Courage is not Rude or Rash
Some people confuse being courageous and speaking up with being rude. Real courage, like real confidence, is not a spoken or boisterous competency. It is quiet, thoughtful and polite. Real courage is not about interrupting others, talking over someone, using emotional fits to win a point or even using bullying tactics. It is certainly not about blind copying an email to embarrass someone.
Conversely, people who come across as polite and deliberate should not be misjudged as lacking courage. The loudest person in the room is not the one with the real courage. In fact, the cool leader will use courage more effectively and with better judgment.
Being rash is covered in detail in an upcoming commandment but suffice to say that risk must always be mitigated and analyzed. Jumping blindly off a cliff is not risk taking. It is just dumb.
Courage to Confront
The first and most used competency for leaders is the courage to confront. This becomes almost a daily function for many supervisors, managers and executives and it is a fundamental part of the coaching function. The courage to confront is simply the desire to discuss poor performance and behavior in a direct and immediate manner.
Not being rash, this is an unemotional approach to coaching team members who do not meet expectations. Most commonly, this is a leader directed coaching dialog in which an expectations for performance or behavior has not been met. Many leaders fear and avoid these interactions for a variety of reasons but the most common avoidance excuse is the loss of popularity or the risk of a full blown and ugly confrontation. Both of those lines of reasoning create a grossly ineffective leader. As a supervisor, manager or executive, you are not there to be loved. Your responsibility and accountability is to the organization and not the feelings of your team members. You are not running for homecoming queen.
The desire for popularity is an interesting dynamic. Everyone wants to be liked and loved. We humans are wired for it. Unfortunately, this becomes counter-effective and counter-productive in a leadership role. Leaders must shift their need to be liked to a need to be effective and a need to be respected. Many times a leader that makes decisions to remain popular will greatly compromise their respect quotient. More simply, the leader that fails to confront failed performance in one team member because of a desire to remain liked by that team member will loose respect and credibility with other team members.
Effective leaders make one more shift related to popularity. They move the desire to be liked out of the workplace and move it home or in other settings. This shift provides for the need to be popular and liked but keeps it from compromising important actions in the working environment.
Another obstacle to the courage to confront is performance comparatives. In it’s most simple terms, a performance comparative is looking at total team member value compared to a failure or error event. It is the failure to address today’s dress code violation because the team member usually looks good or because they are a star performer in other areas. It is not talking to a team member about their surly approach with the receptionist because they produce more than any of the other team members. It is the fearing the loss of good characteristics, behaviors and performance when addressing a deficiency.
This paradigm is most easily challenged by asking a real star performer wants to be a star performer in all areas. Also challenging this belief is the fact that team members want to know where they stand and how they are doing. Real star performers want an opportunity to be a star in all areas and fix anything that does not rise to star level. Remember, when providing this type of coaching to only focus on the single behavior that needs improvement and not the total value of the team member.
The final obstacle related to the courage to confront is the fear that a coaching session about poor performance or behavior will result in an explosion from the team member. Ugly, yelling explosion. Maybe even a complaint to human resources about you. Crying, denying and accusing. Unattractive stuff.
First, go back and read the skills and techniques to be used in these types of coaching sessions in the immediate preceding chapter and commandment. Coaching team members is not easy but it is a core skill needed in effective leadership.
Challenge yourself to understand why some team members explode during a coaching dialog about poor performance and behavior. They explode. You respond in kind. You may even say something you regret. You may say something that causes liability to you and your company. They win. Without exception, explosive behavior from team members are designed to derail your mission as an effective and coaching leader. We have taught these team members that if they explode, the supervisor backs off. And better still, the leader becomes leery of future conversations about performance.
Another example is when a team member breaks down and even cries. They cry. Your empathy turns to sympathy. You back away from the performance or behavior dialog. They win. Lesson learned and it will be used again and again.
More common is the false belief that these types of dialogs always result in ugliness. In fact arguing, crying and fussing are relatively rare. Much more common is the desire for the team member to know where they have erred and how they can remedy it.
The “No Surprise Principle” tells us that team members would much rather have a conversation about their performance that read it as a surprise on their annual performance review. That is almost guaranteed to get a nasty response. Team members need to know how they are doing and effective leaders tell them.
As a final note in this section, also consider how this skills translates into other areas of your life. If you had a dog that was digging up your backyard and did nothing to confront the behavior, would the dog continue to dig? Would your other dog be encouraged to also dig? Your child has a tantrum and you back off from your dialog, what has she learned? Will your other kids mimic that behavior?
Friday, January 29, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
Monday Mentor-Refresher 4-The Basics of Positive Feedback
The correct and frequent delivery of positive feedback is one of the most powerful tools available to any leader. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most widely misunderstood, misused and underused tools as well.
Positive feedback is providing appreciation and acknowledgement when a team member performs at their role expectation or higher. It is simply designed to replicate the positive behavior or performance from the team member and create a culture where others strive for the positive feedback and acknowledgement.
For those of us who are dog owners and those of us that have previously enjoyed the company of man’s best friend, we can compare positive feedback in work team members to the process of conditioning dog responses. When you throw the tennis ball to the dog and he brings it back, you say “good dog.” When you throw the ball again and he brings it back, you again say “good dog.”
In the event that you cease saying “good dog” the dog will stop bringing the ball back. You say “good dog” to praise a positive event and encourage the replication of an appreciated behavior.
For those of us who have raised children, we can also compare our interactions with them to the correct use of positive feedback at work. When a child brings home a good report card, we say “good job, nicely done.” The intent is to reward the good grades and encourage more good grades. Every time the grades come back well, we repeat the praise.
Please don’t get this comparison wrong. Adult working humans are very much different from dogs and children. Or are they?
Adults react to reinforcement conditioning in the same way as children and dogs. When positive feedback exists, they will replicate the behavior. When no positive feedback exists, there is little motivation to replicate the performance.
Why Bother
In about twenty years of consulting and training work, we have documented an incredible phenomenon related to the lack of positive feedback in working environments. It is the “Why Bother” phenomenon.
Basically, what happens is that a team member does something well and the leader does not acknowledge or appreciate the activity. The first time around, there is not much harm because intrinsic motivation and pride will drive the team member to do well again. Unfortunately by the second or third time with not acknowledgement, thanks or reasonable belief that any appreciation is coming, the team member will develop a “why bother” approach and begin performing at minimum or worse levels.
