Understanding the leadership interactions of counseling, coaching, and mentoring can help boost your coaching career. Knowing the difference between counseling, coaching, and mentoring can help you implement all of these in you coaching practice. Knowing how they relate to leadership can help you find more successful outcomes for more clients.

Leadership

The leadership interactions of counseling, coaching, and mentoring begins with leadership. Leadership doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all definition. Leadership is mostly about a having a vision, being able to successfully describe that vision to others, and having the ability and will to inspire others to fulfill that visions. Leadership is also about being able to help others achieve their visions and goals – it’s about being able to motivate and energize others while taking risks to create rewards.

Coaching

For a coach, the leadership interactions of counseling, coaching, and mentoring is centered on coaching. After all, that”s who you are and what you do. You learn the basic skills needed to be a coach – inquiry, active listening, feedback on performance, accountability, and more. You help clients identify and understand their goals, and then you encourage, motivate, and support them on the way to goal achievement. Interactions between the coach and the client often focus on leadership – whether they are in leadership positions or just concerned with leading themselves to success.

Counseling

I moved this to second because you are a coach, first and foremost. Counseling is different than coaching – it is often done during a personal crisis. It explores the past while trying to ameliorate the present and provide a more desirable future – it moves people from a state of dysfunction to a more functional place. Coaching uses the present to create a brighter future, but can borrow skills and theories from counseling to offer more outcomes for their clients.

Mentoring

The leadership interactions of counseling, coaching, and mentoring conclude with mentoring. One of the most important leadership interactions of counseling, coaching, and mentoring, and the one that makes mentoring a category that should not be overlooked, is its informal nature and its ability to be broader and more long term in scope. The mentor will share more personal stories and knowledge than a coach or a counselor. A mentor can help a mentee navigate both professional and personal obstacles, and can work with all aspects of a client’s life.

The Leadership Interactions of a Counselor, a Coach, and a Mentor

As a coach, you occasionally have to be counselor, coach, and mentor. Because counseling is a professional field requiring specific degrees and licenses, coaches only borrow some theories and skills from counseling – they can not actually act as a counselor. But, because coaching and mentoring are so closely related, you often both to your clients.

Coaches use some counseling skills, mentoring tools, and their own coaching core competencies to improve their clients’ leadership skills by:

• Identifying goals, both for the individual and for any involved organizations
• Increasing self awareness and leadership potential.
• Helping them understand feedback and accountability, both for themselves and for those they may lead.
• Help them become reflective and responsive.

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Fred Philips
Business Coach
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