I often get asked the question should I get a coach or a mentor? My answer is emphatically yes! Surrounding yourself with the right people is often the difference between 'good' and 'great'. But why limit your guidance to just one source when you could engage a personal board of directors.
A personal board of directors“… is a group of people with diverse skills who all contribute to your career, growth and development in different ways’.
There are 6 positions you should aim to fill on your personal board of directors; so consider who you will ask to sit at your table:
1. Trusted Advisor
The person you go to when you really have a problem. The person who would never betray your confidence and you can unload all your thoughts and feelings and get trustworthy advice from.
2. Teacher / Coach
The person you go to when you need to learn to get better at something.
3. Cheerleader
The person you reach out to when you need a pep talk; to be reassured of your contribution and value.
4. Elder / Guide
An experienced mentor who shares with you their life experience, knowledge and insight.
5. Creative / Innovator
The person who sparks your ideas, challenge yourself and creativity.
6. Insight
The person who understands the lay of the land inside the organisation and provides you with tacit knowledge. They hold the insight into ‘How things work around here’.
So which one is best?
Two of those six seats are the ones people actually argue about. Position two, Teacher or Coach. Position four, Elder or Guide, which is your mentor. Most people treat them as the same purchase, and choosing the wrong one is why so much good guidance goes nowhere.
Position 2. Teacher / Coach
Works on how you do something. They do not need to have done your job. They need to be able to watch you do it, and to ask better questions than they give answers.
Position 4. Elder / Guide
Works on where you are going. They do not need to watch you work. They need to have already walked a road you are trying to get down, including the parts they got wrong.
Is this a skill problem or a direction problem? If you know where you are going and cannot yet do it well, you want position two. If you can do the job in front of you and cannot see what comes next, you want position four. Most people who say they need a mentor have a skill problem, and most people who hire a coach have already decided the direction is fine when that is the thing most worth questioning.
Which is the honest answer to the question in the title. Neither, on its own. One person cannot be your challenger, your teacher, your cheer squad and your translator of office politics, and it is unfair to ask them to be.
Go back up through the six and be honest about how many of those seats one person is currently filling. That number is usually the problem.
Be diverse in your wisdom
Six seats is the easy part. The harder part is resisting the urge to fill all six with people who think like you do, because the board that agrees with you is the most comfortable and least useful one you can build.
Pick people who will disagree with you well. That is the whole point of a board.
Keep reading
- The Keys to Holding Great Coaching Conversations. Once you know a coach is what you need, this is what good coaching actually sounds like.
- The Value of Time. Building capability in someone else is the highest yield thing a leader does. Worth asking who is doing it for you.
MENTORING
Some things do not get solved in a room full of people.
If reading that list made you realise one seat is doing all the work, an hour with someone outside your organisation is often the fastest way to fill another. One hour on leadership, or two hours on your DISC or Hogan profile.
SEE MENTORING OPTIONSCite this article
Satterthwaite, M-J. (2017) 'Coach, Mentor, or Personal Board of Directors? What's best?', Scope Blog, 23 August. Revised August 2026. Available at: https://scopevision.com.au/blog/coach-mentor-or-personal-board-of-directors-whats-best (Accessed: [insert date]).
In text: (Satterthwaite, 2017).
Be diverse in your wisdom
Six seats is the easy part. The harder part is resisting the urge to fill all six with people who think like you do, because the board that agrees with you is the most comfortable and least useful one you can build.
Pick people who will disagree with you well. That is the whole point of a board.
That was a whole article about asking other people for help.
So here is me doing it.
The like button just below is how I know.
And if someone came to mind while you were reading, send it to them. That is the better compliment.
