Effective Communication

It's not the kind of sandwich that will hopefully quieten your rumbling stomach during your midday break, but it does have something in common with the contents of your lunch box: it's meant to be appetizing, figuratively speaking, and easy to digest.

Like it or not (and usually not!) there's something almost everybody in the workplace has to brace themselves to receive now and again: those penetrating critiques - occasional or regular, spontaneous or preplanned, on overall performance or relating to a specific assignment - commonly known by that very overworked and misused term: "feedback."

And nowadays, apparently, many managers and supervisors are already familiar with a new species of this animal, designed to take the sting out of the critical comments and thus make the whole process more pleasant for both giver and receiver. The "feedback sandwich" consists of criticism "sandwiched" between two positive comments, as follows:

• Make specific positive comment (what the person evaluating liked).
  
• Critique and/or suggestion for improvement. (what the evaluating person didn't like).
  
• Overall positive, encouraging comment.

Sounds good. However, there's a problem.

As communication consultant Shelle Rose Charvet remind us, employees, or other feedback recipients, aren't stupid. Just one word of praise from the boss and they already already know what's coming. The "sandwich" style has become so so familiar that as soon as someone gives them a compliment they brace themselves to hear the criticism that inevitably comes next and are therefore in no frame of mind to take in the compliment.

"What, I did a good job? Great! OK, so don't beat about the bush, get over with it now.....what's the big but?"

In other words, the moment you hear praise, you know you've done something wrong somewhere along the line.

Charvet points out that management theory has recognized for quite some time that creating and maintaining a positive emotional state is key to performance. Habitual criticism, whether of the sandwich variety or not, will induce emotional states that are anything but positive.

The eventual outcome is that the recipient develops Incompetency Attacks - a term invented by Charvet's friend, Gillian Keefe. These are extremely negative emotional state wherein one believes one is utterly incompetent. But it's all in the mind. These states have no bearing on one's real level of competence.

After some experimentation in her own training programs, Charvet found this reconstituted version of sandwich feedback to work very well:

• Make a suggestion.
• Give 2 reasons why we think it is a good idea: one reason would state what the suggestion would accomplish
  
• and one reason would state what problem the suggestion would prevent or solve.
• Make an overall positive comment about the person, his/her abilities, etc.

The big difference in this formula is that there's no criticism at all, whether direct or implied. Yet it proved highly effective in inducing the subject to change whatever the initiator of the comments wanted to be changed.

Of course, like all good things, it takes practice. But surely, it deserves the close attention of all involved in working with people.

Labels: business communication, the workplace

Stumble It!

The growth of e-mail, Instant Messaging, SMS, web conferencing and the like - together with the decline in face-to-face meetings and phone calls - has broken all the accepted rules of business etiquette.

This is the view of Microsoft's unified communications manager Mark Deakin, as reported in The Times recently.

Yes, he says, for sure we're becoming savvier every day in terms of applying IT, but our appreciation of the subtleties of each technology stills lags behind. And confusion over which method is appropriate for each business task is widespread.

By way of citing just one or two examples of many unanticipated but common pitfalls, Deakin points out that humor and sarcasm can very easily be misconstrued in e-mails. So can potentially ambiguous abbreviations. (What do the letters LOL stand for? "Laughing Out Loud", or "Lots of Love"?)

Penny Edge, managing director of the Finishing Academy, which teamed up with Microsoft to produce a list of the Top Ten do's and don'ts of electronic messaging , warns us that the cardinal rules of remote communication - to be brief and be businesslike - are being consistently flouted.

Here are the Top Ten Tips that Microsoft together with the etiquette experts at Finishing Academy produced:

1: Respect other people’s chosen form of communication.

2: Use IM for short requests and immediate responses.

3: Use e-mail sparingly and don’t expect an instant response.

4: Use the telephone for building rapport or discussing delicate matters.

5: Use IM and e-mail settings to show whether you are available or not.

6: Humour, sarcasm and flirting may not be appropriate at work.

7: Be careful when using “emoticons” in a business context.

8: Don’t say anything in an e-mail that you wouldn’t say to someone’s face.

9: Don’t read e-mails or send an SMS if you are with other people. Turn phone to silent mode.

10: Keep records of all-important decisions reached over the phone or IM and print out vital e-mails.

Finally, "if we are to avoid becoming robots," adds Deakin very pointedly, "good old-fashioned phone use needs to be encouraged so that we can continue to sharpen up our verbal communication skills."

Labels: business communication, the workplace

Stumble It!

Thank you to training consultant Dan Bobinski, whose ongoing stream of penetrating, down-to-the bone observations and insights on corporate and work life have long earned my respect (See Dan's top-class blog), for the following intriguing parable:

An adult, the story goes, was walking with two small children in a nature park. Before they knew it, their path was next to a steep cliff. “Stay close to me and away from the edge or you may fall,” said the adult.

