The Big Picture of Business – Communications Reflect Your Strategy

The biggest problem with our business in our society, in a capsule sentence: People with one set of experiences, values, wants and perceptions make mis-targeted attempts to communicate with others in trying to get what they want and need.

Success is just in front of our faces. Yet, we often fail to see it coming. Too many companies live with their heads in the sand. Many go down into defeat because it was never on their radar to change.

One of the biggest cop-outs that businesses in denial use is the term Messaging. They say, “We’re in the right business. We only need to improve our messaging.” That’s a rationalization to avoid confronting key strategic issues.

7 Biggest Communication Obstacles:

  1. Lack of people skills, manners
  2. Wrong facts
  3. Denial-avoidance of the real issues
  4. Non-communication
  5. Saying the wrong things at the wrong times, for the wrong reasons
  6. Failure to pick up subtle clues
  7. Failure to master communication as an art

7 Levels of Communicating:

  1. Sending out messages we wish-need to communicate.
  2. Sending messages which are intended for the listener.
  3. Communicating with many people at the same time.
  4. Eliciting feedback from audiences.
  5. Two-way communication process.
  6. Adapting and improving communications with experience.
  7. Developing communications as a vital tool of business and life.

Lack of communication is symptomatic of fear, which is the biggest handicap for any company. Because of fear, productivity suffers, turnover increases and profitability drops. There are four main fears in the business environment:

  • Reprisal. This includes disciplining, termination, transfer to an undesirable position. When employees fear reprisal, more effort is spent on affixing blame to others than achieving pro-active progress.
  • Communication. Rather than risk going out on a limb, employees either don’t learn or use their communication skills. This stymies employees’ professional development and hampers company productivity.
  • Not knowing. Rather than admit areas where information is lacking, employees often cover up, disseminating erroneous data, which comes back to hurt others. The wise employee has the building of knowledge a part of their career path… sharing with others what we most recently and most effectively learn.
  • Change. Managers and employees with the most to lose are most fearful of change. Their biggest fear is the unknown. Research shows that 90% of change is good. If people knew how beneficial that change is, they would not fight it so much.

Each member of the organization should understand and covet the position they play. It is just as important how, when and why we communicate with each other:

  • Shows that the company is a seamless concept… an integrated team working for the good of customers.
  • Indicates sophistication by each representative… that every team player knows how to utilize each other for mutual benefit.
  • Reminds customers that the company is detail-focused and quality-oriented… with an eye toward continually improving.
  • Underscores how internal communications are comparable to the way we will interface with customers.

Pictures Convey Impressions, Symbolic of Corporate Culture.

One of the hottest and most accessible vehicles is the photograph. With cameras now on phones, people are snapping more pictures than ever before. Some get distributed on the internet, through social media and in direct transfer to friends.

This resurgence in photography comes after a conversion of the industry from film to digital. Photography is presently at an all-time high in terms of societal impact. The irony is that its principal corporate contributor (Eastman Kodak) fell by the wayside, a victim of changing technologies. The same fate had fallen the electronics industry, whose innovator (the Thomas Edison Electric Company) fell behind others in leading the trends and usage.

Photographs convey thoughts, ideas and experiences. Hopefully, their usages represent thoughtful communications. Organizations can see photography as a boon to their business, if utilized properly.

Every business person and company needs a website and social media presence. Photographs convey what you’re doing new. They’re indicative of the scope of your business activity.

Use photography to personify the company. Pictures draw relationships to the customers. Think of creative ways to show employees doing great work. Show customers as benefiting from the services that you offer.

Most companies would do well to devote a portion of its homepage to its charitable involvements. Show employees as being engaged in community activities. Promote and graphically portray your company’s designated cause-related marketing activities. Interface with outside communities tends to grow your stakeholder base.

Don’t just view photography as something that everyone does. Establish company ground rules for the usage of pictures. Tie activities to customer outcomes (the tenet of Customer Focused Management).

Nourish Communications Skills

It is important to generate ideas and suggestions via writing memos, E-mail messages and internal documents. Their succinctness and regularity of issue have a direct relationship to your compensation and the company’s bottom line.

