I have a name for this blend — Blended Guidance

The deputy general manager who came to my session yesterday asked me this: “Should I part ways with this person?”

The answer they would get from me depended on which hat I was wearing. Because:

A good coach asks a question: “What do you want to do? What happens if you part ways, and what happens if you don’t?”

A good mentor tells you what happened to them: “Years ago I was in something very like this. Here is what I did, here is where I was wrong, and here is what went well.”

A good consultant gives you the formula: “You have three options. These are the risks. I would take the first, and this is why.”

All three are right, in fact, and more often than not all three are needed at once.

Where the difference lies

In the seconds that followed, this is what went through my mind. What separates these three, to my mind, is who holds the expertise, who does the talking, and where responsibility is left. In coaching the expertise is in the process, not in the subject. The coach opens room for the client to find their own answer. The answer is already there; the coach makes it visible. Responsibility stays with the client from beginning to end.

In mentoring the expertise is in the subject. The mentor carries what they have lived through and hands it over. “This is how I did it” is the heart of mentoring. Responsibility still belongs to the other person, but now they hold a compass.

In consulting, the expert speaks. They set out the options, weigh the risks, name the recommendation. And the moment they name it, they take on a share of the responsibility.

A coach attends to questions, a mentor to experience, a consultant to analysis and solutions. What all three are after is the same thing, that the client travels better.

When a fine dancer first hears the music

What do you suppose a fine dancer does on first hearing a piece of music? I think they begin to dance in their mind. The floor is still empty, and yet they are already imagining the figures. The music all but tells them what to do, and the body answers the call and goes along with it. The same thing happens to me when I first meet a client 😊 From that first conversation I am walking, curious, inside their adventure. I set out on a kind of exploration. I see the findings we have, I see the locks, and most of the time I see where the keys are lying too… In that moment I am not asking myself “should I coach here, or mentor?”, just as the dancer feels no need to choose a figure… But let me say this plainly in advance: a dancer can improvise because the technique is in their bones. Whoever does not have it does not improvise, they flounder.

The dancer never worries about choosing a figure, the music has already told them. At the table it is the same, I am not really the one choosing the method, the client’s matter whispers it to me…

Why I call myself a consultant

A leader comes into a session with a problem. For the first half hour they usually need precise questions, and in the course of it they find the chance to put their own thoughts and feelings into words and hear them out loud. Then they get stuck somewhere, and there they need what I have lived through. At the end of the conversation they sometimes ask it outright: “What do you think I should do?” Saying “I am a coach, I cannot give you advice” does not meet that need. This is why I define myself in the widest of the three places, as a consultant. I do all three, often inside the same conversation. Consulting contains mentoring, and mentoring contains coaching!

Keeping the walls thin

Over the years I have come to see that these three work best not one after the other but folded into one another. Within the same conversation I ask questions, I tell my own story, I analyse and I name my recommendation. For me the walls between them are permeable. I have given this a name: BLENDED GUIDANCE. It is also the name of the programme I run with managers, leaders, successors and board members! I begin every new adventure by explaining the method. In the very first meeting I tell the person across from me what coaching, mentoring and consulting are, and in which of them responsibility rests where. And then how I will blend the three along the road we are going to walk together.

So what do we have on the technical side?

What shows that coaching is not simply a chat is the technique behind it. The five most used models are these:

These models are not scripts. They do not run the conversation, they keep you from getting lost. A good coach makes the model invisible; the client believes they are having a conversation, while the structure works quietly in the background.

Mentoring has its technique too

Mentoring is taken to be “telling”. In fact the real work is deciding which story not to tell. There are two traps in passing on your own experience. The first is putting myself, without noticing, at the centre of the story. The second is assuming that my solution will work just as perfectly for them. A good mentor leaves their experience on the table as an option, not as a prescription. And then listens to the client.

A last word

Numbers speak. Let me tell you about a few findings that caught my attention.

Look at what that study measured as “the way the decision was made”: was what remained uncertain actually discussed at the table, could a view that contradicted the executive’s own get into the room, could people who saw the decision from somewhere else take the floor? These are not rows in a spreadsheet, they are the states a table can be in. This is the eye I bring to my work. I ask the question so that the uncertainty finds words, I tell my own story so that they do not feel alone, I name my recommendation so that the person across from me hears one worked example of a solution. Which part of it is called coaching and which consulting is my problem; theirs is how they get up from the table.

The music ends, the floor empties. What remains is that the client has come a little closer to “their own best version”…