This phenomenon also occurs when a leader is seen only in the role of critic in chief. The only time we hear from the boss is when something is wrong or she always tells people how to do it better so, “why bother.”
“Why bother” can become pervasive in workplaces and organizational culture when there is no expectation for positive feedback. It is very common when a leader ascribes to the “I pay them to do a good job” or “I expect them to do a good job” or the “when they don’t see me they know they are doing well” philosophies. Arcane and fatally flawed, you can’t produce replicated good performance through ignoring people.
Another contributor to “why bother” are the systems used in place of human interaction positive feedback. Annual performance reviews, employee of the month plaques and bonus checks have value but do not come close to the immediate reinforcement needed reproduce good performance.
As a leader, if you want to jump start the performance of team members or recharge an entire work group that you think is under-achieving, positive feedback can cure the “why bother” phenomenon quickly and re-motivate team members.
Positive feedback is providing appreciation and acknowledgement when a team member performs at their role expectation or higher. It is simply designed to replicate the positive behavior or performance from the team member and create a culture where others strive for the positive feedback and acknowledgement.
For those of us who are dog owners and those of us that have previously enjoyed the company of man’s best friend, we can compare positive feedback in work team members to the process of conditioning dog responses. When you throw the tennis ball to the dog and he brings it back, you say “good dog.” When you throw the ball again and he brings it back, you again say “good dog.”
In the event that you cease saying “good dog” the dog will stop bringing the ball back. You say “good dog” to praise a positive event and encourage the replication of an appreciated behavior.
For those of us who have raised children, we can also compare our interactions with them to the correct use of positive feedback at work. When a child brings home a good report card, we say “good job, nicely done.” The intent is to reward the good grades and encourage more good grades. Every time the grades come back well, we repeat the praise.
Please don’t get this comparison wrong. Adult working humans are very much different from dogs and children. Or are they?
Adults react to reinforcement conditioning in the same way as children and dogs. When positive feedback exists, they will replicate the behavior. When no positive feedback exists, there is little motivation to replicate the performance.
Why Bother
In about twenty years of consulting and training work, we have documented an incredible phenomenon related to the lack of positive feedback in working environments. It is the “Why Bother” phenomenon.
Basically, what happens is that a team member does something well and the leader does not acknowledge or appreciate the activity. The first time around, there is not much harm because intrinsic motivation and pride will drive the team member to do well again. Unfortunately by the second or third time with not acknowledgement, thanks or reasonable belief that any appreciation is coming, the team member will develop a “why bother” approach and begin performing at minimum or worse levels.
This phenomenon also occurs when a leader is seen only in the role of critic in chief. The only time we hear from the boss is when something is wrong or she always tells people how to do it better so, “why bother.”
“Why bother” can become pervasive in workplaces and organizational culture when there is no expectation for positive feedback. It is very common when a leader ascribes to the “I pay them to do a good job” or “I expect them to do a good job” or the “when they don’t see me they know they are doing well” philosophies. Arcane and fatally flawed, you can’t produce replicated good performance through ignoring people.
Another contributor to “why bother” are the systems used in place of human interaction positive feedback. Annual performance reviews, employee of the month plaques and bonus checks have value but do not come close to the immediate reinforcement needed reproduce good performance.
As a leader, if you want to jump start the performance of team members or recharge an entire work group that you think is under-achieving, positive feedback can cure the “why bother” phenomenon quickly and re-motivate team members.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Career Builder-13 Things Not to Share with Co-Workers
By Rachel Zupek, CareerBuilder.com writer
It's happened to everyone before. The constant flow of words that just keep coming, long after you've made your point (if there ever was one) and even longer after people stopped caring. The kind of gibberish that just won't stop unless someone else starts talking. The type of chatter that inevitably ends with you wishing you'd put a sock in it.
Yes, verbal diarrhea is never a good thing -- but it can be worse in some places more than others.
Like the workplace.
There are certain things co-workers need not know about each other -- your baby-making plans and stomach issues, for example -- but some folks just can't seem to keep their mouths shut.
Some people talk to hear the sound of their own voice; others share because they don't really have a life and, by revealing details you'd rather not know, they create the illusion of one, says Linda Lopeke, a career advancement expert and creator of SmartStart Virtual Mentoring Programs. "Then there is the person who believes gossip, even about them, creates instant emotional intimacy. It doesn't."
Read the Entire Article: http://msn.careerbuilder.com/Article/MSN-1219-Workplace-Issues-13-Things-Not-to-Share-with-Your-Co-workers/?sc_extcmp=JS_1219_advice&SiteId=cbmsn41219
It's happened to everyone before. The constant flow of words that just keep coming, long after you've made your point (if there ever was one) and even longer after people stopped caring. The kind of gibberish that just won't stop unless someone else starts talking. The type of chatter that inevitably ends with you wishing you'd put a sock in it.
Yes, verbal diarrhea is never a good thing -- but it can be worse in some places more than others.
Like the workplace.
There are certain things co-workers need not know about each other -- your baby-making plans and stomach issues, for example -- but some folks just can't seem to keep their mouths shut.
Some people talk to hear the sound of their own voice; others share because they don't really have a life and, by revealing details you'd rather not know, they create the illusion of one, says Linda Lopeke, a career advancement expert and creator of SmartStart Virtual Mentoring Programs. "Then there is the person who believes gossip, even about them, creates instant emotional intimacy. It doesn't."
Read the Entire Article: http://msn.careerbuilder.com/Article/MSN-1219-Workplace-Issues-13-Things-Not-to-Share-with-Your-Co-workers/?sc_extcmp=JS_1219_advice&SiteId=cbmsn41219
Monday, January 18, 2010
Fast Company-Carpet People and Tile People
The "Tile People" Versus the "Carpet People"
By Roberta Matuson
A while back I encountered an interesting phenomenon, while conducting employee focus group meetings. Employees kept talking about “the carpet people” and the “tile people.” At first I thought these terms were industry specific. However, after hearing several sarcastic comments, it became clear to me these terms were being used to differentiate between professional employees, who sat in nicely carpeted offices and cubicles, and manufacturing personnel, who had tile beneath them.
Confused, I probed further. It was then that one of the “tile people” informed me that there was a distinct line (a door) where the tile ended and the carpeting began. In management’s defense, the work space set up for those “tile people” assembling the product seemed in line with other light manufacturing environments that I’ve seen. It seems the real issue wasn’t the carpet or the tile. It was the door that had been put up between the two workspaces to insulate both areas from hall conversations.
