Nine Ways To Be A Stronger Career Mentor And Coach

Author Paul Falcone offers the following great advice for how to become a stronger career mentor and coach by helping your subordinates grow and develop in their own careers.

1. Encourage others to engage in random acts of kindness.
2. Find creative ways of surprising your customers.
3. Focus on making bad relationships good and good relationships better.
4. Look for new ways of reinventing the workflow in light of your company's changing needs.
5. Think relationship first, transaction second.
6. Realize that people can tell more about you by the depth of your questions than by the quality of your statements.
7. Separate the people from the problem.
8. Always provide two solutions for each question you ask or suggestion you raise.
9. Employ right-brain imagination, artistry, and intuition plus left-brain logic and planning.

And, one of my favorite pieces of advice from Falcone:

• Convert "yes...but:" to "yes...and" statements to acknowledge the speaker's point of view and to share additional insights.