Personal characteristics and communication skills

Your role is mainly about relating to people. You will need to communicate effectively and have good interpersonal skills. Things will generally be easier if you can make friends of people, or at least keep relationships cordial. Part of your role is to establish relationships and networks and maintain them.

In some cases, this is more than being friendly. Sometimes you'll need to be assertive and manage people's behavior. You'll have to deal with difficult, angry, egotistical, fearful, or frustrated people. You'll probably have to resolve conflicts, negotiate and mediate, especially when you need to navigate and manage group dynamics.

Some general principles are:

1. Interpret legal jargon into plain language.
2. Use age-appropriate language.
3. When you make decisions or inform clients of the decisions of others, explain the rationale for for them. In other words, don't just say what the decisions are, but say why.
4. Be concrete and specific. Vague generalizations don't help very much.
5. Learn to convey factual, non-emotive information succinctly.

Some of the communication skills you need a more like a counselor:

1. Decide where people will sit in the room during the meeting. In some difficult situations, people often choose seating positions in order to:
• appear to have power over others
• create, or prevent, or avoid conflict
• control how much others can say, or to say more than them.
2. Make decisions about appropriate words, behavior, posture, and body language.
3. Give enough time for people to tell their stories
4. Be empathetic.
5. Use active and reflective listening
6. Identify and evaluate what is happening in an interaction without being judgmental
7. Ask questions to probe, clarify and summarize
8. Express your own individual perspective when appropriate
9. Express your own philosophy, ideology and/or background when appropriate, and explore their impact on the situation.
10. Focus on a solution.
11. Provide a summarizing and reflective response in conflict situations.

In dealing with people, you will often need to help people change their behavior. There are various models and practices for behavior change, and the e-book on change management will be a good start.

You'll also have to deal with people from other cultures, sometimes when their English is quite weak. In some cases, they will have their own community protocols; for example, other people will have decision-making power that you don't expect. There may also be factors of:

• Rituals, beliefs, hierarchies and practices
• Community politics
• Gender issues
• Parenting practice and family dynamics

To get decisions made, you may have to navigate complicated family structures and dynamics. Consider the following examples:

• The client's spouse is working away and you cannot get a message to him.
• The client is a child. The parents have left and the child is in the temporary care of a grandparent or friend.
• The elderly client has dementia and a nearby nephew makes all decisions. However, a daughter, who lives in another state, disagrees with the proposed treatment.
• The client is a child. The parents have separated and disagree strongly on the kinds of treatments the child should have.

Managing stress

If you have a high-pressure caseload, you may need to manage stress. This often means:

• Leave work at work so that you can relax during leisure time.
• Don't blame yourself for your mistakes when you did the best you could in the situation.
• Get enough exercise.
• Don't blame yourself for other people's shortcomings.
• Learn how to enjoy the company of pleasant people.
• Learn your personal limits and work within them.
• Manage your time, paperwork, and other causes of frustration.
• Delegate tasks to others and trust them to get on with it.
• Have someone to talk it out when you need it.
• Avoid making destructive responses (e.g. expressing anger and frustration inappropriately).
• Take proper vacations.

Management skills

You'll need to be good at planning, making clear decisions quickly, setting goals, and supervising people. And you can't do everything yourself. Identify the limits of your role, because some things are outside it. Delegate tasks to others, and trust them to get on with it.

Some meetings will be quite formal and require a professional presentation. You'll need to be able to lead the meeting, and present information and feedback. Your information may be oral or written, depending on your organization's meeting format. For example, in case conferences, you'll need to lead the group and encourage participants to share information and to plan.

In the different kinds of meetings, whether large or small, you need to objectively observe participant's behavior and collect feedback from them.