Do you have barriers to productivity that you don't even know are there? Here's how you can find out and what you can do about it:
Read the Entire Article at: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/roberta-matuson/management-escalator/tile-people-versus-carpet-people
By Roberta Matuson
A while back I encountered an interesting phenomenon, while conducting employee focus group meetings. Employees kept talking about “the carpet people” and the “tile people.” At first I thought these terms were industry specific. However, after hearing several sarcastic comments, it became clear to me these terms were being used to differentiate between professional employees, who sat in nicely carpeted offices and cubicles, and manufacturing personnel, who had tile beneath them.
Confused, I probed further. It was then that one of the “tile people” informed me that there was a distinct line (a door) where the tile ended and the carpeting began. In management’s defense, the work space set up for those “tile people” assembling the product seemed in line with other light manufacturing environments that I’ve seen. It seems the real issue wasn’t the carpet or the tile. It was the door that had been put up between the two workspaces to insulate both areas from hall conversations.
Do you have barriers to productivity that you don't even know are there? Here's how you can find out and what you can do about it:
Read the Entire Article at: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/roberta-matuson/management-escalator/tile-people-versus-carpet-people
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Monday Mentor-Refresher 3-Correct Fit: The Beginning and The End
Correct Fit-The Beginning
The first interaction a leader has with a team member is during the hiring and recruiting process. Although usually brief, this first meeting needs to be used to assess the proper fit for a potential team member.
Traditionally, interviews were used to discuss qualifications, education and experience. All of those things have value but not nearly as much as fit and interpersonal skills. To drive this point home, look at your current problematic team members. The ones with two inch thick files. The ones that come off and on disciplinary action with regularity. The ones that constantly are causing trouble but avoid termination.
Now, as you look at those problematic team members, critically review why they are problematic. Is it because of a lack of technical skills, qualification and education or is it because of a lack of fit with the existing team or lack of interpersonal skills? Most managers and leaders agree it is because of the latter and not the former. Interpersonal skills and ability to fit with the existing team are far greater predictors of workplace success than technical ability or education.
Back to the interview. The leader’s job in the interview process is to determine if someone will fit properly with the existing group and in the culture built by the leader and team. This is most often discovered in situational questions about how a job candidate would respond and react to the common scenarios in your working environment. The leader can then compare the job candidate’s response to the desired outcome or how his or her team currently responds and reacts. This is also a great technique for behavioral interviewing.
The leader must also check and test a potential team member’s interpersonal skills. How they work with others. How they communicate. How they solve problems. How they handle adversity. How they operate under pressure and stress. What do terms like accountability and responsibility mean to them? These are the interpersonal skill check points that are so critical in the modern working environment.
The effective leader recruits team members based on interpersonal skills and fit and avoids the common over-emphasis on experience and education.
Correct Fit-The End
The most difficult role of coaching is ending someone’s employment on your team. Difficult but necessary.
In fact, many managers and supervisors make a far bigger mistake by extending employment longer than they should and providing way too many opportunities for improvement and change. This is not an invitation to be rash and take these decisions lightly, but the impact of not terminating a team member when required is far greater than terminating a team member too soon.
The Lakota Sioux tribes of the northern and western plains had a saying. They believed “when you encounter a dead horse, it is best to dismount.” Not comparing team members to dead horses but good leaders recognize when someone is not fitting or not performing pretty early in the team relationship. When the determination is made that the team member will not perform or will not fit after appropriate coaching and counseling, the leader must end their employment.
In the modern working dynamic, most firing decision require multiple levels of approval and many sets of documentation and hoops to jump through. One of the biggest leadership mistakes is to look at these obstacles as insurmountable. Some mangers and supervisors, when told to obtain additional documentation, simply give up and label the team member as fire-proof or protected. This mistake, although convenient at the time, will lead to greater performance and behavior problems with the entire team.
Dragging a termination decision or action too long sends a horrible message to other team members. Rewarding poor performance or behavior will tell the team that those actions work. As a leader, you will also be faced with people that dare you to fire them. Don’t back down. Do them the favor for which they are asking.
The first interaction a leader has with a team member is during the hiring and recruiting process. Although usually brief, this first meeting needs to be used to assess the proper fit for a potential team member.
Traditionally, interviews were used to discuss qualifications, education and experience. All of those things have value but not nearly as much as fit and interpersonal skills. To drive this point home, look at your current problematic team members. The ones with two inch thick files. The ones that come off and on disciplinary action with regularity. The ones that constantly are causing trouble but avoid termination.
Now, as you look at those problematic team members, critically review why they are problematic. Is it because of a lack of technical skills, qualification and education or is it because of a lack of fit with the existing team or lack of interpersonal skills? Most managers and leaders agree it is because of the latter and not the former. Interpersonal skills and ability to fit with the existing team are far greater predictors of workplace success than technical ability or education.
Back to the interview. The leader’s job in the interview process is to determine if someone will fit properly with the existing group and in the culture built by the leader and team. This is most often discovered in situational questions about how a job candidate would respond and react to the common scenarios in your working environment. The leader can then compare the job candidate’s response to the desired outcome or how his or her team currently responds and reacts. This is also a great technique for behavioral interviewing.
The leader must also check and test a potential team member’s interpersonal skills. How they work with others. How they communicate. How they solve problems. How they handle adversity. How they operate under pressure and stress. What do terms like accountability and responsibility mean to them? These are the interpersonal skill check points that are so critical in the modern working environment.
The effective leader recruits team members based on interpersonal skills and fit and avoids the common over-emphasis on experience and education.
Correct Fit-The End
The most difficult role of coaching is ending someone’s employment on your team. Difficult but necessary.
In fact, many managers and supervisors make a far bigger mistake by extending employment longer than they should and providing way too many opportunities for improvement and change. This is not an invitation to be rash and take these decisions lightly, but the impact of not terminating a team member when required is far greater than terminating a team member too soon.
The Lakota Sioux tribes of the northern and western plains had a saying. They believed “when you encounter a dead horse, it is best to dismount.” Not comparing team members to dead horses but good leaders recognize when someone is not fitting or not performing pretty early in the team relationship. When the determination is made that the team member will not perform or will not fit after appropriate coaching and counseling, the leader must end their employment.
