The whole of May we have been exploring the topic Mentoring and it was interesting to see a lot of questions/discussions/doubts/differences around this topic. What was gratifying for me was the feeling that I got uniformly from all sessions about the importance of the mentoring process, along with the dismay that there simply not enough mentoring and not enough volunteers to mentor!
It is important here to differentiate between coaching and mentoring although there's a school of thought that will disagree and disapprove of my distinction between the two. To me coaching is all about a specific skill - where there's a skill gap or knowledge gap, a coach comes in to fill this gap with his/her expertise in this area. For eg a cricket coach, a tuition master ( I have lots of whining to do about this later in this blog)CAT/IIT coaching centres, etc.An IPL coach now coaches his batsmen on how to sledge the ball over the fence - thats the new cricket as we now see it!
Mentoring is a lot deeper and has got to do with "teaching a man how to fish" versus coaching which is giving a man fish to eat!
Mentoring is all about influencing the "Being" of the person, while "Coaching" is all about the "Doing" of the person.
Coaching can be forced - mentoring cannot. A mentee must "want" to be mentored and a mentor must earn the trust and respect of the mentee without which it just does not work.
While Parenting should ideally be all about mentoring, parents have become coaches of their children with a vengeance! An anxious mother called me the other day and wanted me to suggest some class for her 14 year old who has a little gap in his week which she would like to fill up! Chemistry/Physics/Maths tuition, tennis coaching, karate classes, keyboard classes not to mention early CAT/IIT coaching. Mentoring has been delegated to the "idiot box"!
In this fast paced, quadrant 1 kind of lifestyle, Q2 focus areas like mentoring are disappearing and at this rate we will only groom more and more transactional managers who are "tormentors" of short term results rather than long term people leaders!
Anybody ready to volunteer as mentors? I have enough mentees crying for this kind of guidance!