Before presenting ideas to a customer or prospect, consider organizing your approach:

  • Predict reasons why someone might oppose your suggestions.
  • Seek out supporters, early-on.
  • Determine goals. Is the objective to get the idea accepted or get credit for it?
  • Understand your audience. Understand differing personality types of your audiences.
  • Think of yourselves as leaders, who are good communicators.
  • Listen as others amplify upon the idea, which shows their buy-in potential.
  • Determine as much accuracy in others’ perceptions to your ideas. Don’t fool yourself or be blind-sighted to opposition.
  • Throw out decoy ideas for others to shoot down, so they don’t attack your core message.
  • Use language that is easily understood by all. Avoid technical terms, unless you include brief definitions.
  • Don’t over-exaggerate in promises and predictions.

Other pointers in effectively communicating include:

  • Speak with authority.
  • Make the most of face-to-face meetings, rather than through artificial barriers.
  • Remember that voice inflection, eye contact and body language are more important than the words you use.
  • Charts, graphs and illustrative materials make more impact for your points.
  • Don’t assume anything. If in doubt about their understanding, ask qualifying questions. Become a better listener.
  • Sound the best on the phone that you can.
  • Use humor successfully.
  • Get feedback. Validate that audiences have heard your intended messages.
  • Attitude is everything in effective communications.

About the Author

Power Stars to Light the Business Flame, by Hank Moore, encompasses a full-scope business perspective, invaluable for the corporate and small business markets. It is a compendium book, containing quotes and extrapolations into business culture, arranged in 76 business categories.

Hank’s latest book functions as a ‘PDR of business,’ a view of Big Picture strategies, methodologies and recommendations. This is a creative way of re-treading old knowledge to enable executives to master change rather than feel as they’re victims of it.

Power Stars to Light the Business Flameis now out in all three e-book formats: iTunes, Kindle, and Nook.

Audience Mind-Meld: Real-Time Data Makes It Possible

Have you ever given a presentation to a large group, looked out at your audience and wondered what they were thinking? If you give presentations for a living, you probably have a number of techniques to take your audience’s pulse, such as asking for a show of hands or opening the session up for questions to get their thoughts on a topic.

But chances are, these techniques result in an exploration of only a limited number of points of view. Most people don’t speak up during presentations, and if you rely solely on those who do, you might be missing out on important perspectives.

Post-presentation online surveys are a popular way to gauge audience reaction. The drawback to that technique is that response rates are typically quite low, meaning they offer only a limited snapshot of the audience’s thinking.

Presentation survey forms are another method used to gain audience insight. But like online surveys, response rates are an issue. And the data is only gathered and analyzed after the event is over, so it’s impossible to apply lessons learned right away.

There is a way to find out what audiences are thinking in real time: Audience response technology. Polling technology can allow presenters to embed questions directly into a PowerPoint presentation and enable audiences to respond using keypads or smartphones.


Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:

Subscribing to the Self Guided Program - It's Free!


 


About the Author

Sheila Hura is Vice President of Marketing and Advertising at Turning Technologies, the leading provider of instructional, assessment delivery and data collection solutions for learning environments. To learn more about how Turning Technologies’ audience response systems can create interactive presentations, engage participants and immediately assess understanding, please visit www.TurningTechnologies.com/.

The 6 Secrets to Effective Manager Communications

In times like these, when businesses are either bracing for the second wave of economic crisis or scared the employees will walk away on the road to recovery, communications professionals have the opportunity to help businesses prepare for either inevitable circumstance. And since study after study tells us that the most important driver to employee satisfaction is the manager-employee relationship, it only stands to reason that companies should be placing their bets on middle managers to hold the ship together.

There are a number of ways to help managers succeed: professional development, training courses, carrot and stick rewards. In my experience, most of these don’t work. Managers report not having time to attend training and professional development is stuck in the 1980’s; and, since when do we actually offer managers positive rewards for doing great work. More often than not, we just use the stick.

So, while our execs are focused on steering the ship, we can be focused on helping manager hold it together by putting the 6 Secrets to Effective Manager Communications into practice


Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:

Subscribing to the Self Guided Program - It's Free!


 


About the Author

Jeremy Henderson is founder and chief client partner at Jungle Red Communication, an employee engagement consulting firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Working for some of the most innovative and highly regarded companies of our era, including Razorfish, eBay, salesforce.com, and City Colleges of Chicago–Europe, shaped his focus on helping his clients create happy, healthy, and productive workplaces.