In the modern working dynamic, most firing decision require multiple levels of approval and many sets of documentation and hoops to jump through. One of the biggest leadership mistakes is to look at these obstacles as insurmountable. Some mangers and supervisors, when told to obtain additional documentation, simply give up and label the team member as fire-proof or protected. This mistake, although convenient at the time, will lead to greater performance and behavior problems with the entire team.
Dragging a termination decision or action too long sends a horrible message to other team members. Rewarding poor performance or behavior will tell the team that those actions work. As a leader, you will also be faced with people that dare you to fire them. Don’t back down. Do them the favor for which they are asking.
Chief Learning Officer-Engagement Leads to Growth
Research Connects Employee Engagement and Pride to Business Growth
Thursday January 14, 2010
Chicago — Jan. 14New research released by Chicago-based human capital management consulting firm HR Solutions Inc. found employee pride to be at a high level according to its international database.
Close to three-quarters of employees (71 percent) answered favorably to the statement, “I would proudly recommend this organization as a good place to work to a friend or relative.” Seventy-five percent agreed that their “work is personally rewarding,” and lastly, 71 percent of employees “leave work often with a good feeling of accomplishment about the work they did that day.” These three statistics have a direct relationship to employees’ sense of pride in their work. Employees who find great pride in their work naturally have a high engagement level. Engaged employees are more likely to recommend their company products and services to their friends and family as well as recommend their company to other customers, attributing to company growth. Employee engagement translates into employee loyalty and pride, which then drives employee productivity and business outcomes. “Employee engagement has a great impact on the turnover and the financial performance of the company.
Engaged employees are six times more likely to stay with their organization than their disengaged counterparts. To create a sense of pride in one’s work, a high level of employee engagement is imperative. In turn, this prevents turnover, lessening any strain on the company financially, allowing for business success,” explained Kevin Sheridan, CEO of HR Solutions Inc. These organizations have been shown to outperform their competitors on financial metrics. Employees who are engaged and take pride in their work have a sense of ownership that allows for satisfied customers and company growth.
For more info: http://www.hrsolutionsinc.com
Thursday January 14, 2010
Chicago — Jan. 14New research released by Chicago-based human capital management consulting firm HR Solutions Inc. found employee pride to be at a high level according to its international database.
Close to three-quarters of employees (71 percent) answered favorably to the statement, “I would proudly recommend this organization as a good place to work to a friend or relative.” Seventy-five percent agreed that their “work is personally rewarding,” and lastly, 71 percent of employees “leave work often with a good feeling of accomplishment about the work they did that day.” These three statistics have a direct relationship to employees’ sense of pride in their work. Employees who find great pride in their work naturally have a high engagement level. Engaged employees are more likely to recommend their company products and services to their friends and family as well as recommend their company to other customers, attributing to company growth. Employee engagement translates into employee loyalty and pride, which then drives employee productivity and business outcomes. “Employee engagement has a great impact on the turnover and the financial performance of the company.
Engaged employees are six times more likely to stay with their organization than their disengaged counterparts. To create a sense of pride in one’s work, a high level of employee engagement is imperative. In turn, this prevents turnover, lessening any strain on the company financially, allowing for business success,” explained Kevin Sheridan, CEO of HR Solutions Inc. These organizations have been shown to outperform their competitors on financial metrics. Employees who are engaged and take pride in their work have a sense of ownership that allows for satisfied customers and company growth.
For more info: http://www.hrsolutionsinc.com
About.com-How to Change Your Organizational Culture
By Susan M. Heathfield, About.com Guide
Changing your organizational culture is the toughest task you will ever take on. Your organizational culture was formed over years of interaction between the participants in the organization. Changing the accepted organizational culture1 can feel like rolling rocks uphill.
Organizational cultures form for a reason. Perhaps the current organizational culture matches the style and comfort zone of the company founder. Culture frequently echoes the prevailing management style. Since managers tend to hire people just like themselves, the established organizational culture is reinforced by new hires.
Organizational culture grows over time. People are comfortable with the current organizational culture. For people to consider culture change, usually a significant event must occur. An event that rocks their world such as flirting with bankruptcy, a significant loss of sales and customers, or losing a million dollars, might get people's attention.
Read the entire article: http://humanresources.about.com/od/organizationalculture/a/culture_change.htm?nl=1
Changing your organizational culture is the toughest task you will ever take on. Your organizational culture was formed over years of interaction between the participants in the organization. Changing the accepted organizational culture1 can feel like rolling rocks uphill.
Organizational cultures form for a reason. Perhaps the current organizational culture matches the style and comfort zone of the company founder. Culture frequently echoes the prevailing management style. Since managers tend to hire people just like themselves, the established organizational culture is reinforced by new hires.
Organizational culture grows over time. People are comfortable with the current organizational culture. For people to consider culture change, usually a significant event must occur. An event that rocks their world such as flirting with bankruptcy, a significant loss of sales and customers, or losing a million dollars, might get people's attention.
Read the entire article: http://humanresources.about.com/od/organizationalculture/a/culture_change.htm?nl=1
NYT-The Good and Bad of Workplace Jargon
NEW YORK (AP) -- At the end of the day, it's important to achieve a win-win solution. Be sure to think outside the box to demonstrate thought leadership. And harness key learnings to change the game on that mission-critical project.
Confused? You have company. Many workers say they're fed up with business jargon and corporate buzzwords.
Every industry has its own lingo. In technology, employees use ''bandwidth'' in conversations that have nothing to do with the Internet, saying things like, ''I don't have the bandwidth to deal with this situation.''
Read the article at: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/11/business/AP-US-Your-Career-Workplace-Jargon.html?_r=3
Confused? You have company. Many workers say they're fed up with business jargon and corporate buzzwords.
Every industry has its own lingo. In technology, employees use ''bandwidth'' in conversations that have nothing to do with the Internet, saying things like, ''I don't have the bandwidth to deal with this situation.''
Read the article at: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/11/business/AP-US-Your-Career-Workplace-Jargon.html?_r=3
Thursday, January 14, 2010
The Conan/Leno Debacle? A Giant Lesson in What-Not-to-Do with Talent.
From Fistful of Talent
I've always been a Letterman fan although these days, I default to Charlie Rose and Tavis Smiley for my late night fix. (Yes, I'm that boring.) But, because I'm a news junkie, the fiasco playing out at NBC with Conan and Leno has been unavoidable.
