If you want to wear the veritable black belts that a good coach and mentor earns, carefully consider the following points and incorporate them into your day-to-day interactions with your employees. It amounts to a blueprint for success.

• Embrace the philosophy. The primary purpose of coaching and mentoring is to unlock human potential on the job (and elsewhere, where applied) by fashioning a work environment that is most conducive to helping employees reach their utmost potential.

• Appreciate the individual. Appreciate that each and every employee is a unique person who needs to be recognized as such, if the true coaching and mentoring philosophy is to be lived and realized.

• Encourage self-motivation. Bridge the gap between an employee's self-interests and the organization's self-interests and make them one and the same.

• Establish goals. Assist in establishing on-the-job goals for employees on a personal basis based on each individual's level of skills and desire to advance and grow — and, of course, on the organization's needs.

• Commitment. Forge a firm commitment from employees to simultaneously work for the organization, for you — the coach — and for themselves and their respective futures.

• Communicate. Keep open lines of communication between coach and employee at all times. Give recurring feedback on job performance, employing your talent to listen, hear, and value your staff.

• Resolve conflict. Practice immediate and assertive on-the-spot problem solving. Address today's problems today, not tomorrow or next week.

• Be solution-oriented. Always seek positive solutions that will engender positive outcomes. View every obstacle and crisis as an opportunity to remedy problems and move forward.

• Delegate responsibilities. Acknowledge your duty to provide your team with weighty job responsibilities, challenging tasks, and opportunities for career advancement. Appreciate that this is the surest way to keep productive employees in the organization and to attract the best and the brightest people from the outside.

• Show appreciation. Reward progress and positive results on a person-to-person basis. Acknowledging a job well done today increases the chances of a job well done tomorrow.

• Never stop learning. Create a work atmosphere of uninterrupted learning, where augmentation of knowledge and growth in skills are always encouraged and never capped. Offer workshops or lectures to assist employees in staying up-to-date with their respective job responsibilities and industry trends.