WMBA 6633 Week 2 Coaching vs Mentoring Comparison Example

Six Weeks on Shift Handoffs Against Two Years of Career Conversations: Comparing a Coaching Relationship and a Mentoring Relationship at a Fulfillment Center on Purpose, Agenda, Time, Measure and Skill

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6633: Personal Leadership: Mentoring and Coaching

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Six Weeks on Shift Handoffs Against Two Years of Career Conversations: Comparing a Coaching Relationship and a Mentoring Relationship at a Fulfillment Center on Purpose, Agenda, Time, Measure and Skill

Case One: Coaching a New Supervisor

I manage operations at Tri-County Logistics, a composite third-party fulfillment center in central Indiana with about 320 employees across two shifts. In March, D. R., who had driven a forklift and led a crew here for nine years, moved up to run second shift. Within a month, the first-shift supervisor was complaining that she started each morning without knowing which orders second shift had left unfinished, which docks had problems or which temporary workers had not shown up.

I agreed to coach D. R. on one task: the end-of-shift handoff. We met for thirty minutes after his shift twice a week for six weeks. In the first week, his handoffs were verbal, at the time clock, and covered about half of what the morning supervisor needed. By the sixth week, he was sending a written handoff with five fixed sections by 2:15 a.m., and the morning supervisor rated it complete on 23 of 26 shifts. The work had a beginning, a measurable end and a narrow focus.

Case Two: Mentoring a Planner

For about two years I have had a monthly lunch with M. T., an inventory planner in her late twenties who asked whether I would talk with her about her career. We have no agenda except what she brings. Topics have included whether to pursue a supply chain certification, how to handle a manager who took credit for her analysis, whether to apply for a role at a client's company and, most recently, whether she wants to manage people at all. I have introduced her to two directors at clients and recommended her for a cross-site project. There is no measure of success we have agreed on, and the relationship has no end date.

Comparing the Two

Table 1

Coaching and Mentoring Compared

Both people are described by initials; the organization is composite.

What the Comparison Shows

The most important difference is who owns the agenda. In coaching D. R., the agenda came from the business: the handoff problem existed before he and I met, and his success was defined by someone else, the morning supervisor. That gave our sessions focus but also meant he never chose the goal. Whitmore (2017) describes coaching as unlocking a person's potential to maximize their own performance, and argues that awareness and responsibility, the coachee's own, are what make it work. With D. R., I had to work to make the goal his, which I did by asking him what a good morning would look like for the first-shift supervisor and letting him design the five sections himself.

With M. T., the agenda is hers by design. Kram (1985) described mentoring as serving career functions, such as sponsorship and exposure, and psychosocial functions, such as counseling and role modeling. Most of what I offer M. T. is psychosocial, a place to think out loud, though the introductions and recommendation were career functions.

The second difference is measurement. Coaching D. R. could be judged in six weeks, and it worked on its narrow goal. Jones et al. (2015), in a meta-analysis of workplace coaching studies, found positive effects on skills, performance and individual outcomes. The mentoring relationship cannot be judged that way, and forcing a measure on it would change what it is.

The third difference is the reporting line. D. R. reports to my shift manager, so our coaching carried authority, and he may have agreed to things because I was senior to him. M. T. does not report to me, which is part of why she can tell me she is thinking about leaving.

What Each Relationship Asked of Me

The two relationships also ask different things of me, and I am better at one than the other. Coaching D. R. asked me to prepare. Before each session I read that week's handoffs, marked two that had gaps and decided which question I would open with. I was tempted to give him the answer, because I knew what a good handoff looked like and he did not yet. The discipline of coaching was holding that knowledge back long enough for him to find the gaps himself, then confirming them with the morning supervisor's ratings rather than with my opinion.

Mentoring M. T. asks almost the opposite. Preparation would get in the way, since I never know what she will bring. What it asks instead is restraint of a different kind: not steering her toward the choices I made at her age. When she raised the certification, I noticed I was about to tell her it had mattered for my own promotion. That was true, but it was my story, not evidence about her situation. I asked instead what she expected the certification to change, and her answer, that she wanted it mainly so supervisors would take her forecasts seriously, led to a better conversation about how her forecasts were presented.

Ragins et al. (2000) found that the quality of a mentoring relationship mattered more for work attitudes than whether the relationship was formal or informal, and that marginal relationships could be little better than none. That finding fits my experience. The relationship with M. T. is worth something because she can bring anything to it, which also means its value depends on my listening rather than on any program around us.

When One Becomes the Other

The two can blur. If D. R. asked me next year whether he should pursue a management certificate, our relationship would shift toward mentoring. If M. T. took a supervisory role and asked me to help her run better meetings, a period of coaching might follow inside the mentoring relationship. The useful discipline is to know which one is happening at a given moment, because the agenda, the measure and the role I play are different in each.

References

Jones, R. J., Woods, S. A., & Guillaume, Y. R. F. (2015). The effectiveness of workplace coaching: A meta-analysis of learning and performance outcomes from coaching. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89(2), 249-277. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12119

Kram, K. E. (1985). Mentoring at work: Developmental relationships in organizational life. Scott, Foresman.

Ragins, B. R., Cotton, J. L., & Miller, J. S. (2000). Marginal mentoring: The effects of type of mentor, quality of relationship, and program design on work and career attitudes. Academy of Management Journal, 43(6), 1177-1194. https://doi.org/10.2307/1556344

Whitmore, J. (2017). Coaching for performance: The principles and practice of coaching and leadership (5th ed.). Nicholas Brealey.