Coaching assumes that you are whole, healthy and able to solve your problems yourself.

 

Executive coaching uses a framework of powerful open questions to help you clarify your thinking and produce your own solutions and learning. The executive coach is not required to use their leadership experience to provide solutions but are trained to elicit your solutions. Hall et al (1999) contains “Essentially, executive coaches provide executives with feedback they would normally never get about personal, performance, career and organisational issues”, this is added to as we consider Pennington’s (2009) advice that “the coach acts as a facilitative change agent, sounding board and challenger primarily working one-to-one with and in support of the client in a collaborative equal partnership within a confidential creative space”.

 

Mentoring is an “older and/or more experienced person acting as a guide to a younger and/or less experienced person” Hawkins and Smith (2013). Two heads are better than one and the mentoring relationship has therefore provided a forum for the personal development of the mentee, effectively by temporarily widening their organisational and situational memory to include that of the mentor.

 

The strategic purposes of mentoring and coaching an executive are the same: organisational and personal long term success through the production of novel solutions to challenge. Mentoring uses an enlarged experience and knowledge set (that of the mentor) plus the relationship between mentor and mentee to enable this to happen, whilst executive coaching skillfully elicits the coachee to solve the problems in front of them in their own novel, unique and personal way, hence increasing their self-belief, resilience, and ability to cope with a wider range of situations with independence and autonomy.

 

In the words of Whitmore, coaching is “Unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance”.

 

Hall and Duval (2005) contrast these with therapy, which serves people who experience themselves as coming from a place of deficiency.  Therapy can be helpful if you’re feeling painful emotions or facing difficult decisions, if you want to improve or change your relationships, or if you’d like to develop a better understanding of yourself or others. Professional therapists include psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts as well as counsellors and psychotherapists.