One child stayed very close to the adult – but along the steepest part of the hill, the other child strayed too close to the edge and fell over.

By chance, the poor kid who hadn't been been taking instructions too seriously managed to grab hold of a frail bush that was about to give way. The adult looked back and two options came to mind:

1. Say, “I told you so!” and then keep walking, or
2. Reach down and help the child up.


Now, this story isn’t real. Obviously. But it illustrates an important concept, says Dan.

When co-workers make mistakes, do you berate and ridicule them, or do you help them up?

If the former, shame on you. And the more fool you are.

You, or your organization, is the biggest loser in the long run.

Labels: business communication, the workplace

Stumble It!

I don't know whether her motive was to pass on some useful advice for mature living or merely to help us remember the spelling of a common word, but a schoolteacher of mine often used to admonish us: "Don't assume! It makes an ass out of you and an ass out of me."

At any rate, it's certainly true that failing to verify what appears to be obvious could mean a lot of hard work and initiative simply going down the drain. Sometimes, it can be the direct cause of your face going redder than a beetroot. And sadder still, the end result of your blunder could be soured interpersonal relationships.

Our contributor Lora Adrianse tells the sad story of Amy, a concierge at a leading hotel who was asked by a guest to buy for him 10 tickets to a local concert he badly wanted to attend. There was one small problem: the concert was already sold out, but Amy, who had a reputation for "pulling rabbits out of hats" assured the guest she would spare no effort to obtain the coveted tickets. And against all odds, she succeeded.

But then the picnic started. For some reason, she was unable to reach the guest to tell him she had the tickets, and she was about to go off duty. So she turned the task over to the usually reliable desk manager - assuming the matter was now in good hands. The desk manager was also unable to reach the guest, but wasn't unduly concerned because he assumed the guest would stop by and enquire about the tickets. The guest, in turn, assumed Amy had been unsuccessful and made other arrangements for the evening.

So here we have three people making unwarranted assumptions, and the damage to Amy's reputation aside, the worst thing, from the human perspective, was that relations between Amy and the desk manger were extremely strained from that point on.

On the Net recently I came across another little story that shows more directly how mistaken (even if very understandable) assumptions can negatively impact a relationship.

Maxine was telling Tom about a problem she had at work. She was halfway through the story when Tom interrupted, saying: "What you should do, Maxine, is talk with your supervisor and turn the whole matter over to her. She's the one who should be dealing with this problem."

Did Maxine thank Tom for his timely counsel? Far from it, she walked away in anger, leaving behind a very puzzled Tom.

The author of this piece, Illene L. Dillon, cites gender communication expert Deborah Tannen as explaining that our two protagonists acted characteristically, reflecting differences in the way men and women communicate. Women offer "troubles talk", sharing their difficulties as a way of building relationships; men are "problem solvers", offering immediate solutions so the problem can be solved and left behind.

But Dillon correctly adds that this explanation, though a good one, doesn't go far enough. The bottom line, she writes, is that there is a clearly defined "relationship violation" here that triggered Maxine's angry reaction. What was it?

It's only natural that decent people should like to help others, all the more so those whom they love and respect. Often, they feel very frustrated if their help is spurned. What they forget is a simple principle: "Help that isn't asked for never works."

Giving Maxine help she did not ask for created anger and disappointment, not receptivity. This doesn't mean that we should abandon our efforts to help. Rather, instead of relying on assumptions, however logical they may be in our own eyes, we should enquire whether our help is wanted.

Of course, Maxine, for her part, was guilty of an equally serious relationship error. Most people don't know what goes on in another's head, despite the apparently common assumption that love is proved through mindreading! Maxine should tell Tom: "I want you to listen to a story from work- and I really mean listen, without telling me how I should be handling the situation? Will you do that please?"

And by tagging on that little question at the end, she will be avoiding perpetuating a third common relationship error based on a possibly mistaken assumption - the assumption that the other party will comply with a request merely because he or she was asked.

Labels: interpersonal relationships, the workplace

Stumble It!

Labels: business ethics, the workplace

Stumble It!

If there's one aspect of interpersonal relations that's absolutely essential in the workplace, it's trust. Without it, the wheels of business would turn very slowly, if they turn at all.

This is true whether it's a customer trusting that a company will fill and order and deliver it on time, an employee trusting that her boss will reward her for working long hours to meet a deadline, or one colleague trusting that another will do his share of an assigned project. And of course, the same applies in all other areas of life. No one operates in isolation.

"Trust is the social glue that holds things together. It allows us to engage in social and commercial ventures, " points out Professor Maurice Schweitzer, one of three professors at Wharton University who recently ran a unique laboratory experiment, as described in a soon to be published paper called Promises and Lies: Restoring Violated Trust. This experiment was devised to examine what happens when trust breaks down.

