Susanne Madsen shares how mentoring and coaching are quite different, yet both emphasize a distinct approach to helping people realize their full potential, and how serving as a coach will make you a better project leader. Our work environment has changed significantly and abruptly; have you considered taking on a role as a coach or a mentor to encourage others to stay engaged and productive?

Table of Contents

01:01 … Meet Susanne

01:44 … Coaching vs. Mentoring Definitions

03:05 … Are Project Managers Good Coaches?

04:08 … Who Should Mentor?

04:59 … Deciding on a Coach or a Mentor

06:25 … Good Coaching Skills

07:57 … Limitations of Internal Coaching

11:27 … Mistakes Made in the Role of a Coach

12:43 … Asking Good Questions

15:36 … Making Time to Reflect and Review

18:08 … Don’t Ask Why

19:49 … Enhancing Problem-Solving Skills

22:20 … Benefits of Becoming a Coach

24:54 … Can You Self-Coach?

26:15 … Choosing the Right Mentor

27:31 … Time Spent on the Relationship

28:52 … Who Sets Expectations?

29:33 … Benefits for the Mentor

31:03 … Organizational Coaching or Mentoring?

32:50 … Contact Susanne

33:47 … Closing

SUSANNE MADSEN:  So

when you study coaching, you become so much more conscious about your own

beliefs, about how you come across.  And

you just get better at building rapport and having conversations with others,

empathizing with others, and not just talking about yourself all the time. 

WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome

to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  If you like what you hear, please leave us a

review on our website or wherever you listen to our podcast.  We always love hearing from you.  I am Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio

is Bill Yates.  Welcome, Bill.

BILL YATES:  Hi,

Wendy.  I’m excited about our

conversation today.  This is going to be

on a topic that I think a lot of project managers will benefit from.  I think there’s a lot of confusion, too,

about coaching versus mentoring.  So we

hope to really clarify for people, what’s the difference?  Are they the same?  And what advice do we have for both those who

want to be a coach or receive coaching; be a mentor or receive mentoring.

Meet Susanne  

WENDY GROUNDS:  Right, right, so I was thinking, let’s do a podcast on coaching/mentoring. And the more I looked into it, the more we realized those are two very different things, and so we hope that our guest today can elaborate and give us some clarity. So her name is Susanne Madsen, and she’s a project leadership coach, trainer, and consultant, and we’re very excited to have Susanne with us in the studio today.

BILL YATES:  It’s going to be outstanding, and so I’m going to be the one with the boring accent.  We have two wonderful accents, and then there’s me.

WENDY GROUNDS: 

Yes.  Susanne was telling us she

lives in the U.K., but she’s Danish.  So,

yeah, pick up some of that accent.  It’s

pretty cool.

BILL YATES:  Yes.

WENDY GROUNDS: 

Susanne, welcome to Manage This. 

Thank you so much for joining us today.

SUSANNE MADSEN:  Thank

you for having me.  It’s a real honor.

Coaching vs.

Mentoring Definitions

WENDY GROUNDS:  Coaching

versus mentoring.  Could you give us a definition

of both of them and just how they relate to projects?

SUSANNE MADSEN:  Yes, and it’s good that we start with that because so many people use those two terms interchangeably. And I think we should say that there’s a lot of overlap, that both help us to relate to another person and help that other person move forward.  But we do that in different ways, whether we are coaching or mentoring.

So coaching, as a coach, we like to say that we don’t give advice, and that’s one of the big differences between the two. When we coach somebody, we like to help somebody move forward by encouraging that person to find the answers for themselves, and there’s a number of ways we do that.

With mentoring – and so I’m looking here at the black-and-white differences between them.  With mentoring it’s perfectly acceptable to give advice because the whole point of mentoring is that you pass on knowledge from one person, who may have the experience that the other person doesn’t have, and so that is part of the parcel.  And when you then relate that to project management, you can see that, as a junior project manager, I might want to be mentored by somebody more senior. So they can pass on the knowledge, tell me all the war stories, and tell me what they think I should or should not do or how to progress within the organization.  Whereas with coaching, it’s much more impartial, in a way.

Are Project Managers Good Coaches?        

