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

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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].

Do you want to push your solution? Or implement creative, collaborative change?

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StrategyDriven Change Management ArticleHere’s a scenario: as you’re just leaving the house one morning your spouse says to you:

“I think we need to move.”

Huh! How interesting! You tell her you’ll continue the conversation when you get home, and go out the door. On your way home, you see a terrific house with a ‘For Sale’ sign on it, and you buy it. You arrive home with great news:

“Honey! I just bought us a new house! We can move next week!”

What’s wrong with this story? The problem isn’t the house. In fact, it might even be the best solution. But that’s not the point. And in fact you have no idea if it might be the best solution or not. You haven’t discussed or agreed on how, if, when, why you would move, or how to factor in all of the elements that must be included in any decision to make a change.

  • Do you know your spouse’s criteria around a move? Do you need to be in agreement to move forward with any decisions or action? Is there some piece of information your spouse needs to share that you are unaware of that is driving the need to make a change and has been hidden from you until now?
  • What is the commensurate level of involvement for everyone on the Decision Team (i.e. family members in this case)? How will their level of involvement bias the outcome/need or where/if/when a move is necessary? What if there are several competing factors – i.e. is nearness to a school vs closeness to a job?
  • What issues would need to be agreed upon for a solution to get group consensus and buy-in?
  • What does the housing market look like for the sale of your house? How much is it worth and how much could you spend on a new one? What would be the time factor?

In sales, coaching, change implementations, or negotiating, the focus has been on ‘the house’. And you end up with resistance, delayed sales cycles, implementations studded with costly errors and insufficient data, regardless of the efficacy of your solution. A description of the house is the very last thing you need.

To have greater success, you’d need to begin your initiative – whether it’s sales, change management, leadership, or negotiation – by facilitating the components of systemic change first. Here’s a rule:

Until or unless everyone and everything that will touch the final solution agrees to a change, knows how to adapt congruently, and adds their two cents, they cannot buy/change.

The solution is the very last thing to take into account. Until the above happens, you might end up with the wrong house, in the wrong neighborhood, at the wrong price, with the wrong number of bedrooms. It’s not about the house.

There is no need for long sales cycles, resistance, or faulty implementations so long as you add a facilitation capability to your initiatives. Let’s start a conversation and discuss your failed initiatives, and between us, figure out new ways to have greater success.

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.

Assessment: How much do you stink at listening?

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StrategyDriven Business Communications Article
 
Answer these questions to see how accurately you hear what your communication partner intends you to hear, and how much business you are losing as a result.

  1. How often do you enter conversations to hear what you want to hear – and disregard the rest?
  2. How often do you listen to get your own agenda across, regardless of the needs of the speaker?
  3. How often do you have a bias in place before the speaker’s points or agenda are known?
  4. Do you ever assume what the speaker wants from you before he/she states it – whether your assumption is accurate or not?
  5. How often do you listen merely to confirm you are right… and the other person is wrong?
  6. Do you ever enter a conversation without any bias, filters, assumptions, or expectations? What would need to happen for you to enter all conversations with a totally blank slate? Do you have the tools to make that possible?
  7. Because your filters, expectations, biases, and assumptions strongly influence how you hear what’s intended, how do you know that your natural hearing skills enable you to achieve everything you might achieve in a conversation?
  8. How much business have you lost because of your inability to choose the appropriate modality to hear and interpret through?
  9. How many relationships have you lost by driving conversations where you wanted them to be rather than a path of collaboration that would end up someplace surprising?

As I am writing my new book, Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard? I’ve gotten notes from all around the world: everyone thinks they listen accurately. Ah… But do they hear what’s intended?

It’s physiologically impossible to accurately hear what our communication partner intends us to hear. We have biases, filters, triggers, assumptions, and habits that get in the way. And people don’t accurately represent what they mean for us to hear, leaving out details that they assume will be understood and aren’t, or choosing words that have different meanings for listeners. Or the situation we find ourselves in has any range of situational biases that make it difficult. We hear according to our education, family history, religious beliefs, political beliefs, age, ethnicity…

Are you getting the picture here? Not even close to possible. So what is it we are defending? What is so important about believing we hear what’s intended when we don’t – and it’s not even possible?

