Speaker 1: Mentoring skills for managers is about how you, the person with more knowledge and skills, pass these on to team members who know less than you. Mentoring is an effective way to leverage your time and skills into the team you manage, i.e. rather than being limited to one pair of hands you can create five, six, seven pairs of hands or more. You and the team can add a lot more value to the company this way. Mentoring is also rewarding, satisfying, enjoyable and fun as you are building a close professional relationship with team members. Mentoring is not training, although there are many similarities. Mentoring is more like being a guide for the other person's learning and the relationship is a lot more two-way than training. Today we're covering... I personally think that investing in mentoring and coaching team members is one of the best investments you can make as a manager of that team. My name is Jess Coles and I've had a 25-year management career in corporates and household names through to SMEs. As a line manager I spent around 40% of my time mentoring my direct reports, who in turn successfully delivered a huge number of projects and initiatives. This investment led to winning the Best Team Award and coming runner-up in the following year. If you're new to this channel, Enhance.Training shares business and people management expertise to help you improve your performance and that of your team and business. And if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. Before diving into mentoring skills for managers I'm going to quickly cover how mentoring helps team members and you. If you're going to invest your time in mentoring at work then you want to know it'll be worth it for you personally and for your team. You can use mentoring skills to teach a team member on any subject that you know more about than them or help them build skills that you're better at than them. Great uses of mentoring include firstly to give team members direction or help them avoid wrong turns. Secondly helping team members learn a specific skill or set of skills. Third to pass on specific knowledge and life or professional experiences to them. Fourth help tackle problems, work on problems together or to guide them through solving the problem. Fifth mentoring the team member to build their reputation and personal brand within the business. Sixth help them navigate the personal relationships and politics of an organisation. And seventh provide career advice and guidance so they can move their career forward faster. There are so many ways you can help others learn what you know and what you do well. A mentoring relationship can be very much a two-way street. You can also learn a lot from those you mentor to. The benefits that you'll personally get from investing in building mentoring skills and spending the time to mentor team members include firstly improved individual performance feeding into improved team performance. Secondly a happier more motivated and valued employee. Third stronger more positive relationships with your team members. Fourth more ownership and accountability within the team. Fifth less employees leaving the team and more wanting to join from other teams in the business. Sixth passing on knowledge and skills to your successor so you can move your own career forward. As mentioned earlier using mentoring skills and investing your time mentoring is an effective way to leverage your time and skills into the team you managed. Upskilling the team keeps everyone's careers moving forward and creates more valuable staff members for the company. A win all round. Time and time again I have personally experienced the benefits of this investment with my team on my career and in terms of my satisfaction happiness and motivation. If you want personal career progression make the time to mentor as many of your team members as possible. When starting to use mentoring skills for managers you are likely to realize successful mentoring needs time. If you want your investment in mentoring your team members to move the dial you need to invest a lot of time into it. This can be really tough when you have so much on your plate in the first place. Let me tell you about Dave. He took over a team of 35 staff and six direct reports. There was a lot that needed to be done by the team and it was impossible for Dave to personally get involved in more than a fraction of the work. The team members lacked the skills to deliver important results on their own. Rather than Dave rolling his sleeves up drinking a lot of coffee and working late every night he spent about half his week mentoring and supporting his six direct reports and insisted they spend some of their time mentoring their direct reports as well. And you might be thinking that 50% of Dave's time taken up in one-on-one meetings how on earth would Dave and the team get what was needed done? Dave realized that he needed to multiply some of his skills into his direct reports so that they could do more of the work that was needed. This meant more hands tackling the problems. His direct reports worked in the same way with their reports. The team delivered on 54 separate projects in that year, many significant projects and that was over and above each person's day job. This is what you can achieve with a happy motivated team while constantly building the right skills within that team. So plan on investing a significant chunk of your week supporting your team members if you really want to see the benefits of mentoring in the workplace. Mentor each person face-to-face and in person as much as possible. A video call is a minimum where this is not practical. Set aside at least an hour a week per person to meet in private. Keep the mentoring time and place consistent each week. I would expect that you spend another hour or two in ad hoc meetings or helping with specific problems that come up. Successful mentoring takes a significant time investment on your part. Every minute is worth it. The third area when using mentoring skills for managers is to set goals and build a plan. As a manager aim to set expectations in your first mentoring meeting. You know how often you will have diarised meetings, when will the team member get your ad hoc advice, what is expected from each party etc. This is really up to you and the team member to agree on. Next set goals together. What is the purpose of giving mentoring from your side as a manager? Equally important what does the team member want from it? Find out what their ambitions and longer-term goals are. What skills and knowledge should you be transferring? When you have both agreed what the goals are then I suggest you as the mentor start planning out how you're going to help your team member achieve those goals. If you don't create a plan you'll have a lot of unstructured chats which don't move your team member towards the goals agreed. For your