What is it you need?
Do you need a consultant or a coach?
I can be both but you need to decide what is the most compelling need right now for you.
Is it coaching or is it consulting?
First, you need to understand the difference between coaching and consulting. You need to understand the difference because it will be critical in setting the outcome you desire and your expectations.
The question is: Who holds the power in the process and the relationship in coaching and consulting?
In consulting, the consultant holds the power in the consulting process and in the relationship. In coaching, the client holds the power in the coaching process and in the relationship.
With a consultant, the client is seeking a certain level of expertise from a consultant in a very focused area of specialization to solve a problem or to take advantage of an opportunity. Hence, the client is dependent on the content and process that the consultant provides.
With coaching, a coach is not always providing answers. The coach does not necessarily have to be an expert, does not have to be the most knowledgeable on a subject, or has to have a tremendous amount of experience. A coach is more like a guide.
This person is more a master of change, of transformation. A coach is a mentor in your journey to attaining goals and making you accountable for increments of change leading to the achievement of your goals. A coach must be able to work with you to help you transform into a greater version of yourself.
Here are some other differences…
Partner or Solutions Provider
If I were working with you as a coach, I would be a partner in your learning process. I won’t be giving out answers to you or giving you some cheat sheets. It would be more like asking you questions to help you find clarity in what you are about to do or the rationale of what you are about to do.
For example, when the country alert level was raised to contain the COVID-19 pandemic around March 2020, we called family enterprise owners. The call was to help them cope with the impact of the protocols about to be imposed before it was formally announced.
As a coach, I will go through the pace of asking clarifying questions:
- What is your most immediate priority?
- How are you going to organize your enterprise?
- How are you going to know if your people and your systems are capable and ready?
- Where is your customer in all of this? How are you going to deal with your customers?
- How are you going to execute your preparations?
- Where are your employees, community, and your local authorities in all of this? How are you going to relate to them?
As a consultant, I will just send you a guide and give you a quick rundown of the most critical actions to take.
Action 1: Protect your employees.
Action 2: Set up a cross-functional response team.
Action 3: Stress-test your systems, ensure your liquidity, and build your contingency plan now.
Action 4: Keep your customer close.
Action 5: Demonstrate your purpose and commitment to your stakeholders.
Finding Your Truth or Moving Forward
What is your goal? Are you very intentional in your journey to discover yourself? Are you trying to understand your personal leadership? Are you at a crossroads about your life, your career, relationships? Are you having some reflections about your moral compass, your ethics? Are you desiring to forge your own personal code of conduct, mission, or vision?
These are questions I will be asking you to keep you moving forward if I was working with you as a coach.
If I was your consultant, I’ll simply tell you what to do. A consultant will give you some tools or even give you a process on how to solve your challenges and then move on. It will work or it may not work since the solutions are always in context with current realities and how much information is available at the moment.
Your coach will help you discover the answers yourself. Find your own truth. These truths can be your lifetime guide. Information is always grounded on your understanding and appreciation of current realities. Your personal realities.
Meeting a Specific Challenge or Building Capacity to Meet Any Challenge
Coaching is a way to build capacity. Oftentimes this refers to the personal capacities of the client. Consulting is a way to address very particular business or professional challenges such as branding, communication, or cost management.
Coaching can help you become more confident, speak with more clarity about your personal vision, or inspire people. Consulting can come in the form of helping you choose what social media to use for your message, assisting you in deciding long-form or short-form writing for content, or how to automate messaging.
Consulting guides you to the specifics of execution or implementation. Coaching guides you in understanding the underlying principle or philosophy behind an action. This understanding hopefully helps you build your own principles or understanding so you can apply them in other areas of your life.
Teaching or Self Discovery
In consulting, I approach learning moments for the client differently. I provide eBooks, white papers, case studies, and even lessons emailed in installments. I organize bite-size workshops for clients leading to the completion of a major project.
Coaching sessions are continuous exercises of learning designed with the client’s pace and the context in mind. It is a constant moment of new discoveries about themselves that builds on itself. Each learning is a foundation for the next.
A coach armed with a wide variety of experiences can add a colorful background to the client’s journey of discovery.
Exploring or Providing Opportunities
As a consultant, the structure of the interaction will start with getting into root causes and underlying drivers of current challenges, followed by a process of narrowing down options for resolution.
In most cases, as a consultant, I end up presenting a considerable amount of information to the client. The interaction most of the time closes with several courses of action or recommendations.
In a coaching process, I lead the client through well-framed guide questions to clarify what matters to the client or what is the outcome he desires. The questions eventually lead to the client drawing up his own alternative outcomes and solutions.
Problem-centered or Client-centered
In the consulting engagement, the focus is always on the problem. The consultant looks at the different dimensions, perspectives, and impact of the problem. The consulting process is designed to get the most information about the problem and the consultant based on experience and best practices makes recommendations.
With coaching, the focus is on the client. The coach understands the strengths and capabilities of the client using them to get insights for the best approach to leverage them. The approach the coach uses is towards self-discovery and helping the client arrive at a solution to any challenge. It doesn’t matter whether it is personal, professional or business.
Conclusion
Here are some of your takeaway...
- A consultant can help free you from other tasks and get you to focus on things you’re good at.
- A consultant can provide you access to expertise and address your knowledge gap.
- A consultant can help you respond to technical or tactical challenges more quickly.
- A coach is a guide to help you prepare for a life-long journey to get to a better version of yourself or a process of personal transformation.
- If you are forming or pursuing a vision, if you are aspiring to a higher level of leadership, or setting the foundation for a personal code or ethos, a coach is a better choice.
I can coach you on leadership style especially in the area of leading effective teams. If you are looking at leadership in the context of an enterprise wide development, we can work on a consulting engagement at that level. I can help you map a leadership development program for your enterprise.
I write a lot about the things I do for clients. Please visit my
LinkedIn account to know more about my work, my solutions, and the kind of coaching I provide clients.
If you want to know more about my coaching sessions please go to the
Contact Us page and tell me about yourself, why you need help, and what do you want to achieve in the coaching engagement. If your needs are urgent, please add your mobile phone number in the message with the best day and time in the week to contact you.
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