Coaching and Mentoring Can Assist with Leadership and Self Confidence

I am grateful I have been able to provide assistance to people in many ways since I went completely blind almost twenty years ago.  One example is when I accepted a leadership role in an employee resource group a few years ago. I held this position for over five years. During this five-year time period until I decided to step down and turn over the leadership role to another person the membership grew from less than 10 employees from 1 country to more than 125 employees from over 17 countries.  My action of stepping down allowed that other person to practice coaching and leadership. When in this leadership position along with my leadership team I was happy to help inspire leadership, educate and mentor people individually as well as in group settings.

I enjoy writing and publishing stories at my blog to hopefully help in educating and increasing self-confidence for my readers. Although at times I feel some people may get tired of reading the different stories or my experiences. I sense they might think that I am just talking about myself even though I am actually trying to offer assistance by providing examples of what a person can accomplish. In some of my blog posts I also attempt to inspire leadership and self-determination in others through what I write.

It is beneficial to coach or mentor others to assist them in discovering their leadership skills.  I feel the more moral, ethical and compassionate leaders we have in the world the better we all are. Some people may only need a little gentle nudging or encouragement to enable them to demonstrate their ability and skills to blossom into a leader or mentor.

If you enjoy mentoring to develop leadership skills and self-confidence there are many places to locate people looking to increase these skills. For example, there are nonprofit organizations with clients that may be able to use your assistance. There could be a mentoring program within the company you work for. It is also possible you may meet a person at a local area event or a community function.

At the start of this blog post I stated that I have been assisting others for almost twenty years. I am not sure why I was not as involved with helping others prior to losing my eyesight? Maybe I thought I was too busy. I did not work hard or put enough hours or I did not properly prioritize helping others along with my own family.

I recently read an excellent blog post called Leadership is the Art of Releasing Greatness in Others - Leaders Blog that I believe you will enjoy and might be able to leverage some of the helpful hints from it.

Besides leveraging the excellent suggestions in the blog post “Leadership is the Art of Releasing Greatness in Others” below are a few additional points that may assist you. 

• If you work in a company where they have Employee Resource Groups or Affinity Groups consider taking on a leadership role.
• Do not just talk to the person you are assisting without providing time for them to communicate with you. Listen carefully, sensing any non-verbal cues that could help you assist them.   Ask caring direct questions to help you better understand their educational needs and to know them as a person to improve your coaching experience.
• When teaching leadership skills or mentoring others it's best to sometimes let the mentee experience their own difficult challenges if it will not harm them physically.  When coaching self-reliance skills only assist as you feel it is necessary to help the person build self-confidence.
• If you enjoy writing, locate opportunities to coach by your writing.
• When discovering your leadership skills do not forget to leverage your unique skills and techniques you have learned if you happen to be a person with a disability. These unique abilities and viewpoints you possess are extremely valuable and can be leveraged to help you become an effective leader. Also, others can learn and benefit from your unique skills and techniques and how they helped you to overcome any challenges or obstacles you may have encountered to achieve your success.
• If you are disabled and use assistive technology and have the skills to educate others regarding accessibility/usability demonstrate your leadership skills by coaching developers and designers on how to make the tools you use be more accessible.  This will not only help you it will also benefit other people who use assistive technology. If you accomplish your goal with a caring leadership frame of mind, that person you took the time to coach may help educate others to spread the value of accessibility.
• If you have direct contact with product designers and developers provide your expertise to coach them on how to make their products more accessible and usable to more of their customers with disabilities. This leadership action you take can help the product teams increase their customer base by enabling larger numbers of people to use their products more effectively and efficiently.
• If you are disabled and experience an accessibility issue and report the issue with details it is possible the person you reported the issue to might think, because you are disabled, you might be doing something incorrectly and therefor there isn’t an accessibility or usability issue.  This attitude and way of thinking can stem from their lack of knowledge regarding accessibility or disability awareness skills because they have not had the opportunity to further their education on these important topics. Therefore this provides you with an excellent opportunity to demonstrate your leadership skills by educating them on these accessibility issues. By demonstrating your leadership skills through your knowledge on these issues you can show them that this accessibility issue is not due to anything you did “incorrectly.”  However, possibly because of lack of accessibility awareness, it is the designers/developers of the tool/application who did not develop it correctly that actually caused these issues. After you bring these accessibility issues with tips to resolve them to the owner’s attention you might be amazed at how grateful they may be to learn something new.
• Be prepared to receive negative feedback from some of your ideas about coaching others on various difficult projects that your mentee may be attempting to accomplish. For example, some may say nobody has ever done that before or that is not the way it has been done in the past. They might even have other criticisms about your ideas. Therefore if you are helping others ethically and morally you should proceed ahead with care.
• Besides coaching and mentoring others do not be afraid to receive coaching yourself to increase your knowledge of leadership styles and mentoring techniques. This continuous education will enable you to assist others more effectively and efficiently.
• If you're going to have a long-term structured coaching experience be sure to include detailed goals with objectives and timelines to help everybody keep on track for success.
• If you are able to and believe you aren’t too busy you may want to attempt to prioritize and free up a little of your time to help others.

Do you have any suggestions on how to coach and mentor others to help them improve their leadership skills and/or become coaches themselves?  What examples can you share with us to help us coach or mentor others to be effective leaders or coaches with any tips? Do you have any tips for people with short or long term disabilities to harness their unique abilities and to increase their leadership skills?

We all look forward to hearing your valuable thoughts and comments to help us become better moral, ethical and compassionate leaders.

Bill Tipton

Contributing Author,

Global Dialogue Center

http://www.globaldialoguecenter.com/

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/wdtipton

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bill.tipton.39

Twitter: http://twitter.com/wdtipton

 

Comments

[Deborah Kennedy]

Hi Bill,
Excellent post with lots of great tips for coaching as a leader. It is an outstanding example of leading by example!
Debbe

[Debbe kennedy]

Hi Bill, Again, this is a great contribution for leaders,
dk
from my iPad