Coaching and mentoring know no boundaries. Their tools and techniques, with a little situational fine-tuning, of course, work in the offices of the corporate world, non-profit enterprises, government agencies, and in the hustle and bustle of retail and service business environments, too.

In fact, the principles of coaching and mentoring are most welcome in the business venues with the poorest employee morale and the highest turnover. That is, in businesses perceived as offering drudgework, poor pay, and dead-end jobs, the need for an uplifting and enlightening managerial approach is self-evident.

One of the chief factors in the current business climate that's given rise to coaching and mentoring is the reality that today's jobs — and jobholders — are so often transient. That is, there's more voluntary and involuntary movement in the labor force than ever before. And coaching employees takes this fact of modern life into account by scrupulously working on the job at hand, yes, but simultaneously recognizing that tomorrow's job is also an important consideration.

What this means is that coaching and mentoring want to fashion knowledgeable and better-skilled workers, and hence employees who are more resilient and ready to move on to new and better jobs when the opportunities arise.

Even in seemingly unskilled jobs, good coaching extracts lessons to be learned and in so doing creates better-prepared workers who are more apt to go on to bigger and better things. Coaching and mentoring zero in on skills beyond the hard technical kinds and impart the softer varieties involved with dealing with people, accepting responsibility, maintaining a good attitude, and establishing a firm work ethic. These invaluable “other” skills need to be taught and applied in the restaurant and the record store, just as much as in the office place.