How do you develop your interpersonal skills?

Explore and click on the related skills below:

Leadership

The process of successfully influencing the activities of a group towards the achievement of a common goal. A leader has the ability to influence others through qualities such as personal charisma, expertise, command of language, and the creation of mutual respect. As well as requiring strong Communication Skills and Personal Skills, leadership uses the Background skills of mentoring, decision making, delegation and motivating others.

Networking

The ability to actively seek, identify and create effective contacts with others, and to maintain those contacts for mutual benefit. In addition to strong Communication Skills and Personal Skills, Networking uses the Background skills of network building and motivating others.

Teamwork

Involves working with others in a group towards a common goal. This requires cooperating with others, being responsive to others' ideas, taking a collaborative approach to learning, and taking a responsibility for developing and achieving group goals. Teamwork uses the Background skills of collaboration, mentoring, decision making and delegation.

Mentoring is:

• Being a trusted advisor and helper with experience in a particular field. Actively supporting and guiding someone to develop knowledge and experience, or to achieve career or personal goals (for example, a third-year student mentoring a first year student, helping to adjust to the university experience).
• A mentoring relationship may be formal or informal, but must involve trust, mutual respect, and commitment as both parties work together to achieve a goal (for example, mentoring a younger member of a team to achieve better performance in the lead-up to a sporting event).

• any activity in which students work together;
• any activity which has been specifically designed so that students work in pairs or groups, and may be assessed as a group (referred to as formal group work); or
• when students come together naturally to help each other with their work (referred to as informal group work).
• peer group activity in lab classes, tutorials etc

• Identifying appropriate evidence and weighing up that evidence to make a choice (for example, gathering and assessing information to find the best way to perform an experiment).
• Taking responsibility for a decision and its outcomes (for example, choosing a topic for a group presentation from a number of suggestions).
  

• Taking responsibility for determining when to ask someone else to make a decision or carry out a task (for example, figuring out what is a fair distribution of the workload in a group project, and sharing responsibility with others).
• Distributing responsibility and authority in a group by giving someone else the discretion to make decisions that you have the authority to make (for example, as the chosen leader of a lab experiment team, you could assign tasks and decisions to different group members).
  

• Working cooperatively and productively with other team members to contribute to the outcomes of the team's work (for example, dividing the workload and sharing the results of your own work with others in the group, or assisting members of the group who are having difficulty completing their tasks).
  

• Creating contacts with other people and maintaining those contacts (for example, meeting someone at a seminar with similar interests, and swapping email addresses with them).
  
• Acquiring and maintaining information about people who might be useful contacts for specific purposes (for example, seeking out people established in an industry you hope to work with one day).
  
• Using a contact in an ethical manner to help each of you meet specific goals, (for example, collaborating on projects of importance to both of you).
  

• Generating enthusiasm and energy by being positive, focussing on finding solutions and maintaining a positive attitude even when things are not going well (for example, when something goes wrong, asking "What can we try now?" instead of saying, "That should have worked better.").
  
• Encouraging others to come up with solutions, listening carefully to their ideas and offering constructive feedback (for example, gathering suggestions for a group project, and giving each person's ideas fair discussion).
  
• Being prepared to support others in taking agreed, calculated risks, and not blaming others when things go wrong (for example, one group member's portion of a presentation receives a poor mark - make sure that this student isn't blamed by the group, and focus on learning from the mistakes).
  

Back to top