Mentoring and coaching are two adjacent strategies to develop your capabilities and talents. They each bring a different emphasis and approach but the driving outcome is similar: to improve your ability to succeed in what you hope to accomplish.

1. A mentor is someone who has specific experience in the role or field of knowledge sought after. Mentoring is based on the mentor’s experience and expertise. A coach is someone that brings a set of questions, tools, processes and strategies to help you clarify and achieve your aspirations. As a coach you don’t have to be a CEO or run a billion dollar business to work with a CEO of a multimillion dollar company.

2. Mentoring is primarily the transfer of knowledge from someone who knows to someone who doesn’t. A big part of coaching is helping you access and draw out knowledge from inside – to realize what you already know but have not yet acted upon.

3. A mentor tells you what he did and how it worked and prescribes his success formula. A coach helps you to discover your own talents and recognize your unique success formula.

4. A mentor will model the behavior, demonstrate the skill and describe her experience. A coach will help you discover your way.

5. Often a mentor is an older person. The intimation is that the mentor ‘has been there’, ‘has done that’, has ‘faced these kinds of challenges’. A coach can help you discover your challenges together with you.

6. In terms of scope, mentoring tends to focus on the task, the role, the domain of knowledge. Coaching is about the whole person including the 12 eco-systems of success.

7. A mentor transfers job-specific and role-specific skills, organization-specific know-how, and culture-specific understandings. For example, engineer mentors a younger engineer; a movie director mentors a beginner movie director; a financial planner mentors financial planners, a manager with experience in multi-cultural groups mentors a junior manager moving into multi-cultural responsibility. A great coach will help you identify what’s most important to you, clarify what you “really” want and will help you create your individual roadmap to get to where you want to go. The Coach will encourage and challenge you to take action and will hold you accountable for your commitments.

8. The mentoring relationship is driven by the mentee’s inquiry and curiosity. The coaching conversation often evolves through the coach’s inquiry and usage of powerful questions. Therefore, a mentoring engagement thrives when the mentee takes the initiative to promote interesting questions to the mentor with their own insatiable desire to learn and apply the learning. The coaching engagement thrives through a collaborative discovery guided by interesting and provocative questions the coach brings forward.

9. When you want to know how something works, an organization, a process, a culture, you seek out a mentor. When you want to clarify how you should work on your future objectives you seek out a coach.

10. The power equation of coaching is peer-to-peer. The mentoring power equation is senior-to-junior or more experienced to less experienced.

11. The mentor shares life’s lessons and wisdom and you identify and decide what out of their experience is relevant for you. A coach will generate together with you options and strategies from which to choose your course of action.

12. As a coach you can take a mentoring approach when you have a personal knowledge in the domain of inquiry and the person coached inquires about your experience. As a mentor you can take up a coaching strategy to help the mentee discover her optimal path of action. The best coaches and mentors both enjoy helping people to actualize their potential and realize their goals.

13. An effective coaching program progresses through planned sequences of meetings: monthly, twice monthly or weekly sessions. Discipline is an important aspect of the coaching framework. We create accountability inside the coaching space. The mentoring framework is often less formal and the onus of initiative and discipline rests largely with the mentee.

14. You ask a mentor: “what should I do in this situation?” and she tells you her experience. You ask a coach and he reframes the question back to you: “What do you hope to achieve? What are your options? What if you did nothing? What feels right? Which path is most energizing? What would you do if you knew you cannot fail?”

Great managers are capable of a stepping into both – coaching and mentoring strategies. In our Adaptive Leadership (AL) and the Manager Coach (MC) programs we practice theses skills and behaviors. Most managers tend to use one style of engagement in which they are comfortable. Great managers practice situational awareness and adapt their mode of engagement to enhance the situation, promote growth and achieve best results.

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Dec.08.2007 :: Coaching, Mentoring :: No Comments »

“Coaching is a collaborative process dedicated to help and inspire an individual or team to achieve a desired result.”
Here are some of the benefits of coaching I have experienced and witnessed both in being coached and in coaching executives.
The coaching process unfolds through discovery, expanded awareness and insight and leads to designing a strategy of action. It is intuitive, energizing, challenging, sometimes painful and always interesting. If it is not stimulating and interesting then the coaching process is not on. Coaching value is generated on the foundation of trust and authentic conversation.

