Softskills Lair

Mentoring Wheel

2006-02-27T03:03:00.000-08:00

Mentoring--from the Greek word meaning enduring--is defined as a sustained relationship between a youth and an adult. Through continued involvement, the adult offers support, guidance, and assistance as the younger person goes through a difficult period, faces new challenges, or works to correct earlier problems.

The two types of mentoring are natural mentoring and planned mentoring. Natural mentoring occurs through friendship, collegiality, teaching, coaching, and counseling. In contrast, planned mentoring occurs through structured programs in which mentors and participants are selected and matched through formal processes.

MENTORING CAN HELP US to acquire skills, increase confidence, widen your perspective, avoid many errors, enhance your career and life, and help you succeed.

The mentoring relationship provides guidance, friendship and mutual respect. The mentoring relationship is an evolving process in which both the mentor and mentee can gain insight, knowledge and satisfaction. It is a medium for achieving developmental and professional goals. It is a giving experience by which mentors share their proficiency and expertise, and mentees share their knowledge and insight. It motivates both mentors and mentees to develop interpersonal and professional skills. It is a growth experience to cultivate mutual respect and support for the parties involved.

There are many perspectives on the definition of mentoring, especially since the relatively recent popularity of personal and professional coaching. Traditionally, mentoring might have been described as the activities conducted by a person (the mentor) for another person (the mentee) in order to help that other person to do a job more effectively and/or to progress in their career. The mentor was probably someone who had "been there, done that" before. A mentor might use a variety of approaches, e.g., coaching, training, discussion, counseling, etc

Mentoring is the process of shaping competencies or behaviors by providing feedback, usually to subordinates or even peers, about how to achieve the best in life. Mentors in either a formal mentoring program or informal relationship focus on the person, their career and support for individual growth and maturity. Mentoring is a power-free, two-way mutually beneficial relationship. Mentors are facilitators and teachers, allowing people to discover their own direction. Experience supports the conclusion that mentoring is a power independent, two-way process, mutually beneficial learning situation where the mentor provides advice, shares knowledge and experiences and teaches using a low pressure, self-discovery approach.

The Mentoring Framework:

The model describes mentoring as consisting of two fundamental elements:

The purpose of the mentoring, and
The means by which that purpose is achieved.

The purpose of mentoring is always to help the mentee change something - to improve their performance, to develop their leadership qualities, to develop their partnership skills, to realize their vision, or whatever. This movement from where they are ("Here") to where they want to be ("There") provides one dimension of the mentoring model.

The means by which the mentee gets this movement is by taking action in their environment. Without action nothing is achieved and nothing changes. This movement from within to without, from the mentee to their environment provides the second dimension of the model. (This framework is derived from Danielle Roex's Right Relations work.)

Combined, these two dimensions create the Mentoring Wheel which describes a change process made up of four phases; Freeing Up, Envisioning, Implementing, and Sustaining.

Freeing Up describes the process of developing autonomy, responsibility, and the ability to choose freely unconstrained by personal history. When working in this phase, the mentor's stance is nurturing and supportive and aims to help the mentee develop a strong positive self image and sense of self worth so that they have a solid, stable foundation to their lives.

Envisioning is the process of connecting with a sense of purpose, identifying and choosing values, creating a compelling and stretching vision which is aligned to and supports the corporate vision, and committing to realizing it. A key skill at this stage is the ability to create and hold a tension between the current reality and the vision. Without the ability to hold this tension, the vision merges with the current reality and merely reinforces the status quo. The mentor's role is to inspire the mentee and to help them answer the question "Where am I going?"

Implementing consists of identifying the goals which will lead towards the vision, deciding on the strategies and actions to achieve these goals, and then taking action. The mentor's role here is to coach and to help the mentee answer the question "How will I achieve my vision?". This may include helping the mentee improve specific management skills in areas such as communication, team leading and time management.

Sustaining is the process of getting feedback from the environment about what is being achieved and the extent to which the vision is being realized and its achievement sustained. When the mentee is able to see clearly what they are creating and to take responsibility for both their successes and failures, then there is the opportunity to learn from experience and gain insight into the changes necessary to deliver and expand their achievement of their vision. The role of the mentor is to challenge the mentee to see clearly the impact of what they are doing and to help them answer the question "Am I creating my vision?".

Underpinning the whole mentoring process is the development of two key skills - the ability to be self aware and the ability to exercise will. The development of these two skills provides the underlying context for the mentoring process and the degree to which the mentee enhances these two skills is one of the best indicators of the extent to which the mentoring process has created lasting changes in the mentee's effectiveness.

Presentation skills and their Relevance in New World Economy

2006-02-27T02:31:00.000-08:00

Whether you're a manager, sales professional, human resource specialist, health care professional, administrative assistant, educator or entrepreneur, you can learn to lead by example and win respect with every word you speak. In business and in the workplace, on the domestic front and in our social lives, we all stand to benefit from more effective communication skills. We crave for more fulfilling interpersonal relationships. Regardless of what business you are in – a large corporation, a small company, or even a home-based business – effective communication skills are essential for success.

