The Powerful Impact of Mentoring and Coaching

• The roles of coaches and mentors are similar but distinct: Coaches offer students fresh perspectives, while mentors draw on their own experience to help mentees navigate their career journeys.
• Aston maintains pools of coaches and mentors drawn from alumni, academics, and professional services staff passionate about preparing the next generation of leaders.
• Aston also encourages staff members to participate in mentoring and coaching programs to enhance their skills and facilitate their career progression.

 
An MBA journey should be a life-changing experience. This is true whether a student has taken a career break to attend a full-time program or is continuing to work while pursuing an EMBA degree. Some students enroll in MBA programs because they want to change careers completely; others want to position themselves as senior leaders within their companies. All are ready to invest in their careers, build on their previous managerial expertise, and gain broader views of the business world.

In recent years, feedback from employers, graduates, and students indicates that it’s not enough for MBA programs to consist of classroom lectures, real-life case studies, and outside consulting projects. Students also want guidance in taking internal, personal self-development journeys. They want to enhance self-awareness, build resilience, and gain the ability to motivate a wide range of people.

To succeed in this complex, diverse world, managers need to display a type of leadership that goes beyond the traditional heroic model. To help managers develop their own leadership mindsets, business schools can integrate mentoring and coaching opportunities into their curricula.

While mentoring and coaching are related, they differ in important ways. A mentor is an experienced professional who has already been through many of the experiences a mentee is hoping to navigate. In a mentoring relationship, the mentee typically will ask the questions, and the mentor will answer them.

A coach, however, is not necessarily more experienced than the person being coached—just someone who has a different perspective. The coach asks the questions, and the individual answers them. The best coaches, says Tony Robbins in Unleash the Power Within, help others find their own answers. And as Sir John Whitmore explains in Coaching for Performance, through these interactions, individuals unlock the potential to maximize their own performance.

At Aston Business School in Birmingham in the U.K., we provide students with opportunities to receive both mentoring and coaching. We believe that providing them with such opportunities to develop their leadership styles is one of the most valuable educational services we can offer.

Team Coaches Offer Objective Perspectives

At Aston, we provide leadership coaching not just for individuals, but also for teams. We build on the team-coaching techniques for entrepreneurs showcased in Team Academy, edited by Elinor Vettraino and Berrbizne Urzelai.

We work with the university’s coaching pool, which consists of volunteers from the academic and professional services staff who are keen to support MBA students. To become coaches, these volunteers must earn the university’s Postgraduate Certificate in Team Coaching or the ILM Level 5 Coaching and Mentoring qualification. Once they earn a certification, individuals are automatically signed up to the pool. In return for the free qualification, they are required provide a certain number of hours of coaching annually.

Up to 24 team coaches are involved each academic year. They support each other through a community of practice, which includes informal peer supervision and regular drop-in sessions. The school also supports them through a resource-sharing platform.

In the first term, we assign each MBA team a coach after we carefully consider the dynamics of the team and the kind of coach who would be of most benefit. For the second term, we reshuffle the teams and assign new coaches. This means that MBA students should have opportunities to learn from and reflect on their experiences with two teams and two different team coaching styles.

The best coaches help people find their own answers and encourage individuals to unlock the potential to maximize their own performance.

During consultancy projects, our coaches help students through the difficulties of forming teams, and they guide groups out of the holes that project teams almost always experience. Recent feedback shows that participants value the assistance.

“A significant turning point was our engagement with our career coach,” one student commented. “Her advice to put ourselves in the client’s shoes, simplify complex strategies, and structure our narrative for better client engagement dramatically enhanced our final presentation. … This coaching interaction was instrumental in shaping a professional and client-focused approach.”

“Our turnaround began after structured sessions with an external team coach,” said another. “These sessions acted as a catalyst for calibration. The coach created a safe environment where we could reflect openly, reassess group assumptions, and restructure our approach.”

One-on-One Mentors Provide Guidance

Mentoring is an equally valuable service that schools can offer MBA students. As the Blackwell Handbook of Mentoring emphasizes, mentoring relationships are among the most powerful educational tools schools can employ to engage students and help them succeed. They enable students to navigate transitions, build resilience, and develop a sense of purpose.

Or, as mentoring specialist John C. Crosby has said, “Mentoring is a brain to pick, an ear to listen, and a push in the right direction.”