My new book will break down the good, the bad, and the ugly of how we hear, why we don’t, where we have problems (lots of assessments and fun exercises), and ways to fix it. Lots of funny examples of just plain dumb conversations between really smart people. And trust me: my snarky personality will lead readers through the process. I can’t wait until it comes out next year.

Email me with questions about listening. Speak to others about the project. Let’s make ‘hearing what’s intended’ the new buzz phrase. Because if we all can hear what’s intended, we can make a huge difference in the world.

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, as a Leader, Communicate?

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How Should I, as a Leader, Communicate?Question:

Everyone talks about communication being a problem in our company. As a leader, what am I supposed to do about it?

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

A recent Development Dimensions International study, Driving Workplace Performance through High-Quality Conversations: What leaders must do every day to be effective, reminds us in no uncertain terms, that leaders, peers and direct reports need to hold more effective conversations at work to receive more effective business performance.

Technology gets a lot of the blame for the continued degradation of communication skills among leaders over the past two decades. But technology, like any tool, can be used in positive or negative ways. What really matters is how we choose to communicate and how we choose to use our tools. Technology works well for:

  • Sharing information,
  • Setting up meetings,
  • Keeping records

But it does not work well when:

  • We need to have a dialogue and a conversation,
  • We copy the world to cover our bases or boost our egos,
  • There is emotion involved

Since communication norms are deeply woven into the fabric of every organization’s culture, this challenge starts with the CEO and involves all his or her leaders. The DDI study validates how important emotional intelligence competencies, particularly self-awareness and social skills are in human interactions.

Everything we do happens through our relationships – at work and outside of work. When communication is poor or stops, the relationship is poor or stops. In the DDI study, the authors point out that senior leaders have not mastered these communication skills any better than less senior leaders, even though they have been at it longer. To me this strongly indicates we think we are communicating well when we simply… are not.

Take a few moments over the next several days to see if you notice any of these poor interaction habits in yourself and/or leaders you know:

  • Jumping to task before understanding the full picture.
    One solution: Take the time to gather information and listen carefully.
  • Unskilled at, or choosing not to have, effective conversations.
    One solution: Learn this skill or get out of leadership.
  • Failing to engage others in decisions that impact them.
    One solution: Ask yourself, “Who is impacted by this decisions?” Then, engage those people in the process.
  • Failing to demonstrate authentic empathy.
    One solution: Slow down and truly put yourself in another person’s shoes. What might it be like to be him or her right now? Don’t know? Ask.
  • Ego and personal agenda driven.
    One solution: Ask yourself, “Do I really need to be or prove I am right? Or do I want my team to succeed no matter whose idea it is?”
  • Unable to facilitate a productive meeting or discussion.
    One solution: Learn these skills and/or engage skilled facilitators to help you.

The systemic, long-term solution to improving interaction and communication skills in your organization is to make it MATTER. It’s quite simple to do…

What you reward is what you will get. What you don’t reward, you will get much less often.

Leaders generally know what a good conversation looks like. Knowing is the easy part. Doing is the hard part. The leader’s number ONE responsibility is to create and nurture a culture that will bring out the best in their people. Those choices and priorities will roll downhill. This is particularly true for the behaviors we model for our direct reports – all the way from the C-Suite to the front line.

At the end of the day, when we are not truly listening, we are not leading. Period.

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].

Getting closer to the customer is the key issue for Marketing Execs

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What are the most important topics for marketers?

Last month, in an online vote with Incite Marketing and Communications, 579 marketers ranked the following as their top five topics:

1. Data-driven creativity: An oxymoron? Use what you learn to drive better marketing campaigns
2. Think Fast, Act Faster: Real-time insight for quick decision-making and responsive marketing
3. Hit them when they’re listening: Choose the right channels, and use them at the right time for better engagement
4. Keeping it super-relevant – Personalized Marketing: Granular customer understanding to ensure every message is relevant
5. Define your impact on the bottom line: How new data sources give you more detail on your marketing’s effectiveness

So, what does the above tell us about the state of mind of executive marketers in June 2013?

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About the Author

Nick Johnson is the founder of Useful Social Media and Incite Marketing and Communications. Johnson runs a business devoted to facilitating conversation between, and asking challenging questions of, the marketing and communications community. Moving beyond standard business intelligence models, he leads a team devoted to building a customer-centric business delivering real value through the creation of an exclusive, dynamic community of senior strategists.