Business Mentoring Matters

Not necessarily.  Coaching is focused on acquisition of skills or knowledge and is most often performance based.  Coaching is designed for achieving a certain result:  namely, the increased competency of a given coachee.  A coach, therefore, needs to be an expert in the area s/he is coaching and is accountable for results.  The skills necessary to be a good coach include one's ability to share one's expertise with the coachee and to ensure that person develops the skill sets involved. 

A mentor is focused on developing a relationship based upon trust which will allow the mentoree to share the issues that impact his/her success.  Therefore, to be a good mentor means you need to be good at creating relationships.  You may or may not be an expert in the areas a mentoree wishes to develop but you do need to be able to create that climate of trust. 

So being a good coach doesn't mean you are going to be a good mentor.  The skill sets are different for each.  Both are valuable but you want to ensure that the right solution is applied.