Overview of coaching and mentoring

Coaching is a process of unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance; and is now an established method for the development and ongoing support of leadership capability in the NHS, principally amongst senior managerial leaders. The NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement in 2007 recommended ‘’Executive coaching ‘’as the ‘single most important development intervention that a senior leader in the NHS can access.’

Additionally mentoring in both formal and informal varieties has existed as the backbone of clinician support from training through to consultant appointment in recent years. Nevertheless in clinician communities across the NHS, the differences between coaching in its various forms and more formalised mentoring are not widely known. Indeed the basis on which to determine which of these two distinct, but overlapping, modes of leadership development clinicians and clinical leaders should access remains unclear.

In this overview we will try to explain the concepts of coaching and mentoring and the differences between them. It would be useful to highlight that in NHS quite often the terms are used interchangeably.