Should I work with a mentor or seek out a professional coach?

Clients sometimes wonder if it is better to work with someone in their profession rather than seek out someone trained as a professional coach but does not have the training in their field. For example, physicians often feel more comfortable initially working with other physicians, even though physicians are not professional coaches (a short training on coaching doesn’t make one a professional coach).

Getting advice with someone in your field is more accurately called mentoring.

Mentoring is not coaching. Mentoring is working with someone who knows more that you about your work and is willing to give you advice based on their experience. In coaching you remain the expert on what you do. The coach is an expert at helping people grow, learn perform, and accomplishing goals.

Mentors share what has worked for them in the hopes it will work for you. Sometimes that works. But often what works for one person doesn’t work for another person. Sharing best practices and success stories rarely results in performance improvement. The information shared is usually dependent on the person who shared it and not robust enough to work in other situations.

Mentoring is based on the premise of peer-to-peer support. Many self-help organizations use this approach. But the success rates of even the best peer-to-peer support groups, such as Weight Watchers and Alcoholics Anonymous are about 5% when considered over a three-year period. This is not to say that there are not many great things about these organizations. But objectively their success rates are unfortunately quite low.

People Architects’ track record for coaching success is multiple times higher. Using a results measurement methodology we developed over three decades ago, we document well over a 90% sustainable success rate.

“A 5% success rate is just not good enough for our clients. As a professional, I have been able to help them produce the exact opposite in terms of results.
- Clients on the verge of losing their job? With coaching, 100% of clients kept their job.
- Training over 40,000 surgeons around the world on how to implant a new heart device without complications? We reduced year-1 complications by a factor of 10 (technically a 1000% reduction).
- Helping managers design and launch new products? Over 80 products in a row met 300% of year-1 targets.

5% is because people have not done their homework on what works. It’s difficult to imagine only 1 out of 20 clients being successful. These are critical situations. For example, addiction and obesity are serious health challenges. People wouldn’t get into a car that only worked 5% of the time.

Evaluated the methods the “five-percenters” use with the evidence on what is proven to work shows this is no surprise. People Architects’ approach is based on what works and continues to be refined with a growing body of evidence of what is being shown to work even better. We model people who have been successful and replicate it. Instead of 19 out of 20 failures, we help clients win 19 out of 20 times.

When success is critical, invest in a professional who will make sure your odds of success are as high as possible.

~ Coach Tim

Also, it is not necessary to choose between a mentor and a professional coach. Near the conclusion of a People Architects’ coaching engagement, we encourage clients to develop a mentor relationship as another way of continuing their growth. Clients consider not just engaging a mentor but perhaps becoming a mentor for someone else. People learn so much when the try to help someone else. That has certainly been the case in our own experience.