plan think about first you know what subjects you're going to cover and in which order. Secondly what experience do they need to build these specific skills? Third what projects are they involved in and what problems do they need to solve now? Fourth what projects do I need to get them involved with? Fifth which people should I help them build relationships with? Plan out how you're going to help get the best out of your team member through your use of mentoring skills. The fourth area of mentoring skills for managers is to be a cheerleader. A big part of using mentoring skills is to be a cheerleader for the individual you're mentoring. You build a positive mindset towards them, use positive language with them, encourage their efforts wherever you can and praise them for good decisions and actions. You want your team member to learn as quickly as possible, to improve as quickly as possible. There is no way this is going to happen if you're constantly pulling them up about all the mistakes they make regardless of how well intentioned your comments are. Offer a lot of encouragement. Learning is hard work, changing is hard work. As a mentor your job is to help them overcome any personal resistance they have. Tell them what they have done well and explain why they have done that well. Praise their good choices and good behaviors in preference to praising natural talent or things they can already do well. Positive reinforcement really works and the more you praise choices and behaviors that you want to see the more they will do them. Make your feedback praise and compliment specific. Don't say well done that was great. Say I was really impressed you chose to really push into the detail and kept looking at different angles. Doing so gave you several really valuable insights that I don't think you would have got to otherwise. Those insights have helped us add £40,000 in sales to the account in the first month of using your insights. Really well done. Remember to keep a team member happy you need to encourage and praise them at least three times more than you criticize. With mentoring at work be their personal cheerleader and encourage them to learn and change. The fifth area of mentoring skills for managers is how to give useful feedback to steer and teach. A lot of managers and team members are afraid to give really honest feedback. They are worried about offending the other person, damaging relationships and making their own lives more difficult. So instead they water down their feedback or shy away from making it specific. If you want to successfully mentor team members to help them improve you can't afford to give feedback that is not useful. Useful feedback in my view is firstly intended to steer direction action and behavior. Secondly to explain why a particular choice was not as good as others that could have been made, i.e. giving instruction and teaching. Third feedback needs to teach to give the other person better tools approaches and skills. Fourth feedback should be specific with examples and facts where possible. Fifth feedback should be focused on choices action and behavior not on the person themselves. For example you don't say how you dealt with the James situation was a bit of a disaster which conveys almost nothing useful and is far from encouraging. How is the other person going to learn from this? You should say something like the way you dealt with James, yet bluntly telling him that his work was not up to standard and then explaining in detail how he needed to change what he was doing was better than not saying anything. You're well done for having the courage to have that difficult conversation. From your description of James's subsequent behavior and body language I suspect he is unhappy with the conversation. Would you mind if I walked you through a different way of approaching the situation? In note that's asking for permission to provide an alternative. You could then go on to describe the approach you recommend. You could finish with try this approach at the next opportunity and let's discuss how you feel this went in our next session. Comparing the approach taken to alternative approaches gives you a lot more scope to praise the parts done well and also teach or encourage an approach that should work better based on your experience. When giving feedback you can't afford to beat around the bush or water down the feedback. What you do need to do is to make sure the feedback is kind, considerate and useful. You can still be pretty direct while doing this. Make your feedback honest, specific and useful to the other person as much as possible. And sixth I wanted to share 10 skills to focus on when developing mentoring skills for managers. This list is not exhaustive. I think these skills are a great place to start building the essential mentoring skills for managers and to teach and support your team members as effectively as possible. In my view 10 essential mentoring skills are firstly empathy. You're putting yourself in their shoes and thinking through what they might be thinking and feeling. Secondly it's self-management, your ability to control your reactions, body language and manage your emotions. Third building trust, an essential skill to build any relationship. Fourth observation skills, so you have a better idea of what the other person is thinking and feeling. You can then adjust your mentoring approach for this specific situation. Fifth planning, which increases the chances of achieving goals and doing it faster and with less effort. Sixth active listening skills, pretty essential for coaching and mentoring. Seventh communication skills, you know being able to effectively explain and teach knowledge and skills to a range of different people. Eight encouraging and praising. Surprisingly few managers are good at this, so do practice praising and encouraging others until it's second nature. It is a great skill to have. Nine giving honest useful feedback. There is an art to giving honest direct feedback without offending the other person. Practice, practice, practice. And ten analytical and problem-solving skills are very useful when working on problems together or when you are guiding them through issues that they are facing. Work on improving these skills so you can use mentoring skills for managers very effectively with your team members and help the team deliver more, which of course helps you too. So in summary we've gone through different aspects of mentoring skills for managers. Why mentoring skills are very useful. Four key areas to deliver effective mentoring at work and touched on 10 skills that I think are pretty essential for delivering effective mentoring in the workplace. Enjoy developing and using mentoring skills with team members. Please leave any questions you have in the comments section below and I'll get back to you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.