"Willingness to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations about another's behavior,"
was the working definition of trust accepted by the Wharton researchers. They started out on the assumption that "trust is like glass" - that is, "fragile, easily broken and hard to repair." But they soon found out that this isn't always the case. Sometimes it is true, sometimes it isn't. It depends.

So what makes the difference?

Prof. Schweitzer explains this with a simple example. Let's say a friend persuades you to lend him a DVD to watch that you, in turn, had borrowed from a rental company. You agree on condition that he mail it back to the company within a week. Then you find out that this friend of yours forgot to return it to the company.

Would you trust him with another movie at some point in the future? You might, especially if your friend showed a modicum of contrition over his unfortunate oversight. All the more so, if he gave you a firm promise that he would never be so negligent again.

Now imagine the same scenario, but with one crucial difference. This time your friend tells you he sent back the DVD. A little while later, you pay him a visit and you happen to notice that very DVD on top on his TV. Would you lend your friend a movie again?

And let's say he apologizes profusely and promises to follow through next time, would your attitude be any different? Probably not.

The results of the Wharton experiment, which involved a carefully and very cleverly designed money game, bore out in striking manner the difference between these two cases - the second case, where the offending party lies about his or her failure to carry out an obligation (or what is perceived by the other side as an obligation) and the first scenario, where he or she does not.

"Trust harmed by untrustworthy behavior can be effectively restored when individuals observe a consistent series of trustworthy actions," wrote the Wharton academics in summarizing the findings of their experiment. Just as one swallow doesn't make a summer, one mistake doesn't necessarily ruin a reputation, certainly when the transgressor can consistently show that he or she has now turned over a new leaf.

On the other hand - so the experiment revealed - when a person's trust is not only violated, but that betrayal includes deception, that trust will be difficult to restore. If you didn't only forget to return your friend's DVD, but on top of everything, lied about it - it's going to be a different ball game.

And quite likely , it's not just that your friend finds it difficult in his heart to forgive you. The point is that there has been a more powerful, more intense, shattering of the trust he had invested in you. Once shattered to smithereens , it's all the more difficult to restore.

Let his be a powerful warning to us. When planning every step in our interpersonal relationships, we dare not lose sight of the close to inevitable consequences of our actions.

Labels: interpersonal relationships, the workplace

Stumble It!

Marketing expert Paul Myers, well known, among other things, for the dry wit with which he peppers his writing, made the following comment in a recent issue of his ezine:

CertifiedEmail is pretty much a fait accompli. (From the Greek, for "Done deal. Get over it.")

Actually, he knew very well that the term fait accompli is French, not Greek. His intention was a humorous one, although some of his readers, apparently, didn't quite get the joke. But that's really beside the point.

In his next issue, Paul wrote that this comment of his had elicited a large number of messages. The responses could be divided into two groups, and he presented one example of each category:

From Tom: "Since you're usually somewhat of a stickler for preciseness (a GOOD thing, in my opinion) -- fait accompli is from the French, not Greek. :-)"

From Pete: "Fiat accompli is a FRENCH phrase, Dude! As a Hellene, I do not appreciate our nationality misnamed as the Roman designation, "Greek", nor do we like to be credited with French phrases. Please correct your misquote."

Now, both these messages were essentially saying the same thing, right? Well, yes, but on the other hand, most decidedly no! Both Tom and Pete were writing to correct an apparent faux pas (something a recipient would normally appreciate), but what a world of difference in tone!

Apart from the crude condescension bordering on rudeness, Pete's missive is, as Paul puts it, "politely worded proof that almost anything will offend someone, somewhere." Which, I guess, writers and publishers should know better than anyone else!

A new article on our site deals with a topic that has certain aspects in common with the situation described above, even though it's not the same thing. Jamie Walters of Ivy Sea Online deals with a specific manifestation of a classic communication issue: The sender and receiver have drastically different perceptions of a message sent.

Have you ever found yourself, after speaking your mind on some topic or other to a friend or colleague, saying or thinking: "Well, I was just being honest"? Yet, you don't understand why the person you were talking to found your remarks offensive. On the contrary, you think, other people should appreciate that you are taking pains not to mislead them!

Similarly, you could be on the receiving end of what you perceive as a tongue-lashing from someone who was "just being honest", and you think: "Well, now, that was downright rude!"

Jamie gives several examples of raw statements - when you just say what's on your mind (even with the sincerest intentions) straight off the cuff, as it were, in a way that may be inviting trouble. For each of them, she proposes a well thought out, polished equivalent that will enable you to state your case just as forcefully, but which minimizes the likelihood that you'll be perceived negatively.