Personally, I'm always fascinated when it comes to talent plays in the sports and entertainment world. If I could have my hand in recruiting/casting and hiring talent for a movie, or a TV show, or MLB team... that might be a dream job. So, to get a glimpse into the kinds of issues that might come up via the Conan/Leno debacle? Well, as you can imagine, I'm salivating. And there are a ton of lessons to be learned. But I'll make it simple for you. File this ENTIRE situation in your "what not to do" folder.
Read the entire article: http://www.fistfuloftalent.com/2010/01/nbc-you-stink.html
I've always been a Letterman fan although these days, I default to Charlie Rose and Tavis Smiley for my late night fix. (Yes, I'm that boring.) But, because I'm a news junkie, the fiasco playing out at NBC with Conan and Leno has been unavoidable.
Personally, I'm always fascinated when it comes to talent plays in the sports and entertainment world. If I could have my hand in recruiting/casting and hiring talent for a movie, or a TV show, or MLB team... that might be a dream job. So, to get a glimpse into the kinds of issues that might come up via the Conan/Leno debacle? Well, as you can imagine, I'm salivating. And there are a ton of lessons to be learned. But I'll make it simple for you. File this ENTIRE situation in your "what not to do" folder.
Read the entire article: http://www.fistfuloftalent.com/2010/01/nbc-you-stink.html
Inc. Magazine-There is No Substitute for Great Service
Small businesses should keep good, old-fashioned customer service in mind when implementing new technology.
By Lauren Folino Nov 3, 2009
Small businesses struggling to keep customers and entice new ones can test out new call center technology or sign up for social media sites or even implement customer relationship management (CRM) software, but there's no substitution for treating customers well. Experts suggest that small business owners keep this in mind when looking at new technologies.
According to customer service expert Kristina Evey, president of the Grand Rapids, Michigan-based customer service management company Centric Strategies, people don't buy products or services – they buy relationships.
Read the entire article: http://www.inc.com/news/articles/2009/11/customer-service.html
By Lauren Folino Nov 3, 2009
Small businesses struggling to keep customers and entice new ones can test out new call center technology or sign up for social media sites or even implement customer relationship management (CRM) software, but there's no substitution for treating customers well. Experts suggest that small business owners keep this in mind when looking at new technologies.
According to customer service expert Kristina Evey, president of the Grand Rapids, Michigan-based customer service management company Centric Strategies, people don't buy products or services – they buy relationships.
Read the entire article: http://www.inc.com/news/articles/2009/11/customer-service.html
Ten Predictions for Learning and Training from TrainingIndustry.com
By Doug Harward, CEO, Training Industry, Inc.
2009 was as challenging a year for the training industry as we’ve had in the past twenty. The good news is that it’s over. Now it’s time to get up, dust ourselves off, and begin the task of making 2010 the best that it can be.
As in previous years, the staff here at TrainingIndustry.com looked into our crystal ball to provide our annual predictions on how we see the training marketplace changing and performing in the upcoming year. Our intent is to provide a sense of visibility that helps you in strategic planning and decision-making on managing, developing and delivering training. We form these predictions based on our research, our industry knowledge and our ongoing communications with the buyers and suppliers of strategic training services. We believe our combined experiences give us insights into how corporate executives, training management and learning and technology suppliers are driving the market.
Read the entire article at: http://www.trainingindustry.com/articles/10-predictions-for-2010.aspx
2009 was as challenging a year for the training industry as we’ve had in the past twenty. The good news is that it’s over. Now it’s time to get up, dust ourselves off, and begin the task of making 2010 the best that it can be.
As in previous years, the staff here at TrainingIndustry.com looked into our crystal ball to provide our annual predictions on how we see the training marketplace changing and performing in the upcoming year. Our intent is to provide a sense of visibility that helps you in strategic planning and decision-making on managing, developing and delivering training. We form these predictions based on our research, our industry knowledge and our ongoing communications with the buyers and suppliers of strategic training services. We believe our combined experiences give us insights into how corporate executives, training management and learning and technology suppliers are driving the market.
Read the entire article at: http://www.trainingindustry.com/articles/10-predictions-for-2010.aspx
Friday, January 8, 2010
Monday Mentor-Refresher 2-Self Management, Owning Your Behaviors, Blindspots and Obstacles to Personal Change
The most difficult person that you will manage in your leadership career is you.
That is a very hard statement to get your hands around and grasp but managing yourself is a very challenging task. Without good self-management, the delicate balance between leader and follower is jeopardized. You can loose credibility. You can damage relationships. You can completely become irrelevant.
Background on Self Management
First, a little background on self management. Self management is half of the science of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence tells us that eighty percent of our reactions, responses and projections are driven by emotion and not by logic or processed thought.
Many leaders struggle with this concept because they fancy themselves as creatures of pure, unemotional logic. This is nothing but a fallacy designed as a cover for the true nature of decisions and responses.
Emotional intelligence is split in two distinct and different pieces. The second piece is external and relational management and the first piece is self management. Working with the skills associated with both of these pieces, a complete emotionally intelligent leader is produced.
Another point of emotional intelligence and self management relate to age and experience. There is absolutely no correlation between calendar age and emotional intelligence. Some twelve year olds can have outstanding self management and emotional intelligence while some fifty year olds can have very poor emotional intelligence.
A final bit of background information about emotional intelligence is that organizations of all types and sizes have found that good self management is a great predictor of workplace success. Much more so that experience, formal education or technical skills, team members and leaders with good emotional intelligence and self management are much more likely to be successful than those with poor or lacking skills in this area.
What this has caused is that more and more companies are testing, screening and interviewing for emotional intelligence and self management. Your next career move may become dependent on how well you can manage yourself.
Complete Understanding is the First Step
The first, and perhaps hardest part of self management begins with full understanding of the subject matter. That would be you.
You will never completely understand yourself and about the time you think you have a handle on all of your behaviors and personality traits, new iterations of you and your style will emerge. Understanding yourself is not a singular event but a necessary leadership process that needs to be frequently addressed and consistently administered.
There are three sources of information for self understanding. The first is the most overused and most unreliable source related to effective leadership. Far too many leaders rely solely on their own discovery and feelings to try to understand themselves. Unfortunately, this source is full of pitfalls and lies. Often, self talk and intuitive feedback is more about who we would like to be rather than who we really are. Internally produced feedback is a part of understanding yourself but it is a highly unreliable source.
