How can you leverage the strengths of your mentoring clients?

A simple SWOT analysis of skills can be useful in understanding the core key strengths. Also I make sure that my mentee is well aware of his/her weakness and work upon to make the weakness negligible. Understanding the Areas where a mentee is ready to explore and come out of comfort zone.

Understanding their skills of how the Business works and building a rapport makes the market open for more possibilities. Implementation of REST Principle will not only help them to get the deliverable but also boost an organization to stimulate business reducing risks, costs and gaining more power in the market, indirectly building trust amongst the vendors.

I'm troubled by the question. Leveraging the strengths of one's mentee implies that it's their strengths that you must "pursue". Maybe - but it's not a universal truth. I've mentored over 350 people and I mentor them to fulfil their objectives - personal or career. A SWOT approach assumes you pursue their existing strengths but those strengths may not be ones needed to deliver your objective. You need to uncover what's required to achieve the desired outcome and if the mentee doesn't possess those "strengths" or skills, then help them to develop them.

It's important to understand that you develop their strengths not from a solution's perspective but that of providing the needed sense of direction. This way, as a coach, you facilitate the clients in their journey of change as compared to dictating them the point they need to arrive at. This also puts the client's understanding of what he/she is actually working at, into context.

How the organisation operates at a systemic level determines the ‘role-in-practice’ and the value of an individual’s particular strengths or capabilities. Then there is the notion of versatility or being able to use capabilities with situational appropriateness and in the right context. Leaders have to learn to not only modulate (either accelerate or decelerate) their strengths, but to know which strength is more effective in differing situations. As an example: you’re an achiever. Yet, achievement drive applied in the wrong situations or with the wrong intensity can be destabilising.

Initially, listening to the story the client brings onto the table and understanding the same in entirety should allow us to build just the right perspective towards what it is that we are looking at and where it is that we need to start from. This should allow you to actualise on the needed trust factor - a crucial part of the mentee relationship.