What qualities do you need to be a successful coach or mentor?

In this article we discuss the qualities that you need to be a successful coach or mentor. You can acquire coaching and mentoring skills through training, professional development and practise, but there are certain qualities that are fundamental to being a successful coach or mentor.

The qualities that you need are a capacity:

For self-awareness - This includes an ability to self observe, to reflect, to monitor your own emotions, reactions and behaviours and their impact, to understand your strengths, weaknesses, motives and needs, to recognise your prejudices and to be aware of transference and counter transference situations.

To inspire others - This includes inspiring your clients to identify their passions and values, to learn and grow, to recognise unseen possibilities, to achieve their goals and to support and motivate them along the way.

To build relationships - This includes getting to know your clients, building rapport, openness and trust, providing appropriate support and challenge, enabling your clients to discover their own answers and building a relationship that supports your clients to achieve their goals.

To be flexible - This includes being flexible around your clients' priorities and agendas, working at your clients' pace, being able to switch strategies to suit your clients' needs and varying the style of coaching or mentoring to suit your individual clients.

To communicate - This includes having a strong range of inter personal skills, including authenticity, empathy, insight and curiosity, as well as good communication skills, including rapport building, listening, questioning and giving feedback.

To be forward looking - This includes being future, goal and outcome oriented, supporting your clients in setting goals and action planning, exploring where your clients are now, recognising the past as a stepping stone for moving forward and helping your clients to remove blocks to moving forward.

For discipline - This includes keeping the sessions focused on achieving your clients' goals, whilst recognising and supporting your clients to move forward, as well as keeping a good structure to the coaching and mentoring sessions and supporting the clients where they need to change their goals or path.

To manage professional boundaries - This includes the ability to recognise whether coaching or mentoring is the right option for your potential clients and to recognise when coaching or mentoring issues are beyond your capabilities.

To diagnose issues and support your clients to find solutions - This includes an ability to take in a large amount of information during coaching and mentoring sessions, an inquisitive nature, using your intuition to provide insight to your clients and supporting your clients in finding creative solutions.

For business - This includes a strong belief in yourself and your service, the ability to make things happen, an enthusiasm for the benefits of coaching and mentoring, a can do attitude, an entrepreneurial approach and the skills and experience to run a successful business.

How do you measure up against the qualities detailed above? Which areas do you feel that you want to develop further in? How are you going to do this?

If you would like to read more about the qualities discussed above please refer to a very good book entitled The Complete Guide to Coaching at Work by Perry Zeus and Suzanne Skiffington.

If you would like supervision for your coaching or mentoring please refer to the Makin It Happen – Supervision & Support for Coaches & Mentors website at http://coachmentorsupervision.co.uk or contact Liz Makin at Liz@makinithappen.co.uk.

This article first appeared in the October 2008 edition of the Makin It Happen – Supervision & Support for Coaches & Mentors newsletter. Please click here to Sign up for our email newsletter.