5 Mentoring Skills for Managers – How to Pass On Skills & Knowledge

Mentoring skills for managers is about HOW you teach and transfer knowledge and skills to your team members. Using mentoring skills in the workplace can be a great way to leverage your time and skills as a manager by upskilling your team so they can do more.  I take you through how mentoring helps you, 4 essential mentoring skills and touch on 10 key skills that will help you be a better mentor.  So why should you use mentoring in the workplace? Firstly using mentoring at work is a great way to upskill your team. Mentoring helps your team members to improved performance, feeding into improved team performance. You also have better stronger relationships with team members and a host of other benefits that drive overall team performance.  Good team performance is good for the manager – in recognition, better bonuses, promotion, and satisfaction.  To successfully mentor team members you need to put in time. Mentoring employees in the workplace is a time intensive (and results intensive) upskilling approach. When using mentoring skills for leaders, decide on the goals to be achieved with the mentoring programme with the person you are mentoring. When you have agreed goals, then plan out how you are going to help the team member achieve those goals. Your mentoring sessions should be structured and have purpose if you are going to drive results with your team member. When involved in mentoring programs in the workplace, it is critical that encourage, praise and compliment good actions and choices made by the team member you are mentoring. Positive reinforcement drives behaviour.  Being a mentor also means you have to give useful feedback to steer and teach. You can’t afford to beat around the bush or give vague or watered down feedback. Learning how to be direct as well as kind and considerate with you feedback is an art. I give you tips on how to do this.  And finally, when thinking about how to be a mentor at work, 10 key skills that will help you develop stronger mentoring skills are listed and explained.  Mentoring skills for managers are so useful to develop and very personally rewarding.  Do enjoy mentoring your team!