18th October, 2021

Mentors and coaches can play valuable and distinguishable roles on your road to leadership.

The terms can often be conflated or synonymized but they are most definitely not the same thing. As part of my fellowship and have two mentors - one academic and one business-focused. Each, in their own way, and through the kindness of their time, help me stay accountable to what I’ve promised to deliver. They help me walk the walk as well as talk the talk. Neither of them have any part of their own careers dependent on my own. They’ve been there, seen it, done it, and want nothing other than to help me to keep moving the needle of the path to success I’ve mapped out for myself.

A coach is altogether something else. I haven’t engaged with coaches anywhere near as much as my mentors (I talk to my mentors roughly once monthly, at least once a quarter). That said, I had my first coaching experience earlier this year as part of a business course I was on. Access to one-to-one coaching sessions marked a bonus beyond the main course. Where mentors are helpful as a mechanism of objective accountability, coaches are helpful for giving you the space to get out of your own way. I’ve heard the mantra of a coach described as helping someone get to a revelation without stealing the revelation for yourself. Coaches, if they’re good, will ask the sort of open questions that you’ll each comfortably noodle on in silence…and the coach won’t ever be the one to break that silence.

Consider how coaches and mentors could help you get away from the loneliness of your leadership position, and onto the best version of what you envisaged you could be.

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