve the performance of the person being counseled.
Mentoring is neither Counseling nor Coaching. This is placed at a much higher pedestal than both these two concepts, but again not as high as we described earlier in the case of spiritual guidance. Mentoring is real and mentor is a live person, not an angel. Naturally the mentor has to be a much experienced person than the mentee but unlike counseling, mentor does not monitor or interfere with what mentee is doing. Mentor is a good listener who is always available to listen to the mentee and helps the mentee find his own way. That means mentor does not force his views on the mentee but guides his thinking process to a conclusive position.
There has been a rising trend of this kind of structured mentoring in organizations as they have proven to be of much better use than counseling and coaching. We retain hardly 5% of what we are being taught, so coaching, though a useful tool, is not the most efficient method. Similarly Counseling is concerned with forced direction which again may not be of much acceptance to the person being counseled, as it was never his/her idea. Mentoring is different, it is neither a teaching model nor a directing model, but it gets the buy-in of the mentee. Mentee at no points thinks, he/she has been taught something or was provided an advice. Mentee totally owns the guidance as his or her own decision, as it was not forced down his/her throat.
I imagine a mentor as a smiling father-figure who is always ready to listen to my problems, nods at me when I am talking to him, approves of my ideas and thoughts, seldom denies or opposes my approach, softly guides me to the possibilities I never thought possible and gives me the ownership of generated ideas and direction.
After having briefly touched upon the three concepts, we also can conclude that mentoring is probably the best possible model, especially in highly innovative and creative areas or new disciplines. Project Management is one of the candidates for mentoring approach. Project Management may have been one of the oldest disciplines man has practiced, but the structured approaches are not older than a few decades. Last few years have seen an enormous work on project management standards, frameworks, models and methodologies. We need highly qualified people with absolutely clear concepts on these mechanisms to provide mentoring services to new entrants in the field of project management. Especially because it is exclusively a volunteer effort, buy-in means a lot. The person adopting new structures must believe it to be workable. Mentoring is probably the only mechanism which can achieve this goal seamlessly and most effectively.
The volunteer initiative taken up by PMI Karachi Pakistan Chapter on their Mentoring Program is therefore greatly lauded and applauded and we all are looking up to them to set a pace for mentoring in project management for Pakistan and beyond.
When we talk about a mentor, an image of a father-figure emerges in our mind, whom we always look up for guidance and advice. It may be your real father or mother, an old teacher or even your ex-boss. Have you ever considered how this person got to be placed at that highest pedestal of respect? Even people with high level of expertise have their idols and they adore some mentor to whom they attribute all their success. Do they really expect something from their mentor at this stage? Or have they been getting any such support from them while building their own careers? You will be amazed to find that mentors of some of the most successful people are not even alive but they are still respected as if they are the arch-angels always guiding them on the right path. This is purely a matter of adoration and highest level of respect. It probably does not matter if the so-called mentor is able to provide his or mentoring services to the said individual. Then what is the mentee getting out of this relationship. I would say, in this specific case, it is purely inspiration which is indicative of support.
So the mere concept of mentoring is very spiritual and does not place any great demands on mentor except for mentee seeking guidance or sometimes anticipating support in an indirect manner. The person believed to be the mentor must have provided a useful advice to the mentee at some stage of life which had proven to be the guiding light for this individual. Can you see the pattern in this relationship of a mentor and a mentee? The mentoring relationship in this case is ad hoc. It is completely unstructured and is based just on the whim or beliefs of the mentee.
A lot of research has gone into the matters of mentoring, counseling and coaching and many authors have come up with structured methods and mechanisms to address these issues. Due to similarity in function these three terms are widely confused amongst themselves. On one extreme, we do not expect anything from a mentor when we are looking at the concepts from spiritual angle, but when we are structuring the mentoring drive, we start looking at mentor in the role of a counselor or a coach. The purpose of this article is to highlight the differences amongst these three concepts and to put them in their respective perspective.
Let us start from Coaching, which is a pure student-teacher model where teacher is transferring some knowledge to a student. The communication is largely from teacher to the student, even if it is interactive. The source of knowledge is held by the teacher and student is always the recipient. Most popular type of this knowledge transaction is a classical lecture, but other variants can also be possible in varying orders of interactivity. The core principle is that the teacher is disbursing knowledge to student who has no or lesser amount of knowledge on the subject.
Counseling, on the other hand, is an advisory service which is provided on need basis and usually by a more experienced person to a less experienced person. Usually counseling services are provided on specialized subjects on temporary basis, or they can be seen in practice where senior members of the organization provide suggestions and advice to newbies, till they learn to find their own way. Counseling can be a continued service and can be provided at any stage of career by a senior person, generally to improve the performance of the person being counseled.
Mentoring is neither Counseling nor Coaching. This is placed at a much higher pedestal than both these two concepts, but again not as high as we described earlier in the case of spiritual guidance. Mentoring is real and mentor is a live person, not an angel. Naturally the mentor has to be a much experienced person than the mentee but unlike counseling, mentor does not monitor or interfere with what mentee is doing. Mentor is a good listener who is always available to listen to the mentee and helps the mentee find his own way. That means mentor does not force his views on the mentee but guides his thinking process to a conclusive position.
There has been a rising trend of this kind of structured mentoring in organizations as they have proven to be of much better use than counseling and coaching. We retain hardly 5% of what we are being taught, so coaching, though a useful tool, is not the most efficient method. Similarly Counseling is concerned with forced direction which again may not be of much acceptance to the person being counseled, as it was never his/her idea. Mentoring is different, it is neither a teaching model nor a directing model, but it gets the buy-in of the mentee. Mentee at no points thinks, he/she has been taught something or was provided an advice. Mentee totally owns the guidance as his or her own decision, as it was not forced down his/her throat.
I imagine a mentor as a smiling father-figure who is always ready to listen to my problems, nods at me when I am talking to him, approves of my ideas and thoughts, seldom denies or opposes my approach, softly guides me to the possibilities I never thought possible and gives me the ownership of generated ideas and direction.
After having briefly touched upon the three concepts, we also can conclude that mentoring is probably the best possible model, especially in highly innovative and creative areas or new disciplines. Project Management is one of the candidates for mentoring approach. Project Management may have been one of the oldest disciplines man has practiced, but the structured approaches are not older than a few decades. Last few years have seen an enormous work on project management standards, frameworks, models and methodologies. We need highly qualified people with absolutely clear concepts on these mechanisms to provide mentoring services to new entrants in the field of project management. Especially because it is exclusively a volunteer effort, buy-in means a lot. The person adopting new structures must believe it to be workable. Mentoring is probably the only mechanism which can achieve this goal seamlessly and most effectively.
The volunteer initiative taken up by PMI Karachi Pakistan Chapter on their Mentoring Program is therefore greatly lauded and applauded and we all are looking up to them to set a pace for mentoring in project management for Pakistan and beyond.
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