Speaker 1: Today, let's take a look at the difference between coaching and mentoring. You as a frontline leader, supervisor or manager, or perhaps even at the executive level, will have to know the difference between what is mentoring and what is coaching. Many organizations want to establish a mentoring type culture so that employees can go and ask those who have the experience and knowledge some advice that can help them along their career path. What is the difference? Mentoring is when the individual goes to seek out some advice from someone who has the knowledge that they're looking for. So it isn't something that you can force. If I told you you have to go and get mentored by this individual, you'd probably cringe a little bit because a certain type of individual is a better mentor than others. The person that you approach to ask for mentoring advice is usually someone who you respect because of their track record and their competence. So you're not likely to ask advice from someone who you don't respect or who you don't think has done a good job in their career. The second factor that would influence how you would go for mentoring or who you would go to mentor from is whether that person will be open with you and trustworthy, that you would be able to let your guard down in even asking them the advice or when they were going to give you the advice that they wouldn't judge you harshly and that they would be willing to even disclose that they themselves had challenges in that area. The third factor that determines whether someone is a good mentor is whether they're available to you when you need them. Obviously someone who has all the competence and even somebody who's easy to talk to, but if they're never around you're not going to be able to ask them for much mentoring advice. So if you want to be a good mentor, not only will you focus on obviously your track record and your competence, you'd be more about having a conversation with the person who comes to you, feels comfortable actually asking you the question, and that when you give them the advice you don't sound like you've known everything perfectly all the way along. Now let's talk about coaching. Coaching is different because usually coaching is something that the leader acknowledges that needs to be dealt with in terms of the employee and then they, the leader, initiates that conversation. So if you bring an employee and you say, hey I wanted to bring something to your attention, I've noticed that when you do this and this and this that it's not giving you the results that you're looking for so I'm going to recommend that you do this differently and then that will generate the outcomes you're looking for. How does that sound? So coaching is really directed from the leader to the team member. Now in that case there's still a few guidelines to provide proper coaching. Number one is be conversational in your approach. There's no need to be overly heavy handed or aggressive in your tone. Secondly is be as specific as you can be about what you observed and what you think would be more effective. And then third is look for and acknowledge the results when the person implements the change. If you have a person who accepts the feedback that you have, implements it, then you're going to continue to have a coaching relationship. If you know after giving a number of coaching sessions you find that the person isn't enacting the information, isn't taking the action that you desire or generating the results that you expect, you might have to get a little bit more directive in your coaching approach. So mentoring and coaching both can be used as development tools. Mentoring is more where the person pulls the information and advice down that they want. Coaching is where the leader imparts that information to the employee looking for a change in behavior or performance. Now in addition to learning mentoring and coaching skills, we train a lot of frontline leaders, supervisors and managers on all aspects of leadership. So whether it's an onsite workshop or one of our public workshops or maybe just accessing some of our online resources, you can check us out at frontlineleadership.com. And we recommend that you connect with us using one of the social media platforms. Specifically on Facebook, you can reach us by searching for Frontline.