Coaching, Mentoring and Instructing

The distinctions

• Instructing — telling someone what to do and how. Appropriate when they lack the knowledge, when safety or compliance permits no variation, or when time genuinely does not allow anything else.
• Mentoring — sharing experience and advice, usually from someone further along a similar path. The mentor's experience is the content.
• Coaching — helping someone find their own answer through questions, reflection and challenge. The coach's expertise is in the process rather than in the content.
• Counselling — addressing personal difficulty, which is outside a manager's role and requires referral to appropriate support.

Managers need all of the first three and should be clear which they are doing. A conversation that begins as coaching and becomes advice in the third minute is instructing with extra steps, and the person notices.

Why coaching is worth the time

Telling someone the answer is faster in the moment and produces dependence. Coaching is slower and builds capability, which compounds — the person solves the next problem, and the one after, without you.

The manager who solves every problem brought to them has created a queue at their own desk and a team that stops thinking. The pattern is self-reinforcing, because the busier the manager becomes, the more they default to the faster option.

When coaching is appropriate

Coaching works when the person has, or can reach, the capability; when the situation allows time; when there is more than one valid approach; and when developing them matters as much as the immediate outcome.

It is inappropriate in an emergency, where safety or compliance is at stake, where they genuinely lack the knowledge and no amount of questioning will produce it, and where the person is in distress and needs support rather than challenge.

The mindset

• The person is capable of finding a good answer, given the right questions.
• Their solution need not be yours. A different approach that works is a success, and insisting on your method defeats the purpose.
• The goal is their development, not the demonstration of your expertise.
• Ownership matters. A solution someone reached themselves is implemented with commitment; one handed to them is implemented with compliance.

The hardest part

Resisting the answer. Experienced managers usually know the solution within thirty seconds, and the urge to say it is strong. Holding back, asking another question, and tolerating the silence while someone works it out is genuinely difficult and is where the entire value of coaching sits.