Mentoring, Training, Coaching...Whatever

Just what do we mean by executive coaching?  As a starting point, I find it helpful to think about what it's not: It's not mentoring, not therapy, not business process consulting and not career counseling--although it's clearly related to all of those practices.  If we could align them on the margins of a multi-dimensional graph, I'd put coaching right in the middle, drawing upon each discipline, but with different methodologies and goals.

Carol Hymowitz's "In The Lead" column in today's Wall Street Journal muddies the waters by using "mentoring," "coaching" and "training" almost interchangeably.  It's headlined "Today's Bosses Find Mentoring Isn't Worth The Time and Risks," and the basic premise is that some senior managers believe their time is best spent thinking of ways "to expand their businesses and improve productivity and work quality," not wasted on "coaching employees on how to do their jobs."

The contrarian view, here represented by Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford Business School, is that "lack of time for training won't affect performance today or next week...but it will further down the road, when you need a new generation of leaders."

That's a fascinating debate, but it would be easier to understand exactly what's being debated if the language in the article were more precise.  "Training" and "mentoring" and "coaching," although clearly related, are different in their aims and their practices.  To take an oversimplified view of the distinctions, I'd say that training seeks to improve an employee's job-related skills, mentoring seeks to insure that an employee is on the right path early in his or her career, and coaching seeks to maximize a high-potential employee's fulfillment and effectiveness.

If we take a look at Hymowitz's column with those definitions in mind, I'd say that senior managers...

• ...are right to resist providing training to their reports.  More likely than not, training is a time-intensive activity with a low ROI for any individual manager.  If a manager is providing hands-on training to an individual report, they're probably taking on a burden that should be shifted back onto the organization as a whole.  (Of course, that's just reality in many organizations--but that doesn't make it right.)
• ...are wrong to resist providing mentoring.  Properly guiding an early-stage employee will reap rewards not only for the organization, but also for the individual manager who has the opportunity to develop a valuable network of "mentees."  Each manager will have to gauge how much time and energy they can devote to mentorship, but it's one of those Important-But-Not-Urgent tasks that an organization neglects at its peril.
• ...should provide coaching when they perceive that a high-potential employee isn't as effective or as fulfilled as he or she could be.  If they don't have the time to do it themselves, then they should devote the resources necessary to bring in an external coach.  Coaching isn't about helping low performers reach to a minimally acceptable standard--it's about identifying and eliminating the barriers that are keeping your best and brightest from living up to their full potential.

I don't want to sound pedantic, but defining these terms more carefully will allow us to reach better conclusions about whose responsibility they are and how important they are to an individual manager and to the organization as a whole.

Comments

[Matt]

Ed, conceptually, I agree with you. But I'm not a big believer in definition precision. In fact, I think definition precision is what is at the root of some of the excesses of the whole 80's and 90's identity politics. In those cases, it led to convoluted labels for people that took them away from community on the one hand and on the other allowed community to exclude those who didn't quite measure up. The best example, in my opinion, is the whole LGBTQQ label meaning lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and question community. Many have tried to shorten that into Queer. But there are others who want to join onto that label. Obviously, there's something that's gotten out of hand. It's better, in my opinion, to allow people to just be who they are however they define thhemselves.

How this relates to the topic of coaching is evident right there in your post. In fact, if coaching pulls from all of these different disciplines, then why not allow it to be called each of those when its relevant. What seems most important are the goals. By talking about the goals of these interpersonal relationships -- whether between boss and employee or consultant and employee, etc. -- you're able to get around the need to re-educate a broad swath of people who will often continue to harbor the old definition unless they find an epiphany moment where the new definition fully changes their paradigm. Whew!

The goals of coaching, are to me, what are so radical. To me, it's like doing a on-on-one business course where you teach a case study utilizing the business at hand.

At least, that's what I get out of it.

[Ed]

That's a great comment, Matt, and I agree that 1) definition precision is a potential rathole, and 2) defining a coaching relationship by the goals to be achieved rather than by a label is a more fruitful approach. (In fact, the boundary-crossing nature of coaching is one of primary reasons I find the field so appealing.) You've definitely moved my thinking on this.

That said, I still believe the original WSJ column is problematic because of the way it uses terms such as coaching, training and mentoring interchangably. Definition precision shouldn't be an end in itself, but the lack of precision in this context could easily cause a manager to think, "Well, I don't have the time to mentor or coach my reports," when what they really mean is "I don't have the time to train my direct reports." And that would be a loss for everyone, from the individuals who'd benefit from coaching or mentoring, to the organization that would benefit from having more fulfilled and effective staff.