Another reason that self feedback is not a good sole source of understanding is that many leaders have a tendency to be either very hypercritical of themselves or self aggrandizing. The hypercritical feedbacks leads to many negative thoughts that are very counterproductive in self management. The puffing that comes from believing you are more and better than you really are can lead to alienation and loss of followers. Self feedback needs to be balanced with information from other and more objective sources.
Assessments and Profile Tools
One of the best sources of leadership self-understanding comes from psychometric personality tests. Great examples include the DiSC profile and the Myers-Briggs assessments. A psychometric instrument or test is a fully validated and predictive tool that can be used in a variety of settings including coaching, counseling, team building and leadership development. Test like color coding, what Star Wars Character I Am and handwriting analysis might be fun but they are not valid or predictive of your behavior and attitude traits.
One of the great dynamics witnessed in the past twenty years of coaching leaders relates to the use of personality tests. Almost without exception, people will find a piece of language in one of the DiSC profiles and just fall in love with it. Things like “works well under pressure”, “considers the feelings of others”, “builds relationships and teams effectively” or “takes charge and accepts challenges.” They will just ooze with pride when reading and reviewing results like those.
Without missing as much as a breath, the same people will read language such as “can become manipulative and quarrelsome”, “easily distracted by interruptions”, “overly concerned with details” or “appears artificial or disingenuous” and react with contempt for the validity of the survey, assessment or test.
The difficult bottom line about psychometric instruments for feedback is that you cannot embrace the good comments and trends without owning and being accountable for the other behaviors and traits in which you don’t like or don’t agree. We always encourage leaders to note all the statements in these instruments in which they disagree and then ask someone else to review the statements and provide honest feedback. The results: almost unanimously, other people reviewing the results fully validate the accuracy of what is said. Like it or not, it is you and your behavior.
Many times, the information from psychometric assessments and tests in which the leader does not agree represent behavioral blind spots. Blind spots are those pieces of behavior, or in the case of leadership, stylistic elements that the person does not recognize but all other people see with perfect clarity.
If unmanaged, blind spots can be very damaging to a leader. The blind spots can alienate followers, harm and strain relationships and create poor image elements that can damage a career. Blind spots can also be a very limiting factor in the growth and ongoing development of leaders.
If Three People Call You an Ass, You Should Buy a Bridle
The third and final source of information related to understanding yourself comes from the feedback of others. This can be in two subsets, formal and informal. Formal feedback from other people includes performance reviews and 360 degree evaluations. Performance reviews are usually not a very good source of self understanding and awareness because they are done infrequently and they are generally not done well.
The formal process of gathering leadership, performance and behavioral information from others is commonly referred to as a 360 degree assessment. It obtains feedback from those you lead, your boss and others, including vendors and customers, in which you exercise influence. The best versions of these instruments contain both quantified and numeric ratings about key leadership indicators but also include a section for anonymous comments. The most helpful information is often found in the comment section under headings that include behaviors to stop, behaviors to begin, things the person does well and things the person could do better.
The one intellectual honesty risk with 360 degree feedback comes from selecting the audience to comment and evaluate. Two errors occur frequently in choosing either people that you know will be very supportive and positive or choosing people that will be very critical. Both populations do not provide an accurate picture of you or your style. Evaluators and comment providers must be a cross section of those who love you and those who do not.
Informal methods of gaining feedback include the highly complex transaction of (gasp) asking people how you are doing. One of the best leadership sources of this information come from those being led. Simply asking how you are doing as a leader, what you could do better and what is working well is a great source of feedback to understand yourself and uncover some important blind spots.
Another great source of the same type of information comes from peers or near peers. Since they have no real vested interest in how you lead, their degree of honesty would be pretty high. This works especially well if you can create a peer mentoring type of relationship where the feedback is shared between both of you.
As with all types of self understanding feedback, this also contains a warning tale or two. The first time out of the gate, many people will not provide you with direct and fully honest information. In fact, your subordinates and peers may sugar coat things or deny that there is anything in you that needs to be changed. They may even openly think you are up to no good in this questioning. It is only through a consistent approach in which you have demonstrated no repercussions that team members will provide you with complete honesty and feedback that you need. You must ask several times across multiple months and show that no one is going to get hurt to get the self management information you want.
The final cautionary tale about direct feedback is the desire that many people have to dismiss the source. In informal feedback, if you hear something you don’t like from someone you don’t like, it is easy to discredit the information. You might say things like “you know Bob, nothing ever pleases him” or “Mary has not had a good thing to say about a boss in ten years.” Unfortunately, even when the source is not valued, some of the feedback is important. Even when wrapped in exaggeration or dislike, important information about you might lay below the surface and underneath some emotion. Focus on the message and not the messenger.
The three ingredients of understanding yourself are what you already know and believe, feedback from personality assessments and profiles and the feedback from others. Armed with this information you are now ready to begin the final step of self awareness and understanding.
Owning Your Behaviors
Like it. Love it. Hate it.
It is you.
The final piece of self understanding and awareness is to begin to reconcile all of the feedback you receive and owning who you are. The good and the not so good. The parts you like and the parts you don’t like. The effective leader owns all of those pieces of who they are.
From this point, most effective leaders will construct a plan to deal with the areas in which need improvement or need to be corrected. This is a longer term approach in which your behaviors and style are modified through consistent application of better skills and competencies that take the place of the old behaviors. This type of change and progression takes time, persistence and dedication.
Difficult? Absolutely. An absolutely necessary to your success as a leader.
A Little Note About Personal Change and Growth
The biggest obstacle that most leaders face in their own growth and development is success.
That is a tough concept.
When things are going well. You get good raises. Your performance reviews are solid. Results are good. Everything is peachy. What is your motivation to change, improve and grow?
Success often creates an artificial sense and aura of need to continue to grow, develop and change. Success can be a fog that blurs reality. Success can blind leaders into believing they are doing everything well and nothing needs to be tuned.
The most changeable and development desiring leaders are those who are coming off of a failure event and not a success event. Those feeling and experience failure embrace growth while those experiencing success often rebuff it.
Let the impetus for your leadership growth and development be success and not failure.
That is a very hard statement to get your hands around and grasp but managing yourself is a very challenging task. Without good self-management, the delicate balance between leader and follower is jeopardized. You can loose credibility. You can damage relationships. You can completely become irrelevant.
Background on Self Management
First, a little background on self management. Self management is half of the science of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence tells us that eighty percent of our reactions, responses and projections are driven by emotion and not by logic or processed thought.
