Hey Professors,
Do you need an academic mentor or a professional coach? Or both? Or asked another way, what kinds of support can you expect from a mentor vs. a coach when you are trying to reach your career goals?
If you’re a little fuzzy on what some of the distinctions are between mentorship and coaching, then don’t worry, this episode is for you.
In this 54th episode of the Rise with Clarity Podcast, I’m going to talk about mentoring and coaching within the context of higher education. In order to think through the question that I just posed, we actually need to parse out what some of the differences are between professional coaching and academic mentoring.
And in a future episode I want to think through some of the places where mentorship and coaching can also overlap. Hopefully this discussion will help you to decide which one—coach or mentor—may be most helpful for you at this stage of your academic career. Or maybe it will clarify for you that it would be great to have supportive mentors along with a supportive coach.
Alright. Let’s start with academic mentoring, since this is likely more familiar to you. If you’re new on the tenure track, then some of your institutions may have established formal mentoring programs for faculty that you are now a part of. You may have been assigned a faculty mentor (or even more than one) to have meetings with during the academic year.
What are some of the benefits of having an academic mentor?
In this context, an academic mentor is most likely someone who has successfully gone through the tenure process at your institution. They can give you insights into departmental and campus culture, and they can help you to understand how your institution works. They may have knowledge on those things that don’t explicitly appear in your academic personnel manual or the departmental bylaws, but yet are part of the culture of your university. They can impart some of this local knowledge to you.
Additionally, an academic mentor may be someone that you can turn to for guidance or advice on specific matters related to your success and the tenure and promotion process.
And as I mention in a previous podcast episode, Number 52 (Faculty Mentorship at the Mid-Career Level), a mentor can be someone who mentions your name in the room when it really matters and who can facilitate introductions and networking opportunities for you. They are tapped into networks of influence and their endorsements in those circles can be critical for you.
Over the years, you may have a range of academic mentors that are both at your institution and beyond it. These could be both formal and informal mentoring relationships. One thing that you may discover is that many of your mentors are at a higher rank than you. So you may be seeking out their help because they’re a couple or many steps ahead of you on a path that is similar to the one that you are on.
While some mentoring relationships are time-bound by the programs that structure them, other mentoring relationships can sometimes blossom into long-term ones where your mentor checks in on you regularly through your career milestones, your career curveballs, and even transitions.
Perhaps because of the “I’ve walked this path before you” aspect, mentors may freely dispense advice to you based on their own experiences. And this advice is often informed by what they did to be successful in their career. This is great if you are looking up to your mentor as a role model.
One downside to this approach, however, is that the mentor may make assumptions that do not necessarily take into account your positionality, your identity, or your own goals, which may differ from theirs.
And also, since this current moment in higher education is quite different from previous decades, what worked in the distant or near past may not be so applicable or relevant right now.
Additionally, another downside may the inherent power dynamics or the hierarchical structure in the mentoring relationship. And while this can be helpful when a mentor is helping to advocate for you and facilitate introductions, it can also be complicated if the relationship ever sours or if you don’t ever feel empowered to speak openly with your mentor.
So, there’s a lot more to say on this particular issue, but for the moment I’m going to be moving on.
What Does Professional Coaching in Higher Education Look Like?
Ok, now let’s think about professional coaching in the faculty context. Professional coaching in higher education can take a number of different forms which I’m going to get to in a moment. Most of higher ed coaching is characterized by shorter term engagements that are focused on specific goals or areas that you identify where you need support.
Professional coaching services may be available for free through your university, through institutional memberships in programs like the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity or by paying for an external coach who serves faculty and staff.
Now, what are some of the common topics for higher ed coaching? Here are just a few.
• How to prioritize writing and research for an upcoming promotion
• How to navigate departmental or institutional politics while going up for tenure
• How to acknowledge and mitigate burnout
• How to develop leadership skills while stepping into a new administrative position
• How to navigate mid-career slumps and plan for pivots
• How to brainstorm ways to manage the current political moment without sacrificing your core values
• How to make the decision whether or not to leave academia
One key difference between mentoring and coaching in relation to these topics that I just mentioned is that a certified coach is most likely not going to tell you what to do. In fact, coaches that are trained according to the International Coaching Federation (ICF for short) and who abide by the ICF Code of Ethics are not supposed to give you advice in a coaching session.
Rather, they work together with you as part of a thinking partnership, helping you to reflect, uncover assumptions, point out patterns, and help you to brainstorm tailored strategies to work toward your goals, while offering some accountability.
Here are some other additional elements of professional coaching.
• It starts from a place where there is a non-hierarchical relationship between the coach and the individual who is being coached.
• It is future-oriented, and often involves thinking through challenges that may be in the way of reaching your goals.
• Through a practice of active listening, the coach centers the faculty member, and listens to them with curiosity and empathy.
• The coach asks powerful questions that help the individual being coached to evoke self-awareness.
• Typically, professional coaching involves sessions that are structured. This includes a co-created agenda with a topic to be discussed, accountability actions, and next steps.
• Coaching engagements are typically shorter term and can be done over the course of say, 3 months, with 2 sessions per month as one example.
Alright. So what are some of the benefits of professional coaching?
I think one of the main benefits of working with a professional coach is that they can offer tailored and non-judgmental support for you, and that you can decide what specific topics you want to work on in sessions.
If you’re working with an external coach, then there probably is less of a likelihood of a conflict of interest. You can speak more openly with your coach about delicate or sensitive issues without worrying that that information will be shared with your colleagues, your chair, or appear in your next annual review.
Second, a coach is less interested in giving you advice and telling you what to do, than they are in helping to empower you to come up with your own solutions. They’re not a role model for you in the same way that an academic mentor often is.
And third, a coach is more likely to accommodate an engagement that involves a “coaching of the whole person” and not just the academic self. This is connected to the fact that many coaches come from the belief that each individual is creative, resourced, and whole—and that they’re able to come up with the best solutions for themselves.
But the coach may function as a helpful sounding board, thinking partner, and accountability partner.
Ok. Now what are some of the downsides?
One disadvantage to professional coaching can be the cost investment. If your university doesn’t have internal coaches or does not allow you to utilize professional development funds to help pay for coaching, then professional coaching is paid for out of pocket, and can be expensive.
Another downside is that you may experience a misalignment in the coaching engagement with either your coach or your expectations. Maybe what you need more is an academic mentor to actually give you advice in certain situations.
In response to cost-prohibitive coaching, I’d just say that things don’t have to be so stark. There are coaches in training out there who are offering discounted rates or even doing pro bono coaching, as well as affordable group coaching programs.
And then in response to the second point; I want to say that there are definitely professional coaches out there, who offer a blended approach of providing structured guidance along with some of the hallmarks of “pure coaching” – which is driven more by the asking of powerful questions in the coaching session vs. dispensing advice.
In a future podcast episode, I want to reflect on this middle area, where there are these areas of overlap in the Venn diagram of mentorship and coaching.
What is it like to bring a coach-like mindset into the mentoring experience?
And then, what is it like to interweave elements of mentoring into a coaching engagement, which actually connects to a recent revision of an ICF core competency, which I’ll talk more about.
At the end of the day, it is really up to you to determine what kind of support you need the most at a given time. Do you want someone right now to guide you, who has walked your path before? Or do you want someone to walk alongside you?
From my perspective, I think:
it’s great to have both trustworthy mentors and coaches to work with, to help you to manage your academic career and develop strategies to thrive there or to thrive in another place.
If you’ve had positive or negative experiences with coaching or mentoring as an academic, and would like to share some of those experiences, I would love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out to me at Katherine at RisewithClarity.com.