How to Listen to Hear What’s Intended

StrategyDriven Practices for Professional ArticleLike most of us, I assume I understand what my communication partner is saying and respond appropriately. I don’t think about it; I just do it. I don’t realize anything is wrong until it’s too late. But why do I make that assumption? I was never taught how to hear what others meant to convey.

From kindergarten through university, there are no programs taught on how to accurately hear what others intend to convey or how to make adjustments if there is a breakdown. Current Active Listening models don’t go far enough into the problems of misinterpretation: how, exactly, do our brains make it so difficult for us to avoid biasing what it hears? And what’s the cost to us in terms of relationships, creativity, and corporate success?

What is Listening?

Our listening skills seem to be largely intuitive: we instinctively know how to listen to music and to listen carefully when getting directions to a wedding. But sometimes we mishear or misinterpret what someone said. Or interpret something incorrectly and adamantly believe we are correct. Or lose a client or friend because we’ve not really heard their underlying message. Sometimes we listen for the wrong thing, or listen only to a part of the message.

Do we even know what listening is? We all recognize it as a core communication skill – core to our lives, our relationships, our ability to earn a living and share ideas and feelings. But how do we do it? And how do we do it right – and know when we are doing it wrong? Who’s to blame when we get it wrong? Are there skills that would enable effective listening in every conversation?

My broad interests and unique professional life have brought me in contact with an extensive range of people and situations. Along the way I’ve had thousands of successful conversations with people from many walks of life and in 63 countries. The conversations I found frustrating were my communication partner’s fault. Or so I’d like to think.

My lifelong curiosity with listening was piqued to the point of finally writing this book when reflecting on a seemingly simple conversation I heard at the tail end of a meditation retreat:

Transportation Guy: “You can either leave your luggage near the back of the go-cart and we’ll take it down the hill for you, or you can bring it down yourself.”

Woman: “Where should I leave it if I do it myself?”

Transportation Guy: “Just put it in your car.”

Woman: “No… Just tell me where I can leave it off. I want to walk it down myself when I go to the dining room.”

Transportation Guy: “Just put it in your car. I don’t know why you’re not understanding me. Just. Walk. It. Down. And. Put. It. In. Your. Car.”

A simple exchange. Simple words, spoken clearly. Words with universally recognized definitions. Yet those two folks managed to confound and confuse each other, and instead of asking for clarity they assumed the other was being obtuse.

Indeed, it sounded like they were having two different conversations, each with unique assumptions: the man assumed everyone had a car; the woman assumed there was a specific space set aside for suitcases.

The missing piece, of course, was that the woman was being picked up by a friend and didn’t have a car. The transportation guy didn’t ask for the missing piece and the woman didn’t offer it. When they didn’t get the responses they sought, they each got exasperated by the other’s intractability and, most interesting to me, were unable to get curious when confused. Two sets of assumptions, reference points, and world views using the same language. And when the communication broke down both thought they were right.

Why We Misunderstand

Because we filter out or fabricate so much of what is being said, we merely hear what our brains want us to hear and ignore, misunderstand, or forget the rest. And then we formulate our responses as if our assumptions were true. Our communications are designed merely to convey our internal assumptions, and how people hear us are based on their internal assumptions.

So it merely seems like we are having conversations. We are not; we are just assuming what we hear means something, leaping to false conclusions based on what our brains choose, and blaming the other person when the communication falters. Surprising we don’t have more misunderstandings than we do.

How humbling to realize that we limit our entire lives – our spouse, friends, work, neighborhood, hobbies – by what our brains are comfortable hearing. We are even held back or elevated in our jobs depending on our ability to communicate across contexts. Our listening skills actually determine our life path. And we never realize how limited our choices are.

Would it be best for us to communicate only with those we already know? Seems the odds of us truly hearing and being heard are slim otherwise: unless the speaker’s intent, shared data, history and beliefs are so similar to ours as to share commonality, the odds of understanding another’s intent – and hence what they are really trying to tell us – are small.

But make no mistake: the way we listen works well-enough. We’ve constructed worlds in which we rarely run into situations that might confound us, and when we do we have an easy out: blame the other person.

What if it’s possible to have choice? In Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard, I break down filters, biases, assumptions and communication patterns to enable every reader to truly hear what their Communication Partner intends them to hear, diminish misinterpretation, and expand creativity, leadership, and management.

