Coaching and Mentoring - Answered

After some discussion with friends, web searches, the murky water of my understanding between a coach and a mentor starts to clear. This activity had prompted me to look for the remit and definition of a consultant. So, what are they?



COACHING is defined as follows in The Manager as Coach and Mentor by Eric Parsloe:

"a process that enables learning and developmet to occur and thus performance to improve."

Chatered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) defines coaching as:

"developing a person's skills and knowledge so that their job performance improves, hopefully leading to the achievement of organisational objectives. It targets high performance and improvement at work, although it may also have an impact on an individual's private life. It usually lasts for a short period and focuses on specific skills and goals."



MENTORING is defined as follows in Mentoring Executives and Directors by Clutterbuck and Megginson:

"off-line help by one person to another in making significant transitions in knowledge, work or thinking."

Chatered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) defines mentoring as:

"Traditionally, mentoring is the long term passing on of support, guidance and advice. In the work place, it has tended to describe a relationship in which a more experienced colleague uses their greater knowledge and understanding of work or workplace to support the development of a more juniour or inexperienced member of staff."



Whereas, a CONSULTANT focus is on developing organisation practices, processes and structure. Their role is generally more strategic and often used to instigate and design broad ranging change programmes. Consultant does the job for the organisation, rather the individual/group becoming up-skilled to do the job themselves.



SCENARIOS
This made me to think of the following scenario where a personnel development consultant can also be a coach or a mentor.

Imagine that a university hire a personnel development guru to train their students to obtain certain skills which could enhance their studies. The guru will present the university several of his training products and advices the university on which materials are best suited to achieve their goal and how long will it take for the guru to train the fellow students.

For this, the guru does not teach the university on how to do the job but the guru himself/herself took on the responsibility of training the students. Therefore, the guru is the consultant for the university.

To the students, the guru is the coach/mentor for the students, depending on the type of involvement (commitment) or duration of the development skills.

If the university themselves want the guru to teach them, then the guru is the coach/mentor for the university.



LINKS
Nothing too complicated, is nice and simple. Please visit the following link for indepth understanding and discussion.
http://www.cipd.co.uk/default.cipd
http://www.coachingnetwork.org.uk/resourcecentre/WhatAreCoachingAndMentoring.htm

Archmelvic Skyline, Scotland

Mentoring and Coaching?

Attended officer training at the Royal Scotts Club (a superb place to experience Scottish heritage). A topic that kept playing on my mind.

What's the difference between mentoring and coaching?

Famous Toastmasters

With approximately 200,000 members across 92 countries, I believe there are famous world figures who belongs to the Toastmasters International organisation. Well, isn't it good to find out about these highly successful and motivated people? So far, as I know, Robert Kiyosaki mentioned about him being a member of the Toastmasters.

Albert Einstein may be a member of the Toastmasters ... you never know.