For instance, here's one set:

Raw: I don't work that way. I have high standards.

Polished: I have some concerns about doing it this way, particularly that our approach will seem rude to customers. I'd like to propose another option that leads to the same goals.

An article worth studying and taking to heart!

Happy communicating!

Labels: business communication, education, the workplace

Stumble It!

"One of the great causes of corporate dysfunction," says veteran executive coach Marshall Goldsmith," is the huge gap between "I say" and "they do."

Goldsmith explains what he means by way of citing a conversation he had with a client, a 54 year old "extremely action oriented and impatient" CEO of a major high-tech firm.

According to surveys that the CEO had ordered, his employees complained that they didn't understand the company's mission and overall direction. The hapless CEO was beside himself to explain this. He said he had clearly articulated the mission and direction at a team meeting, and then summarized it in a memo that was sent to everybody.

"See, here's the memo!" he wailed. "What more do they want?"

At first, Goldsmith thought his client was kidding, but when he realized that he was serious (as well as clueless with regard to this particular aspect of management), he began to ask some pointed questions:

"How was this memo distributed?"

"By email. It went to everyone."

"Okay. How many people actually read the memo?"

"I'm not sure."

Further questioning led to our CEO conceding that even among those who did read the email, not everyone necessarily understood it, and even among those who did understand it, some may have dismissed it out of hand as PR hype.

And of course, among those who did understand it and did take it seriously, not everyone may have remembered it!

Nor have we reached the bottom line. After all the above are eliminated, queried Goldsmith, "how may people do you think will change their behavior based upon the memo? How many will begin living and breathing the company's mission because of the memo?"

One swallow doesn't make a summer, and one memo, even one face-to-face meeting, doesn't necessarily make an effective communication. The solution: Follow-up. And more follow-up.

As Goldsmith aptly puts it: "Follow-up may take a little time, but it's less than the time wasted on miscommunication.

So how does your boss rate?

In honor of National Boss Day, which was commemorated in the United States a couple of weeks ago, BossMakeover.com compiled a list - obviously with tongue in cheek - of the top 10 ways a boss can tell if he or she needs a communications makeover:

1. No one ever asks a question in your meetings and you think it'’s because you did such a good job communicating.
2. You tell everyone you'’re a "“people person."”
3. After every staff meeting you end up having to explain your "diversity jokes" to the Human Resources Department.
4. You don'’t get why “"Dilbert"” is supposed be so funny.
5. You tell your kids “"people are our greatest asset."”
6. Your favorite sentence is “at the end of the day, we will optimize our passion for results with turnkey solutions in alignment with our strategic vision.”
7. You tell the same jokes and you think employees are laughing because you'’re funny.
8. You warn new employees: "“If you don'’t come in on Saturday, don'’t even think about coming in on Sunday."”
9. When you got the "“Corporate Buzzword Award"” at the Christmas Party, you thought it was a compliment.
10. As you manage by walking around, every person picks up the phone and appears to be talking business.

“"Ultimately, good management begins and ends with effective communication",” commented John Millen, president of MPA Executive Communications, parent company of BossMakeover.com.

And who can argue with that?

Labels: business communication, education, the workplace

Stumble It!

Monday morning blues, and Friday afternoon "highs"...Almost everyone who is cursed with the need to work for a living - yet blessed enough to do so only five days a week - is familiar with these two phenomena at the opposite ends of the spectrum.

This being so, one could almost take for granted that the two most common days for workers to take - or fake - leave of absence from their jobs on account of sickness would be Monday and Friday.

In fact, research has once again confirmed this to be the case. At least, the study was conducted in the United Kingdom, but it's probably safe to assume that the same applies in most other countries with a similar working week.

According to the researchers, 90% of British employers say that employees sneak extra days off work on either side of the weekend. Two thirds claimed that Monday was by far the worst day of the week for workers reporting sick, while almost a quarter said that Friday was the day they were affected most. Many of those who suddenly take ill at these times hardly ever absent themselves from work on other days of the week.

In general, workplace absence is said to have cost the British economy a whopping 12.2bn pounds sterling in 2004, and of that figure, some 1.7bn is estimated to be due to employees faking illness rather than to absence for genuine reasons.

All sorts of innovative plans have been devised in an attempt to stem the severe drain on the economy. One large company now requires all workers, to contact a trained nurse, in the employ of the company, on the first day they fall ill.

All this may help. But I believe another aspect of workplace dynamics may also have a significant bearing on this topic. Employers ignore it at their peril.

Indeed, another piece of research also conducted in Britain this year bears out my contention.

Not that the results were any great revelation, but the investigators concluded that workers take fewer days off sick if their company makes an effort to look after their home as well as their workplace life. Flexible working hours, being generous on compassionate leave and giving staff the option to work from home all help to cut down on absenteeism.

