Leader Spotlight: The difference between mentoring and coaching, with Hina Kharbey

Hina Kharbey runs HR2 Coaching, a coaching consultancy for product managers and product leaders. She was previously Director of Products at TherapyNotes, an online practice management system for behavioral health. She spent the first 15 years of her career at NovoPath, a laboratory information systems platform, where she began as a product manager and worked up to VP, Business and Product Strategy. Hina completed her MBA at Yale University during her time at NovoPath.

In our conversation, Hina talks about how the roles of a mentor versus a coach differ, as well as the situations that work best for having each one. She discusses how proper coaching helps PMs feel empowered and the skills and practices that coaches should employ. Hina also shares her experience creating a cultural change of feedback and transparency within an organization.

When to be a coach vs. a mentor

Could you start by explaining how you see the difference between mentoring and coaching within the context of product management?

In my head, both of them have their place. A product leader should have both in their leader toolkit and PMs should make use of both resources to speed up their development. With that said, mentoring, to me, is more about giving advice. If you’re a manager, employees will generally see you as an expert in your domain. So, anytime they have a 1:1 with you, they’re likely going to be coming seeking answers to their questions.

Coaching, on the other hand, is about exploration to gain more self-awareness and insight. Instead of offering advice to PMs, as a coach, I’ll ask more open-ended questions like, “Why is a certain situation or an issue challenging to you at this point?” Then, I’ll let them think through how they would solve that problem themselves. There’s a focus on cultivating a growth mindset around focus and identifying skills or areas of improvement that they want to hone in on. That helps them come up with goals and an actionable plan to achieve those goals.

With coaching versus mentoring, it’s about giving people more ownership over what it is they want to focus on and how they want to solve for it.

You mentioned that it’s important to have both and that they each have their place. Can you explain more about when you might decide to use one vs. the other?

Say you have a PM who’s struggling with user interviews. As a mentor, you might give them tips from your own experience, tell them how to approach the interview, what sort of questions to ask, and how to interpret the results. This is all very useful information that the PM needs to have if they are new at this.

Coaching, on the other hand, is more personalized. The conversation would be more focused on determining why this is a challenge for the PM, what’s working well, and what areas need improvement. And what are some actions they can think of that would help improve those areas? A coach will help set goals to complete those actions based on what the PM identified.

I’d say mentoring is really important when you’re comfortable but still want to learn from where other people have been. Even for things like sponsorship, a mentor internal to your company can be great to back you up and promote you to other leaders. Coaching is more appropriate for when you want to improve on specific skills or areas. Or, if you feel like there are blind spots where you don’t know what you’re missing, a coach can be a great resource.

Do you have an example you can share of a time you coached someone rather than mentored them?

Sure. I had an employee who had some personality concerns about a supervisor. I could have given them advice on how to handle the situation, but advice sometimes makes people feel defensive. Instead, I asked, “What if nothing were to change? The supervisor’s personality is not something that’s under your control. How do you want to manage your reactions?” That really helped them think of it from a different angle and consider if they are making this situation worse or better.

Helping PMs feel empowered

Are there some key benefits to coaching that relate specifically to product management?

Product managers want to feel empowered. There’s a lot of talk about how the most successful, high-performing product teams are teams where PMs feel empowered to collaboratively pick their own problems and come up with their own solutions. Coaching works so much better that way — the PMs do not feel like they’re being micromanaged or having answers spoon-fed to them.

The best part is that it goes both ways. The PMs feel more empowered, and product leaders give PMs the tools to own that. It’s a two-way street because PMs can’t feel truly empowered unless they take the steps to acquire strong decision-making skills. That’s where coaching particularly comes in handy.

Also, as a coach, you don’t have to be an expert in the field. If you’re exploring something new, such as AI these days, you might not have as much experience in that field. When you are taking on a coaching approach, it’s more about exploration. You and your coachee are learning together. It gives you a little bit more leeway to be a leader to your team, while also giving them the power to come up with ways of solving problems.

As you are mentoring or coaching, how do you measure the success of your efforts?

With coaching, as much as it might sound open-ended, there’s a structure to it. Anytime I’m working with someone new or entering into a coaching agreement, the first thing I do is set up a coaching plan. That involves initial discovery to identify the areas that we need to focus on, and we then come up with actionable, measurable goals to resolve those and time-bind them.

We’re working together and they’re committing to the plan. The goals are measurable, so I can track them quantitatively. I also am a big believer in the power of feedback. This means making sure I’m direct and giving feedback regularly rather than waiting till the end or for a performance review. I also like to get feedback in return. How is this process working for them? Is the approach working or do they prefer something different? Do they feel that they’re making progress or not?

Qualitatively, I also like to get a sense of the engagement that I have from the coachee. Are they coming into our meetings prepared with questions and things they want to focus on and improve on? Or are they just checking the boxes? That’s important to gauge as well.

Direct feedback and the importance of onboarding

For someone within a product organization who might be seeking out mentoring or coaching within their organization or through an outside resource, what should they look for?

