Coaching and Mentoring Strategies

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

You can use a number of strategies to ensure you coach and mentor employees in an effective manner.

Build a connection

First, build a connection. A crucial first step in establishing any coach or mentor relationship is to make the coachee or mentee feel safe and comfortable. This means you need to establish an authentic connection. And remember: first impressions last! So make a determined effort to create a positive connection from the outset.

To help you do this, greet clients warmly and personally with a firm and warm handshake. Introduce yourself and check to make sure the client picked your name up correctly.

Begin with a human connection. Make small talk to show that you are not a threat to their safety. Light banter and humility go a very long way to establishing a strong connection. As humility is grounded in vulnerability, this allows the coach or mentor to come across as the ‘real’ person and open the way for an authentic connection.

Also, maintain a relaxed and open posture. Use your body language to signal interest, concern, and so on. For example, lean in towards the client to indicate interest.

Recognize the client’s strengths

The second strategy is to recognize the client’s strengths. Your role as a coach or mentor is to assist your clients in reaching their full potential. As everyone has a set of inherent strengths, whether recognized or not, you must identify, extract, and build upon your client’s strengths.

Earn the client’s trust

The third strategy is to earn the client’s trust. After all, the coaching or mentoring process is a high-trust relationship, whereby both parties need to be open. The coachee or mentee needs to feel confident enough to share their goals and concerns. Building any trusting relationship takes time and patience. A coachee or mentee will probably not open up to you until you have spent some time with them. You have to first ‘prove’ that you can be trusted with their confidences.

Aim high

The fourth strategy is to aim high. And expect your clients to do the same. It is similar to delegation, when you always delegate a task slightly above the ability of a person, to make them strive to be successful. You can build up confidence in the coachee or mentee to reassure them that their course of action is achievable, even though they may encounter pitfalls and roadblocks. The best part about aiming high is that when success is achieved, you are then in a position to celebrate that success with the client. You can use this success for its learning value by pointing out that the client now knows “what success feels like”. And they should strive going forward to replicate this feeling as often as possible.

Listen actively

The fifth strategy is to listen actively. Indeed, this is essential in any coaching or mentoring relationship. Too often, the coach or mentor is impatiently waiting for their turn to talk or thinking about what to say next, instead of truly listening to their client and viewing them, and what they have to say, with interest.

Active listening is a four-step process. First, truly listen to the person and be seen to listen by your body language. Next, feed-back the content and feeling of the person’s words. Third, confirm you heard the person correctly. And finally, ask a relevant follow-up question to further clarify your understanding of their situation.

Build rapport

The sixth strategy is to build rapport. To do this, pay attention to the overall body shape of your client. Roughly copy or emulate it. Then, after a few minutes of conversation, lead your client by shifting your posture and see if they follow your gesture. If they copy you – success! Rapport has now been built and you can intensify the conversation or ask a tough question. If they do not copy your gesture, revert back to their current body stance and try again later.