Interestingly, the surveyors felt that even though finding replacements for people absent from work is usually a bigger problem for smaller companies, precisely these organizations, because of their close-knit environment, are often better at dealing with this issue than their larger, less personal counterparts.

Of course, a small minority of workers will always take advantage of any leniency. But it's certainly no surprise that employers who realize their staff with respect and go out of their way to accommodate them on personal issues, will, in the end, get the most value from their workers.

Labels: the workplace

Stumble It!

Are you - in your own opinion, of course - the star of the office? Do you believe with perfect faith that you're the brightest and best you can get in the workplace - for efficiency, competence and devotion to duty?

If so, I have bad news for you. For your fellow workers and associates, on the other hand, "news" is hardly be the right word. It's nothing they didn't know all along, really. All the same, they'll be delighted to hear it.

Because now it's official - backed up by hard data.

According to University of Florida management professor Timothy Judge, whose research is scheduled for publication shortly in the Journal of Applied Psychology, conceited, vain and self-absorbed employees rarely live up to their high opinions of themselves.

In the view of their managers and colleagues, cocky individuals just don't deliver the goods.

In the research study, people who scored high on a psychological measure for narcissism were asked to rate their own leadership and job skills. Then their bosses and co-workers were asked to rate their performance. Apparently, ratings from colleagues averaged 20% lower than the self-scored reports.

"It's one thing to think you're better than other people when in fact you're no better; quite another to think you're better when you're actually worse," commented Prof. Judge.

As the professor warns, in extreme cases the lack of a realistic appraisal of oneself can have dangerous consequences. After all, people with grandiose views of their capabilities have been directly responsible for tragedies of major proportions in this world. History in every age is replete with examples, and modern times are certainly no exception.

On a more everyday level, narcissists , for all their outward displays of toughness, easily feel threatened and are inclined to react aggressively when their inflated view of themselves is challenged. Empathy and social skills are not usually the strongest points of vain and egotistical people.

But perhaps the saddest thing of all is the waste of human potential. As Prof. Judge puts it: "Not recognizing your own limitations in the workplace is going to keep you from developing from trying to develop skills that will help you improve and make your organization more effective."

What can we do to help these hapless people? Yes, specialists in the field are offering training programs in developing empathy for managers who may be technically competent but deficient in interpersonal skills.

But how can the foot soldiers of the workforce, the rank and file, contribute to the rehabilitation of that (hopefully) small minority - their high opinionated but underperforming colleagues, with whom they rub shoulders every day?

I'm not sure. What do you say?

Labels: the workplace

Stumble It!

The drawbacks, even dangers, of low self-esteem are well documented. Apart from, or as a result of, the emotional pain borne by individuals with a poor self-image, their ability to lead a productive and fulfilling life is seriously impaired.

On the other hand, I would hardly say that people you find at the opposite end of the spectrum - the folk with an inflated sense of self-importance - are really any better off, even though they may be sitting on top of the world in the short term.

Think about this scenario. John Proudman, talented, hardworking and ambitious, is vice president of operations at a startup that really looks as if it's going places. Of course, if the company's performance has been top-notch so far, it doesn't mean that it can't be better still.

So our John takes a good hard look at every aspect of the organization, conducts an in-depth interview with every member of staff, examines every work procedure, task schedule and job description in microscopic detail, and plays around for weeks with all kinds of flow charts, spreadsheets, permutations and combinations. He deliberates deeply and draws certain conclusions from the mountain of data in front of him. He then sets about implementing certain changes in the budget, personnel policy and other areas.

They're not big changes. On the contrary, they're so subtle that the big brass in the organization hardly notice anything different for quite a while.

Until a few months down the line, sales figures start slipping. Then one of the executives observes that staff morale, although still quite good by most corporate standards, is not what it used to be. Later, unexplained bottlenecks threaten to put the brakes on production precisely at the most critical times.

Nobody in the organization can account for these little mishaps that by this point are becoming too frequent for comfort. Except, of course, for the vice president of operations. So what does he do? He covers up with more changes. He fires a few key personnel, hires replacements, changes a procedure here and there, "doctors" his reports to his fellow directors, anything to cover up his tracks and divert attention from his mistakes.

From John's standpoint, all this works well for a while, but the health of the organization is hardly improving. Sooner or later, of course, the bubble has to burst. In the end, Operation Cover Up is itself uncovered, legal proceedings are instituted, and John Proudman finds himself out on the street with neither job nor reputation.

Why did this happen? In the beginning, John made a few small errors of judgment. But no big deal. They were honest mistakes, rational decisions taken after weeks of careful thought, with the betterment of the company's situation in mind. Could anyone blame him if factors he might not have been able to foresee crept into the equation and matters didn't pan out the way he had planned?

