The ideal Mentee is:

High potential, commmited to their career, hungry to learn and disciplined enough to execute what they have learned.

In short, the ideal mentee is leadership material.

An ideal Mentor is:  

• Someone who has experience in field (they have been there before).
• Someone interested in developing others.
• Someone prepared to take another by the hand and guide them through the territory.
• Someone who asks questions that the mentee doesn’t ask themselves but ought to.
• Someone trustworthy who inspires confidence.
• Someone who will be there in time of need.

The Mentor needs to develop the following skills

1. Supporting
2. Listening
3. Validating growth and development (Cheer leading)
4. Questioning
5. Giving feedback to behaviours and skills
6. Guiding and offering perspective

At our mentor trainings we work on all these skills, but perhaps the most difficult is questioning. Questioning, because the art of mentoring is in the balance between guiding and self-discovery. In medicine, prescription without diagnosis is malpractice; it is therefore essential for the mentor to fully understand the mentee and their situation before offering advice. What worked for the mentor might not work for the mentee or their situation.

After asking questions the mentor can use his or her experience to point out ‘traps for young players’ such as misplaced priorities and pot holes that the mentee has not yet seen. An important role for the mentor is to help the mentee align their goals and values to those of the organization. Ultimately, the mentoring relationship can only be successful when the mentee takes their destiny in their own hands and takes action to achieve their goals.

The Principle of Mentoring

The principle of mentoring is to balance challenge with support. Too much challenge with not enough support and the mentee shuts down. Too much support and not enough challenge and the mentee just feels validated in their status quo.

If the mentor does too much for the mentee, they may actually compromise the mentees ability to reach their full potential. Ideally, when the correct frame of mind is identified the mentee will facilitate the mentee to integrate that and to take action.

Questioning

Here some ‘starter’ questions to use when mentoring.

• What do you want to get out of this session?
• What are your career objectives?
•  What is happening for you now?
• How do you know this?
• How do you feel about what is going on?
• What judgments are you making about people, the company or this situation?
• What have you learned from that?
• What do you most need from me right now?
• What questions does that raise?
• What result do you want?
• What options are open to you now?
• What is your biggest difficulty or problem?
• How can I help you move forwards on this issue?
• Can you think of three options for action?
• What are the pros and cons of each of these options?
• What first steps are you going to take before our next meeting?
• Whose responsibility is it to make this happen?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to do this action?

Mentoring is NOT telling someone what to do or just giving advice. When the Mentor asks questions they allow the Mentee to reflect and synthesise and prepares them to apply new behaviours.

Done well, mentoring is beneficial for the mentor, the mentee and the organisation in terms of engagement, sharing  of knowledge and most importantly developing future leaders.

Done badly, mentoring becomes a chore for senior managers and increases the cynicism of would be high potentials. For more on this read the post, ‘Does Singapore Lack Leadership Skills?’

In Singapore, on Feburary 24, 2011 myself and eight of Asia’s top professional speakers will showcase cutting edge ideas and techniques to Raise your Game in 2011. You and hear; Tim Wade on ‘Productivity Mindset’,  Tina Altieri on ‘Presenting to Win’, Santhanaram Jayaram on ‘Resistance to Irrisitable’, Tremaine Du Preez on ”Conquering Critical Challenges’, Sharon Connelly on ‘Dressing Like a Leader’, Kenneth Kwan on ‘Master Your Inner Self’ and Bob Mittelsdorf on ‘Managing Global Teams’. I will be sharing my latest research and practical applicatons of self-leadership and the whole action-packed day will be MC’d by the effervescent Shirley Taylor.

As the investment is minimal and a portion of profits go to Project Smile, can you afford to miss out on this unique event?

Full details are on the Asia Professional Speakers website or you can contact Self Leadership International in Singapore for tickets. See you there?

I recently passed the ICF’s exam for Professional Certified Coach. Among requirements are; completion of coach-specific training, a minimum of 750 professional coaching hours, a written exam a recorded and live coaching session assessed by two examiners against 11 competencies.

The process was involved but rewarding because I have now had my coaching skills bench-marked and validated and have a clear path to ongoing mastery.

The majority of my Singapore and International coaching clients are corporate at the executive leve;l and until recently have cared more about referral or established brand than credentials. Things are changing and many of my larger client’s, especially the banks, have been setting up internal business processes that require coaches to be credentialed. To this end I am happy to comply with and uphold the highest level of professional behaviour.

If this is your first time visiting Self Leadership Coaching blog then I suggest you use the search button and look for topics of interest to you. You will find many posts on; leadership, management, coaching, presentation skills, communication and influence.