Many leaders struggle with this concept because they fancy themselves as creatures of pure, unemotional logic. This is nothing but a fallacy designed as a cover for the true nature of decisions and responses.
Emotional intelligence is split in two distinct and different pieces. The second piece is external and relational management and the first piece is self management. Working with the skills associated with both of these pieces, a complete emotionally intelligent leader is produced.
Another point of emotional intelligence and self management relate to age and experience. There is absolutely no correlation between calendar age and emotional intelligence. Some twelve year olds can have outstanding self management and emotional intelligence while some fifty year olds can have very poor emotional intelligence.
A final bit of background information about emotional intelligence is that organizations of all types and sizes have found that good self management is a great predictor of workplace success. Much more so that experience, formal education or technical skills, team members and leaders with good emotional intelligence and self management are much more likely to be successful than those with poor or lacking skills in this area.
What this has caused is that more and more companies are testing, screening and interviewing for emotional intelligence and self management. Your next career move may become dependent on how well you can manage yourself.
Complete Understanding is the First Step
The first, and perhaps hardest part of self management begins with full understanding of the subject matter. That would be you.
You will never completely understand yourself and about the time you think you have a handle on all of your behaviors and personality traits, new iterations of you and your style will emerge. Understanding yourself is not a singular event but a necessary leadership process that needs to be frequently addressed and consistently administered.
There are three sources of information for self understanding. The first is the most overused and most unreliable source related to effective leadership. Far too many leaders rely solely on their own discovery and feelings to try to understand themselves. Unfortunately, this source is full of pitfalls and lies. Often, self talk and intuitive feedback is more about who we would like to be rather than who we really are. Internally produced feedback is a part of understanding yourself but it is a highly unreliable source.
Another reason that self feedback is not a good sole source of understanding is that many leaders have a tendency to be either very hypercritical of themselves or self aggrandizing. The hypercritical feedbacks leads to many negative thoughts that are very counterproductive in self management. The puffing that comes from believing you are more and better than you really are can lead to alienation and loss of followers. Self feedback needs to be balanced with information from other and more objective sources.
Assessments and Profile Tools
One of the best sources of leadership self-understanding comes from psychometric personality tests. Great examples include the DiSC profile and the Myers-Briggs assessments. A psychometric instrument or test is a fully validated and predictive tool that can be used in a variety of settings including coaching, counseling, team building and leadership development. Test like color coding, what Star Wars Character I Am and handwriting analysis might be fun but they are not valid or predictive of your behavior and attitude traits.
One of the great dynamics witnessed in the past twenty years of coaching leaders relates to the use of personality tests. Almost without exception, people will find a piece of language in one of the DiSC profiles and just fall in love with it. Things like “works well under pressure”, “considers the feelings of others”, “builds relationships and teams effectively” or “takes charge and accepts challenges.” They will just ooze with pride when reading and reviewing results like those.
Without missing as much as a breath, the same people will read language such as “can become manipulative and quarrelsome”, “easily distracted by interruptions”, “overly concerned with details” or “appears artificial or disingenuous” and react with contempt for the validity of the survey, assessment or test.
The difficult bottom line about psychometric instruments for feedback is that you cannot embrace the good comments and trends without owning and being accountable for the other behaviors and traits in which you don’t like or don’t agree. We always encourage leaders to note all the statements in these instruments in which they disagree and then ask someone else to review the statements and provide honest feedback. The results: almost unanimously, other people reviewing the results fully validate the accuracy of what is said. Like it or not, it is you and your behavior.
Many times, the information from psychometric assessments and tests in which the leader does not agree represent behavioral blind spots. Blind spots are those pieces of behavior, or in the case of leadership, stylistic elements that the person does not recognize but all other people see with perfect clarity.
If unmanaged, blind spots can be very damaging to a leader. The blind spots can alienate followers, harm and strain relationships and create poor image elements that can damage a career. Blind spots can also be a very limiting factor in the growth and ongoing development of leaders.
If Three People Call You an Ass, You Should Buy a Bridle
The third and final source of information related to understanding yourself comes from the feedback of others. This can be in two subsets, formal and informal. Formal feedback from other people includes performance reviews and 360 degree evaluations. Performance reviews are usually not a very good source of self understanding and awareness because they are done infrequently and they are generally not done well.
The formal process of gathering leadership, performance and behavioral information from others is commonly referred to as a 360 degree assessment. It obtains feedback from those you lead, your boss and others, including vendors and customers, in which you exercise influence. The best versions of these instruments contain both quantified and numeric ratings about key leadership indicators but also include a section for anonymous comments. The most helpful information is often found in the comment section under headings that include behaviors to stop, behaviors to begin, things the person does well and things the person could do better.
The one intellectual honesty risk with 360 degree feedback comes from selecting the audience to comment and evaluate. Two errors occur frequently in choosing either people that you know will be very supportive and positive or choosing people that will be very critical. Both populations do not provide an accurate picture of you or your style. Evaluators and comment providers must be a cross section of those who love you and those who do not.
Informal methods of gaining feedback include the highly complex transaction of (gasp) asking people how you are doing. One of the best leadership sources of this information come from those being led. Simply asking how you are doing as a leader, what you could do better and what is working well is a great source of feedback to understand yourself and uncover some important blind spots.
Another great source of the same type of information comes from peers or near peers. Since they have no real vested interest in how you lead, their degree of honesty would be pretty high. This works especially well if you can create a peer mentoring type of relationship where the feedback is shared between both of you.
As with all types of self understanding feedback, this also contains a warning tale or two. The first time out of the gate, many people will not provide you with direct and fully honest information. In fact, your subordinates and peers may sugar coat things or deny that there is anything in you that needs to be changed. They may even openly think you are up to no good in this questioning. It is only through a consistent approach in which you have demonstrated no repercussions that team members will provide you with complete honesty and feedback that you need. You must ask several times across multiple months and show that no one is going to get hurt to get the self management information you want.
The final cautionary tale about direct feedback is the desire that many people have to dismiss the source. In informal feedback, if you hear something you don’t like from someone you don’t like, it is easy to discredit the information. You might say things like “you know Bob, nothing ever pleases him” or “Mary has not had a good thing to say about a boss in ten years.” Unfortunately, even when the source is not valued, some of the feedback is important. Even when wrapped in exaggeration or dislike, important information about you might lay below the surface and underneath some emotion. Focus on the message and not the messenger.
