Helping and Supporting Others

If your role involves helping others grow and develop, then it is useful to have strong coaching and mentoring skills.

Incidentally, the same is true if you are a parent; a coaching style of parenting is more fun and takes less effort than the old-fashioned disciplinarian approach used by earlier generations.

But back to work, where sensing others’ development needs and boosting their skills and abilities is increasingly a requirement for managers.

People who are good at this offer their knowledge in four ways:

  1. They give their time as and when it is needed; a few words linked to a specific task or challenge are more effective than a lecture delivered after the event.
  2. They role-model what they are attempting to teach; they are the living example, they walk the talk, they practice what they preach.
  3. They are skilled in the art of feedback; again, this is done in a timely manner so that the employee can relate it to their efforts.
  4. They recognise and reward people’s strengths and achievements, often asking questions which encourage reflection to maximise learning. 

These steps require humility, empathy, insight into other’s feelings, and good communication skills. As we have seen with other benefits of Emotional Intelligence, there is a circular relationship here: you need the skills of EI to be a good coach/manager, and the more you practice them the more you strengthen them in yourself.

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