So again, what happened?

What is the strongest of all psychological drives? We could make a good case for saying that it's the drive for honor. Take a look at the history of this world. What's at the root of all human conflict? What has inflicted more misery on humankind than the craving for honor, the innate desire for the unconditional respect and admiration of one's fellows?

Poor John Proudman! On the face of it, he lacked the courage to come clean at a stage when his well-intentioned blunders would have been seen for what they were, and quickly forgiven and forgotten. But really, it wasn't a question of courage alone.

For John, whether or not his peers would hold him culpable for his actions was not really the issue. What he simply couldn't bear was the thought that he would be perceived as a fallible human being. Period.

Errors, after all, were something his subordinates were prone to, not he! John's craving for honor was overpowering. Once the word would get out that he, too, was somewhat less than perfect - that he was as human as the next man and could be misled by the same miscalculations - then who would continue to give him the honor he deserved?

Not the people working under him, and certainly not his colleagues on the board. And if not, what else really mattered?

Character flaws of many different kinds can be responsible for seeing a promising career go up in flames. The insatiable desire for honor must surely be near the top of the list.

Labels: the workplace

Stumble It!

It's no secret. Many people are just too wrapped up in their favorite subject - or their favorite human being (guess who that is?) - to conduct a meaningful conversation with another party.

"I really would rather talk about myself than listen to you. And when I do listen to you, I relate everything you say to myself anyway. You can tell because when you've finally finished talking, the next word out of my mouth is 'I.' "

Familiar story? Then again, some people don't have particularly big egos and can be great listeners when they really want to, but suffer from auditory blackouts when they are upset, angry, busy or just plain bored - even though precisely at these times careful listening can pay the greatest dividends.

In the world of business, successful salespeople know that the 70-30 rule can make all the difference to their bottom line. This means that you listen 70% of the time and talk 30% of the time. Why? Because your prospects aren't waiting for your slick sales talk and flowery presentations; they want the opportunity to tell you what their problems are.

Indeed, talking of problems, it's not only the sales department that has a need for people with finely honed listening skills. They required in every area of business. Inability to listen is a major factor affecting the inability to solve problems in the workplace.

Many years ago, a small group of heads of departments of a large non-profit organization were traveling together in a minibus with the CEO. I happened to be one of the departmental heads. We were on our way to a training seminar at a location some distance out of town.

During the ride, the CEO brought us up to date regarding a fairly serious unsolved problem that had been impacting on the reputation of the organization for a some time. Now that we were all sitting together with a long ride ahead of us, the CEO suggested we air our ideas regarding possible solutions.

An initial two or three minutes of silence followed as we all turned the topic over in our minds. What happened next was very much like an orchestra tuning up.

A senior member of the team broke the ice and began to make a point. But she was scarcely two sentences into her presentation when a colleague butted in. Ostensibly, the interruption was merely to correct a factual error. However, the interrupter immediately went off at a tangent to talk about a completely different aspect of the topic.

He, in turn, was interrupted by a third member of the group, and than a fourth, who raised her voice a few decibels to make sure she came through loud and clear. In the meantime, the first two were still carrying on with what had now become monologues, for none of us were still listening to them by that stage.

Yes, their words did reach our ears. But that's hardly the same thing as listening. At the end of the journey, I doubt whether any of the group could have repeated back or summarized the suggestions or point of view of any of their colleagues.

A lot of talk, no communication. What's interesting is that not long afterwards we gathered in the boardroom to discuss the same subject. This time, since we were now operating under the rules of a formal meeting, none of us dared to cut into the speech of a colleague.

For all that, nothing much had changed. Each member of the team addressed the meeting with unmistakable enthusiasm. But their later comments made it very clear that although their bodies may have been in the room while their colleagues were taking the floor, their minds could have been who knows where.

Human nature, yes, but not corporate teamwork at its best!

When it comes to good communication, the ability to listen is, in fact, only part of the story. It's but the first step in the all important process of creating and sustaining empathy.

Nevertheless, the simple, almost forgotten, art of listening can be an extremely powerful force for the good.

Labels: business communication, the workplace

Stumble It!

When you're getting terrible customer service, opines veteran entrepreneur and columnist Norm Brodsky, don't be so quick to blame the company official you happen to be dealing with at the time.

In many cases, he says, the poor guy's employer is the one at fault, and he tells an interesting story - against himself - to prove his point.

And like many stories of this nature, it just could be that the lesson to be learned from it is relevant not only to the world of business, but can be applied to other areas of life as well.

Brodsky runs an archive-retrieval business. When customers ask to have boxes delivered to their offices, they charge a regular delivery fee plus a surcharge for priority service. As to be expected in any business, disputes over the charges arose from time to time. When Brodsky saw that a couple of his customer-services reps were giving in too easily, he made a rule: no credits could be issued without the approval of someone in management.