The three ingredients of understanding yourself are what you already know and believe, feedback from personality assessments and profiles and the feedback from others. Armed with this information you are now ready to begin the final step of self awareness and understanding.
Owning Your Behaviors
Like it. Love it. Hate it.
It is you.
The final piece of self understanding and awareness is to begin to reconcile all of the feedback you receive and owning who you are. The good and the not so good. The parts you like and the parts you don’t like. The effective leader owns all of those pieces of who they are.
From this point, most effective leaders will construct a plan to deal with the areas in which need improvement or need to be corrected. This is a longer term approach in which your behaviors and style are modified through consistent application of better skills and competencies that take the place of the old behaviors. This type of change and progression takes time, persistence and dedication.
Difficult? Absolutely. An absolutely necessary to your success as a leader.
A Little Note About Personal Change and Growth
The biggest obstacle that most leaders face in their own growth and development is success.
That is a tough concept.
When things are going well. You get good raises. Your performance reviews are solid. Results are good. Everything is peachy. What is your motivation to change, improve and grow?
Success often creates an artificial sense and aura of need to continue to grow, develop and change. Success can be a fog that blurs reality. Success can blind leaders into believing they are doing everything well and nothing needs to be tuned.
The most changeable and development desiring leaders are those who are coming off of a failure event and not a success event. Those feeling and experience failure embrace growth while those experiencing success often rebuff it.
Let the impetus for your leadership growth and development be success and not failure.
From ASTD: The State of E-Learning
Click on the image for a full view of the graphic.
Read the article and narrative here:
http://www.astd.org/TD/Archives/2010/Jan/Free/1001_eLearning_Whats_Old.htm
http://www.astd.org/TD/Archives/2010/Jan/Free/1001_eLearning_Whats_Old.htm
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
From CLO: The Power of Paradox
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” In contrast to Fitzgerald, the polemical nature of today’s domestic and international political and social diatribe offers a cautionary tale for those of us who are leading the cultivation of intelligence in the corporate arena. It is painful to watch people suffer while their leaders defend self-interested, partisan positions. These leaders seem to have the inability or unwillingness to see beyond their position to a greater good.
More than a decade ago, Jerry Porras and Jim Collins cited research from which they concluded that leaders who last and make a lasting difference have the exceptional ability to deal with paradoxes and seeming contradictions rather than yielding to the “tyranny of the ‘or.’” This is the tyranny that pushes people to believe that things must be either A or B, but not both. They were speaking of conflict between notions such as the following:
You can have change or stability, but not both.
You can be conservative or bold.
You can have low cost or high quality.
You can have creative autonomy or consistency.
You can invest for the future or do well in the short term.
You can make progress by methodical planning or by opportunistic groping.
You can be idealistic (values-driven) or pragmatic (profit-driven).
Read the entire article: http://www.clomedia.com/columnists/2010/January/2841/index.php
More than a decade ago, Jerry Porras and Jim Collins cited research from which they concluded that leaders who last and make a lasting difference have the exceptional ability to deal with paradoxes and seeming contradictions rather than yielding to the “tyranny of the ‘or.’” This is the tyranny that pushes people to believe that things must be either A or B, but not both. They were speaking of conflict between notions such as the following:
You can have change or stability, but not both.
You can be conservative or bold.
You can have low cost or high quality.
You can have creative autonomy or consistency.
You can invest for the future or do well in the short term.
You can make progress by methodical planning or by opportunistic groping.
You can be idealistic (values-driven) or pragmatic (profit-driven).
Read the entire article: http://www.clomedia.com/columnists/2010/January/2841/index.php
Monday, January 4, 2010
Monday Mentor-Refresher 1-Communication Style
People communicate in dramatically different methods and styles. Almost as if there are sub-languages within each major language.
Image for a moment that, as the leader, someone in Berlin must perform a series of tasks to complete an objective. You speak in your native tongue of English. The Berliner smiles and nods their head approvingly. Communication complete and successful, right?
Just as different languages will lead to communication disconnects, different communication styles will often cause a lack of information flow and impede any real communication. Five or more years ago, the leader would often proclaim that “I am who I am” and it is your job to adapt. Sometimes it was followed by the gentle reminder “or leave.” More recently, successful leadership communication has become a more chameleon-like and adaptive approach.
The most commonly identified communication styles include direct, relational, low-key and detailed. The direct style often communicates in a very blunt, matter-of-fact or bullet point method. There is not a lot of language wasted on pleasantries and not a lot of background or supporting data is provided. Many times an assertive tone, implied urgency and rapid pacing comes along with the direct style.
By contrast, the relational communicator is often more wordy and those words are designed to build rapport. Usually, an upbeat demeanor and an eagerness to contact people are included in this style, as is an animation in non-verbal messages. These people are often labeled as chatty and optimistic.
The two additional styles of communication are a little harder to peg and pigeon hole. The low-key style is seen as reserved and speaks with a flat demeanor. They prefer a very soft, methodically paced and predictable approach to interpersonal communication. The detailed communicator is one that is data driven and often prefers a low-key tone. One unique trait of the detailed communicator is they will tend to answer the why question first and provide multiple sides of a point prior to communicating the resolution.
Now imagine for a moment all of these style thrown into a working environment and told to perform. Just as foreign languages cause disconnects, non-modified communication styles will do the same. A relational style leader attempts to communicate with a key team member who prefers a direct style. A low-key team member tries to interact with a direct style boss and soon loses her in minutiae.
The effective leader will bridge this disconnect with adaptive communication styles. He or she will read the style of the receiver very quickly and adapt appropriately. Quite simply, that means to know your communication style and learn how to read the style of others and adapt your style to that of the communication receiver. When that is done, messages will be transmitted with greater clarity and less misunderstanding. Subconsciously, team members recognize and appreciate the leader’s attempt at adaptation and better connection.
With people that you know, assessing their communication style is relatively easy. You have observed them. You have communicated with them previously. You have seen what style of communication works and does not work with them. What about new contacts and those people who are not as well known?
One technique that works with a high degree of accuracy is to assess the response to the “how are you?” question. Direct style communicators will respond quickly with one word and one word only. Relational communicators will provide between three and five words and many times, inquire about you. Low-key and high detail communicators will often express a brief pause while they assess the reason for your inquiry and the need to respond in an accurate manner.
The final word on communication style is back to the reason why adaptation is important. If, as a leader, your communication style disconnects with some people and the messages that you send are not followed, you lose. If you adapt your style and more people engage to the messages you send, you win.
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