For the past 10 years, Aston Business School has offered students the opportunity to have a hand-picked mentor chosen from our alumni. Since then, an amazing 293 mentors and 545 mentees have participated.

While the mentoring program is not mandatory, all interested students can register for it at the end of the first term and start the program in the second term. The timing is intentional: It allows students to settle into their MBA classes and identify their development needs before we match them with mentors. To register, students submit their CVs and three-minute videos explaining why they want mentors, what their career goals are, and what kind of support they hope to receive.

All students who successfully complete the registration process are assigned mentors, chosen for how well they match the students’ skill sets, previous professional experience, and future career ambitions. We pair each dedicated mentor with a single mentee. We believe this arrangement ensures quality over quantity and allows mentors to provide personalized guidance, support, and industry insights tailored to the mentee’s individual goals.

The matching process is managed by the business school’s alumni team, which maintains a pool of alumni mentors by organizing an annual call for new and returning participants. Mentors either have completed MBAs themselves or have served for some time in senior management roles.

These individuals come from a diverse range of professional backgrounds, including entrepreneurship, finance, and consultancy, and they hold positions in multinational, governmental, and nonprofit organizations. Mentors volunteer their time and expertise because they are passionate about supporting the next generation of business leaders and because they find the experience personally rewarding.

Aston’s program does not include formal training, because most volunteers are seasoned professionals who have served as mentors during their careers. As part of the onboarding process, the alumni team holds one-on-one conversations with each mentor to clarify expectations and answer questions. Team members also spend significant amounts of time getting to know all the volunteers to understand what kind of support and insights they can offer as mentors.

We provide mentors with information packets outlining their roles and commitments, as well as with mentoring agreement forms they can use with their mentees to set objectives. We also encourage mentors to join a dedicated LinkedIn group where they can connect with fellow mentors, share experiences, and get peer support.

Mentoring relationships are powerful educational tools that enable students to navigate transitions, build resilience, and develop a sense of purpose.

Once mentors are matched with students, the pairs work together for the next 12 months. Throughout the year, we frequently check in with both mentors and mentees to ensure the relationships are progressing well and meeting expectations. The alumni team works closely with the MBA program directors and MBA careers team to maintain a coordinated approach. We also encourage participants to contact the alumni team if they encounter any issues or require additional support.

At the end of each mentoring cycle, we invite both mentors and mentees to provide feedback and testimonials so we can assess the program’s impact and identify opportunities for improvement.

Recent feedback from one of our MBA students underscored the transformational power of a truly personalized mentoring relationship. “In our very first meeting, my mentor patiently listened as I shared my career progression, my background and upbringing, my academic and professional experiences and, most importantly, my motivations and long-term aspirations. Only once he had a full understanding of who I am and where I want to go did he begin to offer his own insights and lessons on how best to navigate the path ahead.

“Since then, each conversation with my mentor has revealed new facets of the business world, shown me precisely which skills to hone, and helped me identify the opportunities that matter most for my career journey. The relationship has helped me understand what opportunities to go for, rather than settling for anything which may not align with my long-term targets.”

Training the Coaches and Mentors

None of the mentoring and coaching options we offer students would be possible if we didn’t provide similar opportunities for our faculty and staff.

Our Postgraduate Certificate in Team Coaching has been enormously important in upskilling employees and facilitating their career progression. Each year over the past two years, we’ve enrolled 20 academic and nonacademic staff members in this qualification program. They are now deeply involved in supporting our MBA teams.

Additionally, to help our faculty bring a coaching and mentoring approach to their own practice, we maintain a well-developed system of mentors and buddies within each department. These mentors offer guidance in teaching students as well as conducting research.

After all, as Stephen Brookfield writes in Teaching for Critical Thinking: Tools and Techniques to Help Students Question Their Assumptions, the best university teachers are not just content experts—they are coaches who can help students hone their critical thinking.

To come back to where we started, we know that, in working with MBA students, we are helping create the leaders of the future. Or, as Peter Drucker puts it in The Effective Executive, “The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths … making the system’s weaknesses irrelevant.”

This is a responsibility we take very seriously. One way we undertake it is by providing these future leaders with coaches and mentors who will help them become the best versions of themselves.