BILL YATES:  So a follow-up question on that, I remember reading some of your blogs and writing about this, and I totally agree with it.  You make the point that project managers tend to want to give more advice and sometimes don’t make the best coaches for that reason.  Is that because we’re problem solvers?  So what is it in a project manager that makes them sometimes difficult to be a good coach?

SUSANNE MADSEN:  I think it goes for project managers as many other types of professions, anything to do with engineering and problem-solving, because we like to give the impression that we know a lot. We know it all, maybe not everything, but we are knowledgeable.  We don’t want to make people feel that they could do without us, and so that’s actually something that’s related also, not just to coaching, but to leadership in general.  If I empower other people, and if I don’t tell them what to do, then what is my role? And we can’t really get our head around that, so yes, it’s true that many project managers like to give advice because it makes me feel that I’m needed.

Who Should Mentor? 

BILL YATES:  Yup.  So following up on that, thinking about it

from a person who is thinking maybe I should mentor, given the definitions that

we have, who do you think is better positioned to be a mentor?

SUSANNE MADSEN:  So when I’m a mentor, I would say I’ve got to a position within the organization where I’m a little bit more senior.  It doesn’t mean that junior people can’t also mentor.  But it suggests that I have a certain level of experience that I want to pass on that knowledge and experience to somebody else.  So I may be very happy with my day job, very busy with my day job, and I may feel there’s a certain way of doing it that I would like to pass on to others.  And so I’m quite happy to spend, let’s say a couple of hours a month mentoring different people, or a couple of hours every six months mentoring others.  Whereas coaching, I think, is fundamentally different because as a coach you do need some training.

Deciding on a Coach

or a Mentor

WENDY GROUNDS:  If we’re

looking at it from the other side now, if somebody is saying, “Should I have a

coach, or should I have a mentor for my career?”  How do they decide which is the right thing

for them?

SUSANNE MADSEN:  So I know a lot of people who do both.  So one doesn’t exclude the other, also one might be readily available within the organization, and the other one might not.  But let’s say that we take those constraints away. Personally I would say that, if somebody wants to learn from somebody more senior, if I know that I can get better at the subject matter, or if I would like to climb the career ladder, and I need to broaden my network, or there’s something else I feel that I can get from somebody, let’s say, within my own organization, or with somebody who works within the same industry as me – maybe they don’t work in my company, but in a sister company – then mentoring is for me.

Also if I feel that it’s more like there are some situations, the same situations keep coming up for me – I keep locking heads with my project sponsors, or I keep getting the same kind of feedback from my team members and I’m wondering, is it me or is it them?  Then mentoring isn’t really for me. They’re less likely to work with me on those interpersonal skills, understanding my own patterns, my own limiting beliefs, that much more behavioral aspect, so that’s much more about coaching.

Good Coaching Skills

BILL YATES:  I want to

follow up on the role of a coach because there’s a part of me that’s a little

bit intimidated when I think about being an effective coach because I agree

with you, I think it does require some training.  When you’re thinking about that, what are

some skills that you see in good coaches?

SUSANNE MADSEN:  Good

coaches here, I would assume that they have been trained.  Some of the obvious skills that a coach needs

is more about the asking open questions and listening.  And also rapport building is unbelievably

important because coaching is about creating a safe and very confidential space

because as a coachee, I open up a lot about stuff that may be very vulnerable

to me.  So as a coach I need to be able

to hold that space and to treat that confidentiality and to build a rapport

that enables the other person to really open up, and not make them feel awkward

and go, “Oh, really?  Did you say

that?  I mean, that’s really horrible,”

you know.  So there’s a lot of

interpersonal skills that a coach needs that we train in as coaches.

And I’d also like to say that a good coach is somebody who

can be a mirror.  It doesn’t mean that I

just match and mirror whatever you’re doing, but it means that I play back to

you whatever is going on for you.  So you

might talk me through some of your goals and aspirations.  And I replay that back to you; and I say,

okay, so what I’m hearing you saying is so and so.  And you go, yeah, I guess that’s what I’m

saying.  So being that mirror is also

very important as a coach.

Limitations of

Internal Coaching

BILL YATES:  You talk

about the need for building rapport and confidentiality in a coaching

relationship.  I totally agree.  I’ve got to be able to trust my coach that I