Here are 32 Benefits you can find through Coaching. You can…
1. Increase self-awareness
2. Clarify situations and reduce complexity
3. Identify opportunities
4. Evaluate threats
5. Explore options and choose the optimal path
6. Remove obstacles
7. Improve communication effectiveness
8. Prioritize goals
9. Articulate values and purpose
10. Refocus on the vital few most important things
11. Let go of the unimportant
12. Role play an upcoming situation and improve readiness
13. Learn to ask powerful questions
14. Examine beliefs to overcome personal limitations
15. Develop a strategy for career advancement
16. Develop a personal and business vision
17. Download new ideas and frameworks
18. Get feedback and feed-forward on personal strengths and style
19. Update your self-view and presentation
20. Align short and long terms objectives
21. Free up time and resources
22. Manage chaos and ambiguity
23. Resolve conflicts and pacify emotionally charged situations
24. Change your inner state and practice new ways and approach
25. Gain confidence and fluency
26. Practice and optimize influencing skills
27. Create a strategy to develop your team
28. Rebalance work and personal life and family
29. Learn to coach individuals and teams for breakthrough results
30. Overcome a career setback or other significant disappointment
31. Clear your space and environment
32. Set a course of action and build support system and accountability

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Nov.15.2007 :: Coaching :: 1 Comment »

As I said in Part One of this net casting – this process is intended to help you gather your thoughts and your strengths and prepare for the best opportunities and growth you can have in the next year. Visit these questions (and those in the previous parts) time and again from now to the end of the year. By December you will have an open net that is ready to find and receive new answers.

In part four of this net casting process I invite you to look at the following questions:

10. What will make next year the best year yet?
11. Who and what do I want to help next year? Where can I make the most difference?
12. What support do I need? What help do I need to achieve all that I hope to be doing next year? What and who am I ready to have come into my life to help me live on purpose and realize my opportunities?

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Nov.02.2007 :: Coaching, Personal Growth :: No Comments »

In part three of this net casting I look at the following questions (read parts one and two below. If you want to join me, you can spend 7-15 minutes daily on each question):
7. What new growth opportunities will excite and energize me?
8. What risks am I ready to take? Where am I ready to step into a new unknown territory?
9. What will make me very proud next year?

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Oct.31.2007 :: Coaching, Personal Growth :: No Comments »

Here are the next three questions in my October deliberations. If you want to join me, you can start by keeping a journal and spend 7-15 minutes daily on each question. Alternatively you may have a conversation about these questions with a friend:
4. What am I doing that I no longer need to do? What am I ready to stop doing?
5. What do I want to learn? What new skills and capabilities do I want to develop?
6. Forgiveness is the greatest act of self love – what am I prepared to forgive?

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Oct.30.2007 :: Coaching, Personal Growth :: No Comments »

October is almost over and the end of year draws near. Every new year brings in a new flux of opportunities, challenges, energy and growth. Each year, I begin to cast the net for the new year in October. It’s great time to reflect, explore ideas, and deliberate on options. This annual net casting is a process of bringing myself up to date with where I am today. I harvest learning and wisdom from my journey so far this year; I identify needs, trends and directions and I draw future plans and possibilities. This process starts in October and I keep working on it through the end of the year. This helps me “plough the field” and gives the process time to breathe in and out. I do this by dwelling on certain questions. Some questions need time to simmer and percolate and it takes time to engage the holistic capacities of the mind.

Beginning to cast your net now makes you more ready for golden opportunities to find you in the new year. In the next four days I will post three questions daily that I am deliberating on as I begin to cast the net for the new year. Here are the first three questions:

1. What have I learned this last year? What have I enjoyed and found satisfying?
2. What do I no longer need? What can I clear out of the way, to make space for the new?
3. Who are the important people in my life that help me be the person I am? What do they need from me? How can I be there for them?

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Oct.29.2007 :: Coaching, Personal Growth :: No Comments »

Rachel is a bright executive. She moved swiftly up the corporate ladder and was given responsibility for a large division in her company. She relocated and quickly adapted. Yet, for a few months Rachel continued to struggle. She hadn’t been able to communicate effectively with a key manager. He had been a talented manager and she tried a number of approaches but simply couldn’t get through to him.
When we spoke about her struggle it became clear to Rachel that it was not the manager she was struggling with. It was herself. “It’s my own internal sense of clarity and direction that I am having difficulty finding. My ineffectiveness with this manager is just a by-product. It’s not about him, it’s about me.”

The lights turned on for her when she realized this and proceeded to articulate that what she faced was not ‘doing’ things differently, rather it was finding a new, more powerful sense of ‘being’. It was not a technique to be found on the outside – it was a new knowledge of self, inside her, that she was looking for.

I challenged Rachel to clarify and reach for the things that were absolutely essential for – her core values and vision for herself. She came back with a tremendous sense of self-discovery, liberation and strength. Rachel then realized that she had released something powerful within. She had found a more authentic voice and the results were thrilling.

In the weeks following our coaching, Rachel was cruising at a different altitude. Her focus and enhanced effectiveness surprised even her. “It’s as though I have new amperage about me and there is a kind of grace and joy that accompanies all that I do. My communication is clearer and more confident. It is not an act. I have a compelling inner sense of what is important, of my values and of what I cannot compromise. People respond to me differently. I was able to find a powerful new clarity with the manager I had struggled with previously. I haven’t really changed a lot of what I say; it’s that I am now able to come out from a different place. The conviction and the energy come from the inside and other people can’t help but notice.”

© Aviv Shahar

Aviv Shahar :: Oct.23.2007 :: Coaching, Leadership :: No Comments »