This article is an excerpt from Sharon Drew Morgen’s new book Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard? coming out in late 2014 with AMACOM. Look for it in bookstores.


About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is founder of Morgen Facilitations, Inc. (www.newsalesparadigm.com). She is the visionary behind Buying Facilitation®, the decision facilitation model that enables people to change with integrity. A pioneer who has spoken about, written about, and taught the skills to help buyers buy, she is the author of the acclaimed New York Times Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: Why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.

Want to enhance your or your team’s listening skills? Contact Sharon Drew at [email protected]. Learn about her training programs and speaking topics at www.buyingfacilitation.com.

The Advisor’s Corner – How Should I Address Sensitive Subjects With My Staff?

How Should I Address Sensitive Subjects With My Staff?Question:

How can I navigate ‘touchy’ subjects with my staff?

StrategyDriven Response: (by Roxi Hewertson, StrategyDriven Principal Contributor)

If you read no further, remember this – it is a fact that “the truth will set you free!” What is also a fact is, HOW you share your truth matters as much or more than WHAT you share. Some of the hardest things leaders have to do are deal with delicate employee relation’s issues and/or tough business realities that impact their people. Most leaders are ill equipped, and have had very little, if any, training or good experience in this area.

Workplace issues with employees show up because people are messy and groups are messy. Deep down, leaders know this is reality. It’s not as simple as, “Why can’t everyone just be happy, do their job, and get along?” Right? Life isn’t that simple for any of us. There are effective ways to navigate your people and organization to a better place in tough times.

The answer to preventing and/or resolving delicate employee or business issues begins with creating the culture you want within your business, hiring well in the first place, leading people effectively, and finally managing performance consistently.

The leader sets the expectations and tone, and must hold all staff accountable, including herself or himself. All leaders within the organization have a big impact on everything, everyday. This means no individual who holds a leadership role is off the hook.

Here are four guidelines for navigating sensitive issues with employees:

  1. Don’t assume anything or react immediately – check out all the facts, just like you would expect from a good audit or quality assurance assessment. Make sure you are confident in your conclusions.
  2. Utilize Constructive Feedback skills and methods. The kindest thing you can do for an employee is tell the TRUTH – RESPECTFULLY. Make sure your motivations are positive and convey your positive intent in helping them.
  3. Resolve conflicts as soon as possible. Don’t hope they will go away – they rarely do. A large percentage of conflicts arise from miscommunication, lack of clarity of expectations or both.
  4. Demonstrate empathy –try hard to walk a mile in his or her shoes before you say anything you might regret. This means LISTEN deeply.

If the tough situation is something like layoffs or cost cutting, and you aren’t even sure about the end game, the people who work for you still deserve to know as much as you are able to share.

Transparency – transparency – transparency! In a small or even mid-sized office, everyone can smell trouble. There is no hiding it. Most people fill in the blank spaces with bad news, not good news. Rumors start, and those are often worse than reality. This is toxic for any group and will hurt your customers as well.

Since you can’t hide it, tell the truth. Rather than losing sleep over how people will respond, tell them what you know and tell them what you don’t know and tell them what you can’t tell them and why. Then manage the emotions by allowing their voice to be heard and engage in solutions as much as they can.

As you consider how to help your people work things out or when you must share tough news, consider these 2 RULES:

  1. The Golden Rule is about fairness – how YOU would like to be treated.
  2. The Platinum Rule is about empathy – how HE/SHE wants to be treated, considering what they need, not just what do you need.

By keeping these two rules smack in the front of your mind as you embark on tough conversations of any kind will help you navigate them, and help you sleep at night.


About the Author

Leadership authority Roxana (Roxi) Hewertson is a no-nonsense business veteran revered for her nuts-and-bolts, tell-it-like-it-is approach and practical, out-of-the-box insights that help both emerging and expert managers, executives and owners boost quantifiable job performance in various mission critical facets of business. Through AskRoxi.com, Roxi — “the Dear Abby of Leadership” — imparts invaluable free advice to managers and leaders at all levels, from the bullpen to the boardroom, to help them solve problems, become more effective and realize a higher measure of business and career success.


The StrategyDriven website was created to provide members of our community with insights to the actions that help create the shared vision, focus, and commitment needed to improve organizational alignment and accountability for the achievement of superior results. We look forward to answering your strategic planning and tactical business execution questions. Please email your questions to [email protected].