What's the Difference Between a Mentor and a Coach?

In this candid explainer, Holly Brailsford breaks down the one question everyone in HR eventually asks: what actually separates mentoring from coaching?

The answer unfolds as a study in contrasts:  Coaching emerges as the sharp, expensive specialist, short-term, accredited, and laser-focused on performance goals, using pointed questions to make people find their own answers. Mentoring, by contrast, plays the long game: a relationship built on shared industry experience, career storytelling, and personal investment rather than assessment.

Along the way, Holly reveals a quiet truth about mentoring programs: most people sign up without knowing exactly what they want, and it falls to the mentor to help that focus emerge over time. It's less a competition between two methods and more a case for choosing the right tool for the right moment, ending with a simple pitch for why mentoring builds the kind of trust performance reviews never can.

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