Coaching and mentoring get used interchangeably, but they pull on different levers. A mentor lends you their map — the routes they have already walked. A coach helps you draw your own, asking the questions that surface what you already half-know.
That distinction matters when you are deciding where to invest. Mentoring compounds when there is a well-trodden path and someone a few steps ahead. Coaching compounds when the path is yours to define — a new role, a hard decision, a behaviour that has quietly capped your growth.
The best leadership programmes use both, deliberately. They pair the directional pull of mentoring with the reflective depth of coaching, and they are explicit about which mode a given conversation is in.
At GKT, every engagement starts by naming the goal — and the goal determines the mode. Sometimes you need answers. More often, you need better questions.