As the technology evolved, communication protocol also had to evolve; for example, Thomas Edison had to discover that hello was the clearest form of greeting by voice over a distanced form of communication; previous greetings such as hail tended to be lost or garbled in the transmission. The view people take toward communication is changing, as new technologies change the way they communicate and organize. In fact, it is the changing technology of communication that tends to make the most frequent and widespread changes in a society.

Communication is the process of exchanging information, usually by way of a common protocol. Humans communicate in order to share knowledge and experiences, give or receive orders, or cooperate. Common forms of human communication include sign language, speaking, writing, gestures, and broadcasting. Communication can be interactive, transitive, intentional, or unintentional; communication can also be identified as verbal or nonverbal. Communication varies considerably in form and style when considering scale.

Communicating effectively in the workplace

It's a fact. The way company personnel communicate with each other can make all the difference between success and failure, efficiency and ineptitude, profit and loss.

Effective Communication Leads to Business Success

If you want to have a fighting chance in the business world, you’d better be an effective communicator. Here are three steps that will help you operate as a truly effective communicator.

Step #1. Know your outcome.

An effective communicator knows her outcome and states it in the positive.

Step #2. Know where you are in the process.

Know if you’re moving away from or closer to your outcome. You’re questioning and listening skills play an important role in this step for communications awareness.

Step #3. Know your options.

Be flexible. If what you’re saying or doing isn’t producing the results you’d planned, you’d better say or do something else.

Success Story: In a recent survey of recruiters from companies with more than 50,000 employees, communication skills were cited as the single more important decisive factor in choosing managers. The survey, conducted by the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Business School, points out that communication skills, including written and oral presentations, as well as an ability to work with others, are the main factor contributing to job success.

Mastering Interpersonal Communication

2006-02-27T01:56:00.000-08:00

MASTERING THE ART OF COMMUNICATION

In business, we are on our own when it comes to making the positive impact that gets us noticed, remembered and promoted. Our voice tone, body language, listening ability, and communication style are powerful communicators that often determine crucial outcomes for us personally and professionally. Communication is your door to financial wealth, loving relationships, and all that is good in life. Our ability to communicate in so many modes is unique to humans on earth. People who do not have the ability to speak can be wonderful communicators. The loss of one or two senses certainly can impair communication, but it does not have to stop communication. Effective communication is rarely taught and even more rarely learned in our society. What follows is an outline of a few of the many keys to mastering the art of communication.

BASIC COMPONENTS OF COMMUNICATION

Interpersonal communication includes at least the following elements:

A transmitter. Someone who wants to "send" a message verbally or non-verbally to someone else.
A receiver. Someone who will "receive" a message from another person.
A message. Information in some form.
Noise. Anything that interferes or causes the deletion, distortion or generalization of the exact replication of information being transmitted from the mind of the transmitter to the mind of the receiver.
Feedback. Both the sender and receiver constantly elicit verbal and nonverbal feedback to the other person.
Replication. The duplication of understanding in one person that is in the mind of another person. Replication is an approximate goal and philosophically not perfectly possible, though desired.
Understanding. An approximation of what the message means to the sender by the receiver.

OUTCOME BASED THINKING

A key element of inter personal communication is outcome based thinking. Outcome based thinking entails knowing what your objective is before entering into a task, communication or project. It is not always necessary to consciously use outcome based thinking in interpersonal communication. There are many times that it is simply nice to 'be' with someone. In these cases it is often far more enjoyable to remain non-directive.

Know by asking these questions to yourself.

What precisely do I want out of the process?
What does the other person want? If I don't know, what are they likely to want?
What is the least I will accept out of the process?
What problems could come up in the process?
How will I deal with each one, and if possible, use the problem as a BENEFIT for the other person?
How will I bring the process to a conclusion?

KNOW WHAT YOU WANT WHEN COMMUNICATING

It is difficult to effectively communicate if we do not know what we want in the communication. Living life by design means that we are empowering our life with true purpose and mission.

RAPPORT

Rapport is the perceived affinity between two or more people. This is an excellent way to augment the development of rapport in communication. The ability to build and maintain rapport in communication is one of the key skills of a master communicator

CLOSURE IN COMMUNICATION

The ability to politely and effectively close a cycle of communication is a skill that more people need to become adept at. Closure is the ability to acknowledge the other person, say "thank you" to the other person or confirm that what was said was understood. Closure is the final step in any segment or cycle of communication.

These are the few strategies one can follow for mastering interpersonal communication.

My Profile

2006-02-27T01:52:00.000-08:00

Hello friends....
Im shilpaReddy doing my masters from JNTU. This blog would contain some stuff useful in improving you softskills.