If you’re unprepared, you won’t get much out of a coaching session. It’s important to get into the right mindset. If you are entering the relationship as a coachee, it’s a lot of work. It’s not like mentorship where someone is telling you what to do or giving you advice. Instead, you are doing all the work. Your coach is not going to come with any answers, they’re only going to come with questions. So, go in with an open mind and understand you’re going to be uncovering insights and blind spots.

When looking for a coach, trust is super important. A coach needs to establish psychological safety, especially if they’re part of your organization. You need to trust that they have your back, and if you’re going to be open about your weaknesses or what you’re struggling with, you need to trust that they won’t use it against you in any way. If you’re looking outside your organization, you should speak with a few options to see where there’s a natural fit.

Generally, the best coaches are going to be direct with you. It’s going to be uncomfortable. There’s no growth without discomfort. That’s why a coach should be someone who’s open and gives direct feedback without wanting to please you or to be your friend. You need to be open to hearing that kind of direct feedback that no one else would tell you — the difficult conversations.

The onboarding process for new hires is such a critical time. Could you talk about your approach to incorporating those coaching principles into an onboarding process?

I don’t think we talk about how difficult it is to start at a new place enough. Everything is new, such as the work, the product, and the people. Onboarding is so important because it lets the new person come in and feel supported and trusted. If you take on a coaching approach with them, you are asking them about what their goals are alongside the regular product and process training you’re doing. If you’re asking them that during onboarding, it further instills confidence and sets them up for success.

I’ve worked at places where onboarding is just throwing someone into the deep end and having them figure things out on their own. Hands-on training is great, but it should be supplemented with onboarding processes too. Additionally, I think it’s a great idea to set new folks up with a peer mentor. That’s an approach I’ve used in the past at previous organizations that was very successful.

Instilling cultural changes

In your experience, can coaching actually shift an organization’s culture?

Yes, cultural change is super hard. It takes a long time. In my opinion, everyone needs a coach — someone to surface blind spots and be a cheerleader — but it takes time and patience to drive cultural change throughout an organization. You need leadership to do that.

For example, I think it’s especially hard for an engineering organization. Product managers want to be empowered. They’ve bought into the concept of coaching already. Developers, on the other hand, may be used to the business telling them what to do and how to do it, depending on the organization they’re in. If you ask developers open-ended questions, it may not sit as well with them. They may not be used to it. However, it is so crucial to involve engineers early on in the discovery process because they come with knowledge that product managers don’t have.

We always want to empower engineers who will think through their problems and contribute to these discovery discussions earlier on. Coaching can really help if that’s not the current culture in your company. I like to think I’ve been planting the seeds and hope to see the results soon.

What’s your approach to identifying and nurturing talent within your team?

For me, it’s important to stay adaptable and flexible. I don’t stick exactly to job descriptions. No two PMs I’ve ever seen have the same skill set, so I need to be able to identify individuals’ strengths and provide an environment where they can work on projects that utilize those strengths. And then if there are weaknesses, I complement those weaknesses through training, support, or help from team members who have that skill set.

Further, I like to challenge my team members and set high standards. If you want to be part of a high-performance team, discomfort is important. You need to be challenged to grow. For example, I once had a new PM with a ton of potential — great communication skills, good rapport with clients, and worked well under pressure. I assigned him our biggest client to work with. There were some concerns in the organizations because he was so new. I said, “Well, if we don’t challenge him, we’ll never know.”

It worked out great. He needed some help going into the nitty gritty of PRDs, so I assigned him a product analyst to work with, and that was a great way for him to learn. He was promoted rapidly through the organization. He’s a director now, and the clients love him. It’s important to help your folks step out of their comfort zone.

Also, recognize the human side of things. Things come up, whether that’s illnesses, appointments, etc. Creating a culture where it’s OK to ask for help and where people will have each other’s backs is so important. For instance, we recently had a product manager go on maternity leave and there wasn’t a replacement for her immediately. One of the designers stepped up and started doing a lot of the requirements and talking directly to users. She improved her skillset and the organization recognized her for her contributions. And the PM felt supported once she knew we wouldn’t be bothering her with questions throughout her leave.

Could you offer any tips for product leaders who are trying to shift from mentoring to more of a coaching mindset in terms of things they should be aware of or pitfalls they should avoid?

The number one thing is to create an environment of psychological safety. If you’re a direct supervisor, it’s going to be really hard for people to open up to you all the way. To some degree, they’re trying to impress, after all, you employ them. Try to create an environment where people will feel safe talking about what they’re struggling with, because, in the end, that’s going to help everyone reach their goals, including the organization itself. That will also make the org a nicer place to work.

Additionally, the biggest piece of feedback I get from PMs is to set clear expectations and goals. Teams want to know what is expected of them, what success looks like, and which goals they should be continuously working on. Also, being direct is important. You’re working with these people every day, and sometimes it’s uncomfortable to give constructive feedback. But again, if you’ve created that environment of psychological safety, your team understands that when you’re giving this feedback, it’s because you want them to grow.

Lastly, stay open to feedback yourself as a leader. No one’s perfect, and you want to hear from your team earlier on what’s working for them, as well as what’s not. Focus on your own development so that you can continuously improve as well.