One of the most unhelpful actions of the 1990s was the attempt by a bevy of coaches in the USA to draw hard lines between coaching and mentoring. The rationale was primarily commercial. Here were these people offering for free developmental support very similar to that offered by professional coaches. So, a number of artificial and questionable distinctions were promoted. In particular:

  • Coaches were trained; mentors not. While sometimes true for so-called business mentors, training for mentors in corporate programmes became the norm long before training and accreditation for external coaches. Accreditation for mentoring programmes also preceded accreditation for coach education programmes.
  • Mentors give advice; coaches don’t. In the 3,000-year history of mentoring, the relationship with mentees was to help them with the quality of their thinking, through questions and providing just enough context to stimulate different thinking. Context is a powerful aid to learning dialogue; advice is doing the thinking for someone. In the 175 years of coaching, giving advice (via instruction) was central. The shift to non-directive approaches began in the 1970s but only become dominant in the late 1990s. Even today, coaching as instruction remains commonplace in industrial settings. Moreover, there are times when a coach is ethically bound to give advice – for example, when someone is about to do something that may be harmful to themselves or others, or may be illegal.
  • Mentors act as hands-on sponsors. This notion arose from an academic study that asked people about others who had helped them in their careers, but didn’t distinguish between instrumental and developmental relationships – conflating the two roles of sponsor and mentor into one. We now know that the two roles, which have historically been separate, are largely incompatible, at least within a corporate setting, not least because sponsorship is a relationship based on the exercise of power or influence and mentoring is a learning partnership. Most corporate mentoring programmes, especially in Europe, now take care to distinguish between them. Professional mentors typically have to keep the roles separate to avoid conflicts of interest.

The work of the Coach Maturity Research Group demonstrates conclusively that the more mature coaches become in their practice, the more they blend coaching and mentoring. They use their own physical and mental reactions as clues to what is happening for the client and between them and the client. They draw upon their experience to empathise more with the client, to craft questions that are more powerful, because they derive from having “been there” and they are able to use stories to enlarge the canvas of a conversation. It seems that worrying about “slipping into mentoring” is a mark of coaching immaturity.

The EMCC working groups on coaching and mentoring identified two key qualities or competencies that mentors have, on top of those that they share with coaches. One is the ability to use personal and vicarious experience in a non-directive manner; the other is, where appropriate, to be a role model.

Across the world, we now see a growing movement for leaders to seek professional mentors rather than professional coaches; or coaches, who also have mentoring skills. We also see increasing interest by retiring executives, who have coached and mentored many people over their careers within the organisations that employed them, seeking to employ their combination of experience both as a leader and as a developer of people. 

The idea of a Professional Mentor Academy was first trialled nearly a decade ago in Poland. More recently, CCMI has opened an international programme aimed at both retiring executives and at coaches, who want to add mentoring skills to their existing competencies. For the latter, this is a route to adding more value to clients than through coaching alone. You can find out more about our upcoming courses on the Foundation and Practitioner course pages.

©️David Clutterbuck, 2026