What happened then? Occasionally a customer placed a rush order and, for whatever reason, the box didn't arrive on time. In other words, there was nothing to talk about: the company was unmistakeably at fault.

An angry customer would call up and say: "Because it was late, we couldn't make any use of this stuff. You guys can stand on your head, but I'm not paying."

"I'm sorry," the customer-service person would reply, "we made the delivery and you have to pay for it." When the customer would continue to insist "Nothing doing!", the rep would say, "Well, you'll have to speak to a manager."

No question, the manager would waive the charge after hearing the story, but the damage would have already been done. Bad enough that the delivery was late, but the customer sees that they would have been charged for it anyway had no one complained. Then to top it all, he had to waste time arguing with a rpresentative of the company before he was transferred to a manager who cancelled the bill.

So the customer would go away thinking. "That damn service stinks!", and the company would consider themselves lucky if they ever heard from him again.

Thus, the rule that Brodsky laid down came back to haunt him. He now quickly grasped that establishing a rule to eliminate costly errors was not the right response. Among other drawbacks, good, faithful customers were being penalized for the sake of the one or two who tried to take advantage. A few employees with questionable judgement were tying the hands of perhaps the majority whose judgement was perfectly sound.

Now, he has adopted a completely different approach to the sticky problem of well-meaning but inexperienced employees who were a little too looose in passing credit. The real solution, he realized, lay in better training. His people had to be equipped with more knowledge and better tools to make the right decisions.

Rather than clipping their wings, with all that this entailed, time, effort and even money would have to be invested in order to get the potential offenders up to speed.

The point should be clear.

We're living in the age of instant solutions. In business, as in other areas of our lives, we're inclined to fall into the trap of shortcuts, easy answers, the least painful way out. Why do we make bad rules? Often, it's because we're not really attacking our problems head on.

Rather, we're avoiding them. And therein lies the danger - and the challenge!

Labels: business communication, business ethics, customer service, the workplace

Stumble It!

In the world of business, you find three kinds of people: the unsuccessful, the temporarily successful, and those who become and remain successful. When all's said and done, what does the last category have that the others don't?

It's not talent. It's not business acumen, or knowledge of the market. Nor is it intuition or a special knack for dealing with people. It's not even dogged perseverance nor good old fashioned luck.

According to the author of a new book by a billionaire philanthropist who founded a company that grew to be the largest petrochemical and plastics business in the world, there's only one answer to our question: character.

"Character," explains Jon M. Huntsman in the new work, "is how you act when no one is watching...Once dishonesty is introduced, distrust becomes the hallmark of future dealings or associations." He quotes the 18th century Scottish philosopher Frances Hutcheson: "Without staunch adherence to truth-telling, all confidence in communication would be lost."

Huntsman's book is aptly entitled: Winners Never Cheat: Everyday Values We Learned as Children (But May Have Forgotten). Indeed, his description of how his childhood values carried over to his later business life is most illuminating:

As a teenager, he writes, his father explicitly stipulate "a.m" or "p.m." when he ordered him to be home by 8 o'clock, but he knew very well his father meant 8 that night. Similarly, "there was no fine print to detail what was meant when he said he didn't want me driving the family Ford. Although technically, he only said I shouldn't drive that 1936 Ford coupe, he was including my friends." Although a lawyer might have counseled that technically and legally his friends or anyone else were not prohibited from driving the car, our future business tycoon knew better.

So why, asks Huntsman, do we employ the same feeble excuses in our business and professional lives when we are caught doing something we knew we shouldn't be doing?

"As we grow older, our rationale for not abiding by the rules would make a master storyteller green with envy.... We rationalize that immoral behavior is accepted practice. Shifting responsibility away from ourselves has become an art form."

Indeed. And I think we need to ask a pertinent question here.

In later life, the author clearly succeeded in sustaining, and building upon, the moral and ethical values that he had imbibed from his parents and teachers, and possibly other adults in his community, during his youthful days . Many others who enter the business world, as he intimates, are not so successful with this.

Some willfully cast off the moral and ethical values they had inherited at the very first opportunity. In other cases, the whittling away of acquired ethical standards may be more gradual, as young entrepreneurs from the best backgrounds slowly succumb to the unrelenting pressure and intensely competitive atmosphere of modern business.

But whether sudden or slow, if this erosion of principles is so commonplace with people who were indeed exposed to the right role models and a sound educational environment in their early lives, what chance will youngsters have who didn't have that privilege?

We've stressed it before. Parental example, whether for good or bad, is undoubtedly the most powerful influence on a child's moral and social development. The influence of teachers and other significant adults in the child's immediate environment shouldn't be ignored either.

