Know the Difference Between Coaching and Mentoring

Many people have questions about the differences between business coaching and mentoring. Admittedly, the two can be similar in their overall goal: to help you improve your skills and acumen as a business owner. However, there are certain tools and outcomes you can only expect from a business coach. Even if you are already working with a mentor, you may want to consider adding a coach to your team. 

Here are three things you’ll get out of working with a Certified Business Coach in Minnesota that you shouldn’t necessarily expect from a mentorship. 

Easily Measurable Success

Mentoring is usually focused on more abstract goals that will ultimately lead to personal development, whereas business coaches want to create more specific goals that can be easily measured. The Minnesota certified small business coaching process is all about identifying specific goals and offering the tools you’ll need to achieve those goals. In a mentorship, the mentee may have the goal of becoming a better or more successful business owner, but the steps they need to take to reach that goal will shift and change over time. This can make it difficult to track progress and stay motivated.

Shorter-Term Goals

Both a mentorship and a partnership with a business and success coach in Minnesota can provide ongoing, long-term support. Business coaching tends to focus on achieving shorter-term goals than mentorship. Progress toward these goals is accelerated when you meet with a certified business coach in Minnesota once or twice a month to keep yourself on track. Your coach will usually offer more tools to help you achieve those goals, while a mentor may be more focused on only providing encouragement. Keep in mind that you don’t need to sever your relationship with a coach once you’ve met your short-term goals. Instead, consider combining these goals to work toward reaching a larger goal over time. 

Structured Meetings 

One of the biggest contrasts with coaching vs. mentoring is that the former is generally much more structured. A business owner who has a designated Success Principles Certified Coach in Minnesota will schedule meetings once or twice a month to sit down and look at their progress in-depth. If things come up in between meetings, you’ll make a note to discuss it the next time you see your coach. This allows you to really get into the problem and consider the leadership tools you can use to resolve it. 

In a mentorship, the mentee may call their mentor up right when a problem arises to discuss what’s going on. This is mostly for moral support, since it often takes really sitting down and looking at the issue from all angles to come up with a sustainable solution. This is why most coaches are happy to work with clients who also have a mentor; the two roles offer very different types of support.