We welcome your comments and will post them even if they disagree with the post, so feel free to start a discussion. Most of the information posted has come from my experience as a leadership consultant and executive coach, working in Australia, Singapore and across SE Asia and as a life-long learner I am always looking for new ideas and best practice.

Please enjoy – and Learn

In April 2010, I was asked to speak at the Singapore Leadership Conference on Leadership and Influence.

After my presentation I was interviewed by Dee Allen of Red Mars. You can see a few minutes of the interview and speech in this YouTube video.

If you would like to know more about the Circle of Influence, read about it here.

As a leadership consultant and executive coach living in Singapore and working across Asia, I am often asked; “is there is a difference between Western and Asian Leaders?”

The answer is “yes” and “no”. Leaders worldwide need to ask the same questions:

• Where are we going?
• What is our strategy? (how do we get there?)
• How do we execute?
• Is our team ready? (learning and development)
• Do we have enough bench strength for growth and sustainability (succession planning)

In addition leaders must be able to engender trust and effectively communicate their messages.

The difference between East and West is a matter of focus and style. In the Asian managers and companies tend to focus on execution, whereas in the West, creativity and innovation are more valued. In the East there is emphasis internally on command/control, the ‘how’ the do things, whereas Western companies tend to look externally at their customers and clients.

Asian employees are more likely to do what is asked whereas western employees are more likely to be free agents and independent thinkers .

Of course these observations are all generalisations but I think the key take-away is that both styles have merit and if we can appreciate and take the best of both we can be better leaders.

A lot of my work in the last couple of years has been equipping leaders with an understanding of different cultures. Western managers in Asia have needed to learn how to get the best from their employees and up and coming Asian leaders have needed to learn how to communicate in a style that is valued in Western companies.

There is currently an imbalance, more Westerners are heading up operations in Asia than there are Asian heading up operations in the West; it will be interesting to see if this tips in the next few years. What do you think?

Leadership Development in Singapore
Executive Coaching in Singapore

Research has shown that only about one-third of people are aware of their strengths and the management guru, Peter Drucker said that we can only lead from strengths.

A common approach in management and  leadership development has been to measure the gap between a person’s behaviour and the desired corporate competencies; whilst this approach is valid it can downplay the application of a person’s strengths.

My top strengths are; love of learning, humor, zest, perseverance, honest, open-mindedness and perspective. I know this because I have taken a test based on the research of Dr Martin Seligman and Dr Christopher Peterson.

Seligman and Peterson’s research has found six broad categories of the best of human behaviours (virtues) that are intrinsically valued across time and cultures. Seligman and Peterson suggest that these virtues may even be biologically linked in terms of survival of the species. Within each virtue category are strengths that we all demonstrate to a greater or lesser extent.
 The list is as follows:

There is a natural tendency to consider those strengths that you don’t score highly on as weaknesses but, unlike talents, strengths can be built up.

My lowest scoring strength is modesty ( for those of you who know me this is no surprise) and yet this does not mean I am not modest in some circumstances and with the awareness of this I can build it as a strength.

Positive Psychology researchers are now validating interventions to build strengths and the work is ongoing. This has major ramifications for the field of leadership development as we can know with certainty as to how to build up individuals and teams.

At Self Leadership International we have already started to build this research into our coaching and programs. A popular activity is a partner exercise in which each party listens to a success story told by the other and reflects back the strengths that they heard. The result of this exercise are profound in that colleagues who have known each other for some time get a deeper understanding of each other and managers learn to better delegate and build up their teams rather than jump to criticism.

Posted from Singapore 27/10/2010

I have just experienced three transformational days at the first Asia Pacific Coaching Conference held in Singapore, and before I share my learning’s and take-aways I wanted to publicly acknowledge Foo See Luan and Nancy Hughes Verhoeven and their team of dedicated individuals for bringing together 300 coaches from across the region to talk, listen, learn and collaborate.

The theme of the conference was ‘Coaching for Sustainable Mulitcultural Communities’ and the attendees were certainly diverse; I met fellow coaches from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, Australia, India, Brazil, USA, Norway and of course Singapore.

Coach Denise Wright and team facilitated a World Cafe on the conference theme. I am a fan of facilitated processes such as World Cafe and enjoyed the dialogue around, whether coaches themselves are a community that can model multi-culturalism? And what an opportunity we have to influence the leaders we coach by encouraging listening without judgment. One concept that was floated was that we are a ‘Coaching Nation’ in as much that we are united in our passion to facilitate positive change.

I witnessed coaches preparing for their credentialing with the International Coach Federation, which represents coaches to the rest of the world in terms of their ethics and competency and I saw new and experienced coaches eager to learn methodologies and approaches to  better serve their clients.

