Management

Management

A mentor or a coach?

Mentor: A mentor is usually a senior person in the organisation who uses his holistic knowledge of the company and its culture to help a junior in acquiring the right perspectives. This perspective helps the junior employee in understanding what to expect, what not to expect, how people have succeeded or failed, how to look for growth opportunities within the organisation, etc.

Coach: A coach in contrast plays a more direct role. He helps the individual in remaining focussed on acquiring the desired skills (both work skills and soft skills) and knowledge that would help the individual in achieving his/her goals. A coach need not be an old hand in the organisation as long as he is a specialist in his own area, but the mentor needs to have been around and ‘grey-haired’ to some extent to be convincing in his role. The coach will not care much if his ward likes him or not as long as he is in agreement with his principles. For a mentor, respect and a certain ‘awe’ for the seniority helps a lot.

The debate on the effectiveness of coaching vis-a-vis mentoring, has been an ongoing one. A coach and a mentor are integral to an individual’s professional and personal development—they are not substitutes and serve different purposes in their ward’s growth. The duration of their relationship varies along with the intended impact. While coaching is more short-term and specific, the mentorship programme is prolonged and holistic. The common factor is that both are guided by business interests.

Interestingly, while all experts agree that mentoring is more effective, coaching remains the most popular trend in organisations, despite the fact that it costs much more. Initiating a mentorship programme requires a different type of commitment and focus from an organisation.

Mentoring has a wider applicability than coaching which is short-term and immediate.

Arun Rao, VP-HR, AppLabs Technologies, points out the factors that differentiate coaching and mentoring:
Time frame: While mentoring could be an ongoing relationship, coaching is more time-frame bound
Formality: While coaching could be a more structured affair, mentoring is more informal and could depend on mentee’s need for help
Experience: Mentor is acceptedly more experienced than the mentee (in the organisation —could be more skilled) while a coach need not necessarily have more experience than the occupational role
Focus: The focus in the mentoring framework could be on career development while coaching focusses on issues at work.

Judging the effectiveness

It has been long argued that mentorship is more effective than coaching as it has a long-term perspective. The truth is that both serve different purposes and are no substitute for each other.

There are many factors that make organisations vouch for the success of the mentorship programme. Atul Srivastava, Senior VP, HRD, Datamatics, lists a few points:
It enables managers internalise the work cultures and environment
It assists employees in personal and career development
It enables employees achieve the desired drive and professional competence

Both coaching and mentorship have common objectives—achieving high levels of personal mastery and guiding behaviours. It requires great personal commitment.

While the effectiveness of mentorship programme has been proven time and again, coaching is the more popular process normally adopted by IT organisations in India to develop talent. Implementing a mentorship programme and finding the right people to drive is not an easy task and takes prolonged planning by an organisation.

Large, tier-1 companies put a lot of emphasis on organisational mentoring. Teams and bosses often change very rapidly and young professionals feel a kind of emotional stress as they switch from one cultural silo to another. Someone at the highest level who possesses a well-recognised personal brand, can help a lot by mentoring others. Coaching, on the other hand, is mostly done by the immediate manager and is usually role-dependent.

Similarities between coaching and mentoring

• Both coaching and mentoring facilitate the exploration of needs, motivations, desires, and skills aimed at helping the mentee/client change himself
• Both could use questioning techniques to facilitate client’s/mentee’s own thought processes in order to identify actions rather than take a prescriptive approach
• Support the client in setting appropriate goals and methods of assessing progress in relation to these goals
• Both encourage a commitment to action and the development of lasting personal growth and change
• Both ensure that clients develop personal competencies and do not develop unhealthy dependencies on the coaching or mentoring relationship.
  

Training for mentors and coaches

Do mentors and coaches themselves need to be continuously trained to guide other people? The mentor is not only passing on knowledge related to software or technology, but also in helping the mentee develop a positive mental attitude, enhance personal aptitude and provide inspiration. At the same time, mentors are reminded not to discuss issues that do not concern their mentee, like revenues, salary packages, individual-related grievance, and organisational policies.

Mentors do not need training to guide others because they are people who have undergone various such situations before and it is out of experience that they imbibe values and guide juniors, where as certain companies appoint coaches who have prior experience or have been coached on a particular subject/issue.

Business interests

All training programmes are guided by business interests, but it is important to understand the business focus of mentorship programmes. An organisation like Synygy India has training programme for mentors which comprises knowledge sharing.

Business goals drive the coaching and mentorship programmes.

Finding a good coach/ mentor

It is easier to find a good coach, but mentors are the rare ones in any organisation. There are only that many mentors in a company who possess the maturity, the skills and the interest to personally guide people.

Most of these people are senior professionals who are extremely busy and finding the time for mentoring other associates is not easy.

Making the perfect match between a mentor and a mentee is a delicate task and mistakes sometimes happen. Synygy India, which has a highly evolved mentorship programme tries to ensure that both have some level of background equanimity as far as educational qualifications are concerned. At Synygy everyone has a mentor, while someone who is fresh out of college is guided by an individual who has 1-2 years of experience, the latter is himself mentored by somebody more senior.

The biggest disadvantage in an organisation is that as there are very few senior people who have to mentor too many individuals this sometimes brings down the quality of the relationship.

posted by Nisha Talreja @ 1:45 AM