Mentor vs Coach: What Support Do You Need for Professional Success

You're a high achiever. You care about building your career and know that it's important to keep growing, acquiring new skills, and tackling new challenges

You wonder if there’s a secret to leadership that everyone else knows, but you’ve been missing. You’ve heard that it’s important to develop a board of directors or to work on your growth mindset or to find mentors — or was it a sponsor? — and also to build your network. Yet you’re not sure where to start.

You’ve heard of executive and career coaches. You’ve heard that other people have had great mentors.

How do you know if it’s the right time to get professional support? And which one — mentor or coach— might be the most needed for you right now?

The different approaches for mentorship vs coaching

Imagine that your goal is to learn to ride a bike. You might do it on your own by reading up on the process, watching YouTube videos or asking your friends to share their experience of learning to bike.

If you work with a mentor, someone who has years of experience and specific knowledge in the skillset of bike-riding, they will likely tell you about their own experience of learning to ride a bike. They will share common pitfalls and success strategies. They will be a wealth of information including pros/cons of different bike riding techniques and possibly the best bike brands to get started with. Your mentor will be doing most of the speaking to share their expertise.

If you work with a coach, their expertise with riding the bike matters less. They will support you in the experience of getting on a bike, perhaps holding the handlebars or creating other structures for you to feel safe and successful. When you fall, they will encourage you to get back up and keep trying, while learning from the process. The inquiry about bike riding might be:

- What’s most important to you about learning to ride a bike?

- When you’ve accomplished this goal, how will your life be different? What might be unlocked?

- What patterns are holding you back?

- What’s the biggest fear around this experience?

The coach holds space and helps you to process your own experience of bike riding, while completely supporting you along the way. Most of the time, the conversation will be split 50/50 between you and the coach. Sometimes the coach might have suggestions, but they are primarily to prompt your thinking.

Depending on your needs, either a mentor or a coach could accelerate your professional growth.

When is the right time to seek professional help?

The first step is to identify the goals you’d like to reach or the problems to be solved. I’ll share three common examples I’ve heard from coaching clients, mentees, and team members I’ve managed. Each of these examples could be supported by a mentor or a coach.

Rohit is an ambitious product manager who’s spent five years building his career. He now wants to be promoted to manage his own team. He feels that his boss hasn’t been listening to him and may be holding him back, constantly telling him that he’s not quite ready. Rohit doesn’t know how to get clear feedback on what to work on or what expectations he needs to meet to get promoted.

Leyla is a first-time CEO and cofounder with a sales background. She has a technical co-founder, a former colleague who she trusts deeply. Their startup just received Series A funding and is showing signs of early product market fit with some initial customer traction. She’s never been the big boss before. She’s not used to assuming all the power and having people treat her differently because she’s the CEO. Layla wants to be the best possible leader, fulfilling her obligations to the team who’s followed her as well as to her investors.

Jamie runs a large engineering team. She has high expectations of her team, cares about them deeply, and is the first to stay late and work through the weekend to diagnose the source of a high-impact bug. Recently, she’s felt overwhelmed, cranky, and under even more extreme pressure to meet tight deadlines. Her CEO has also given her feedback that others on the executive team find her difficult to work with. She doesn’t know what to do with this feedback. She feels terrible but is already operating at max capacity and needs to hustle and drive everyone around her harder to meet the company’s ambitious goals.

Rohit, Leyla and Jamie had exhausted their own resources, network or skillset. The tools and skills that have previously led to career success are no longer working. Once they have an understanding of the behaviors they wanted to change, or a goal they wanted to reach, it provided clarity so they knew it was the right time to seek professional help. Either a mentor or a coach could help. But which one?

Framework for Mentoring vs Coaching

There are six facets of how professional help can be viewed which can help you decide between if you’d like to seek out a mentor or hire a coach.

Your Role

Consider your motivation to be an active driver of this process. With a mentor, the more you put into it the more you get out of it. It’s on you to define a clear agenda and have focus questions. While a starting topic or challenge is helpful, the coach will often have a structure or direction to guide the client through exploring new perspectives.

Structure

The mentor will make time as needed and when requested by the mentee. The mentee will reach out when they have a question, and the meeting happens if the mentor has the bandwidth. Coaches will meet on a regular cadence, whether weekly, bi-weekly or rmonthly. Often, they will hold co-define actions or homework for the client to work on between sessions. Coaches also hold confidentiality and follow a code of ethics

Tools

Many high achievers are capable of great things but may lack the knowledge in an ambiguous space. A mentor who has trodden this path before will suggest tips, software, and strategies that have worked for them. Coaches provide a wide array of tools that have worked for a broad group of clients. Different tools will resonate with different people.

Investment

The mentorship relationship is at little to no cost. The biggest downside is that it can be challenging to find a mentor to donate time to your professional growth. Rates for coaching range from as little as $100 / hour on platforms such as BetterUp up to $50K for 6 months for top tier executive coaches. You get what you pay for.

Personal Accountability

This is often low with as a mentee may feel like they are already asking a lot of the mentor’s time. mentor as they are already helping you with their time. With a coach, the client, has higher personal accountability because of the investment of time and money to achieve a goal.

Outcome / Goal

This isn’t typically measured in a mentorship relationship. Many coaches have a process with intake forms and regular assessments to measure progress towards the goal. Often upon completion, the client will assess the monetary impact of coaching.

How to Get Started

First, as with the examples above figure out what issue you’d like to work on. If you’d prefer to find someone to give you answers based on their expertise, start looking for a mentor in your field or within your company. If you can’t find a single mentor, as this process can be lengthy and time-consuming, consider following this rule of 10 to get the opinions of ten smart people with a range of perspectives.

If you’d prefer a formal coaching arrangement, ask around for coach recommendations, especially from trusted colleagues who have first-hand experience with specific coaches. Consider narrowing down to coaches with experience in your field or who have worked with clients experiencing similar problems. Once you have a list, reach out and ask to have a conversation with each coach to evaluate fit and chemistry — it’s really a little bit like dating. You can also research other articles such as how to decide if an executive coach is right for you.

Finally, if budget is an issue, you may explore how to become your own career coach.