Presentations that I attended included; the Neuroscience of Coaching and how the brain resists change and yet can learn new strategies very quickly when coached to do so, how to assess Cultural Intelligence and plan a coaching approach to better equip executives to work effectively and how coaching and coaches are developing based on research of the profession.

A keynote from my fellow Certified Speaking Professional, Marcia Reynolds invited the audience to consider first looking for similarities in people rather than difference. Marcia shared strategies on how to do this which I personally found particularly useful.

Omar Khan, who I have had the privilege of meeting before, gave a powerful presentation on the importance of effective communication from his own multicultural background and his early influences including, Neuro Linguistic Programming and the mind of Dr. Scott M. Peck. The proceedings were kept moving smoothly by Rob Salisbury, CSP with his excellent MC skills allowing speakers and participants alike to enjoy themselves.

Over and above the presentations were the informal conversations I had with old and new friends in the hallways. If you were in Singapore and attended the conference you will know how important such an event is for the coaching profession in this region, if you were not then be sure not to miss the next one. And if you want to  get a view of what the conference was like then it was captured by professional photographer Zurina Bryant (yes, my wife) who will be posting pictures on her website.

If you attended do let me know your experiences.

Ask the tough question

•  “Send me some more information!”

• “Let me think it over!”

These are the two statements that most prospective clients use on sales people. And unfortunately, most of them get away with it.

1)      Unfortunate for the sales person, because he or she will need to call again to chase the prospect/client for an answer whilst having no guarantee of the result.

2)      Unfortunate for the prospect/client, because they will be called again and will have to spend valuable time either reevaluating or fobbing off the sales person.

Since we all know this happens, why are people still doing it?

1)      Because clients are often too polite to say “No” upfront.

2)      Because sales people are afraid to be upfront for fear of getting a “No”.

So, how can you save yourself and your prospect loads of time?

1) Assess if the client is interested – Immediately!

Next time you hear,  “Send me some more information!”Or “Let me think it over!”

Immediately ask the tough question:

“I just want to check with you if my service/product is of interest to you? If not, it will save us both valuable time if you can tell me upfront.”

This way you are giving the client permission to say “NO” and avoid the “unfortunate” part. But you also show that you are serious, have belief in your product and have no interest in chasing the client if they don’t need it.

Most intelligent prospect/ clients will respect that . Who knows? You may even get referrals if you ask for them and might hear “I don’t need it, but I know a friend who might.”

So, with this awareness, are you ready to ask the tough question?

Research has shown that the inability to build a successful relationship with the boss is a significant reason for managers failing or not reaching their full potential.

When I approach this topic I encounter a number of mindsets that lead to an inability to effectively influence, these include:

• My boss is autocratic
• My boss doesn’t listen to me
• I don’t want to jeopardise my career
• I have no power in the relationship
• My boss doesn’t give me time

Do any of these sound familiar?

The problem with blaming the boss is that you have created an external locus of control which is the exact opposite of self-leadership. To influence you must ask yourself what can I do that will make a difference? The purpose of this blog is to provide some ideas to get you started:

1. Create an Ally

Allies have open and honest conversations, they may not always agree but they will listen to what each other wants and assertively communicate what their own needs. “But my boss doesn’t care what I need” I hear you cry; and my response is, do you know what they need? and have you told them what you need?

2. Finding the boss’s currency

We all have currencies, those things that are important to us and ‘count’ in relationship. Bosses
currenices are likely to be some of the following:

• Commitment to the stated vision
• Doing things ‘the right way’
• Offering help without being asked
• Doing things faster than expected
• Providing information that they need
• Having a skill the boss does not have
• Acknowledging the bosses contribution to the organisation
• Activities that build the bosses reputation
• Using your contacts to expedite a task
• Expressing gratitude for anything the boss gives
• Minimising discomforts and distractions for the boss

Noticing which currencies the boss responds to and paying them in these currencies cost you a little in time and energy but sets up reciprocity.

3.Reciprocity

When something does something for us we feel consciously or unconsciously obliged to reciprocate.
Reciprocation is the number one principle of influence, why else do you think marketing campaigns offer you a free gift? If your boss ‘owes’ you first then you can assertively ask for what you want.

4.Assertiveness

We are most influential when we frame our influence with confidence and conviction. So using formula
for influencing your boss might look and sound like the following:

“Boss [use their name] I understand that x [insert currency or bosses pet project] is important to you and to do this I believe that we should [insert your suggestion here].”

“Boss [use their name] I appreciate that x [insert currency or bosses pet project] is important to you and to achieve this I will need [insert your request here].”

It is my experience that most employees underestimate their ability to Influence Without Authority, whether this is with their boss or their peers; believe you can influence and you will find a way.

Did you find these strategies useful? Do you have a success story on influencing your boss? Please share your stories.