By Marty Brounstein
Part of the Coaching & Mentoring For Dummies Cheat Sheet
Coaching and mentoring your employees requires a continuous effort to make it a part of your management practices. Use the tips in the following list to help incorporate coaching and mentoring techniques into your management practices: * Delegate: Articulate the results you want to see, set parameters, determine what support the employee needs, and set times to conduct progress reviews along the way. * Give performance feedback. : State what you observe, be specific and direct, show sincerity, and communicate face-to-face for both positive and negative performance efforts. * Motivate employee performance: Give timely recognition for a job well done and provide favorable assignments that challenge your staff and meet business needs at the same time. * Mentor employee growth: Pass on words of wisdom that guide behavior for success and ask employees for ideas to make improvements and solve problems. * Focus employee performance: Collaboratively set goals with action plans that define the key steps for achieving the goals. * Set meaningful goals: Define the results that need to be achieved and how the goals will be measured. * Assess employee performance: Don’t wait for the annual review. Meet one-on-one with each staff person at least once per quarter to review performance; adjust plans accordingly to keep priorities current. * Aid career development: Collaboratively set plans that define how employees will prepare themselves — from training to work assignments — to grow in their skills and capabilities. * Deliver training: Give step-by-step instruction a that involves your employee doing the skills or procedures in a hands-on way. * Reinforce good performance: Catch employees doing quality work and demonstrating positive behaviors with the same effort that you catch them when performance