For example People may have had a rough night without sleep and so are fully themselves when they meet me. What I need to do is practise giving people positive regard and get to know them over time, only then can I evaluate their personality if necessary. In my professional experience I have encountered this problem many times. One of my duties at my school was to interview prospective students to assess language ability. We had to do it in a hurry, about 4 minutes, because we had 12 scheduled interviews in a 50 minute block. In such a short time it was a difficult task to complete, I found myself rushing and in doing so may have relied too much on my 1st impressions rather than the content of their speech, for example, did they seem confident, if so they must be able to speak at a higher level. This leads me into leadership skills. .
As the leader in the interview room I need to practise active listening, actually looking at the person being interviewed, sometime I caught myself simply looking down at my assessment sheet. This may have made the person being interviewed feel somewhat neglected. At times I need to clarify information given to me by the student. If he mentions overseas studies I should ask what the client has studied, how long, in what depth; so I need to also ask the right questions and allow the student sufficient time to answer remembering that English was not their 1st language. .
In the class my role as a group leader has many responsibilities. For example, when a student makes an error or forms a good clear sentence, I need to point that out to the class as a whole in a positive so that everyone can gain from the exercise. To make certain students feel confident I need to practise a certain amount of self disclosure (both good things and bad) so that student feel they are not alone and can follow my lead; modelling. At certain times I need to use Blocking skills to filter out inappropriate topics which may make students of age, gender or ethnicity feel uncomfortable.