And indeed, the process continues throughout life. College students watch their professors. Workers keep a close eye on their managers and supervisors. The less educated keep tags on the more educated. Civic and political are targets for emulation, one way or the other.

It's an awesome responsibility for all of us.

Labels: business ethics, the workplace

Stumble It!

Some years, ago, I retold an interesting workplace story as related in a book by Barbara Garson.

A clerk in a large insurance company happened to spot a glaring discrepancy in a form she was typing. In a certain store owner's policy, two figures had been transposed through a simple error. The result was the store was insured for $165 000 against vandalism but only for $5 000 against fire. The clerk's first instinct was to reach for the phone to inform her supervisor of the error, for the sake of the unfortunate store owner.

"But wait a minute," she then thought to herself. "I'm not supposed to read these forms. I'm just supposed to check one column against another...If they're gonna give me a robot's job to do, I'm gonna do it like a robot."

Revealing, isn't it? The president of a large industrial corporation summed up the problem well when he confessed in a radio interview: "Most companies assume you should check your brains every morning at the factory door."

What's also interesting is that in the end, the insurance clerk - against her better judgment, so to speak - did apparently inform her supervisor about the error. Garson believes this highlights one undeniable fact: "For most people, it's hard and uncomfortable to do a bad job."

That's undeniably true, but when people opt for putting their best foot forward in today's workplaces, they often find that not a few obstacles are thrown in their path. And when executives and managers set out to give their employees the self-respect they badly need and deserve and some feeling of job satisfaction, these do-gooders at the top sometimes find that the whole area is full of minefields. Further, when companies decide to reward their workers for exceptional performance, the impact is often far from what they intended.

So what's going wrong? David Sirota, co-author of The enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit By Giving Workers What They Want sheds a lot of light on the subject in a special interview with Knowledge@Wharton. According to Sirota, asking how to motivate employees is a silly question. The real question is: "How do you keep management from destroying motivation?"

He points out that people coming to a new job are quite enthusiastic, but morale, or enthusiasm, declines precipitously after five or six months. And in case you should interject that natural honeymoons always come to an end in any event, we find that in 10% of companies the honeymoon does indeed continue throughout a worker's career. So if organizations that are able to sustain enthusiasm do exist, why can't the rest follow suit?

The crux of the matter is, of course, that it's pretty hard to be wildly enthusiastic about a company that's not enthusiastic about you. Not even to mention if it couldn't care a darn about you.

Sirota is quick to counter his colleagues in the human resources industry who claim that direct financial remuneration is not in itself all that relevant nowadays. Baloney!" is Sirota's response..."If I feel underpaid and if I feel that the company is nickeling and diming me, or wants to pay as little as possible, there is not much else an organization can do to boost my morale."

But having said that, he stresses that there's another side to the equity, or sense of being treated fairly, that every employee seeks. Simply put, workers wanted to be treated respectfully, not as children or criminals.

Admittedly, a very small part of every workforce - Sirota estimates about 5% is "allergic" to work. Then you have a very small minority who not only shirk but actually make trouble. "But the bulk of the problem is not hostility. It's that people have become indifferent." But in any event, asks Sirota, who to employers have to generalize from the troublemakers to the rest of the workforce? "The mistake we make is that we feel we have to be consistent, that we have to make the same rules for everybody, so companies are consistent in treating everybody as a child or criminal."

And that, he emphasizes, is very, very destructive.

On a higher level, but not all that much, is the style of management Sirota calls "transactional", where workers are like ciphers. The attitude at the top is: "We paid you, now we are even. We don't owe you anything." The highest and most desirable level is the "partnership organization where the "because I paid you, we are now even" doesn't enter into the picture. "It's more like a relationship between mature adults -- not children or enemies, but allies. "

And what more could any employee - or any employer - wish for?

Labels: the workplace

Stumble It!

We may like to think of ourselves as tolerant souls who hate bigotry, but are we doing enough to make employees or colleagues from different backgrounds and cultures feel comfortable in our work environments?

I've just posted on the site a new article by business consultant T.T. ("Mitch") Mitchell, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging diversity, particularly in the workplace, and respecting people who may be "different" in one way or another. As Mitch writes, good habits we develop at work regarding interpersonal relationships, will follow us once we get outside as well.

Nothing new about this of course, but something we cannot emphasize too much, so kudos to Mitch, who writes a regular newsletter on management skills.

It's imperative, of course, that our respect for someone who's "different" - or for any other human being for that matter - should be 100% genuine. As always, empathy is king! Nothing can be worse than a condescending or patronizing attitude to a human being who, for whatever reason, is in a weaker position than you are in the society in which you're living or working.

I was brought up in South Africa, where paternalism or patronization towards the underprivileged class used to be, unfortunately, a common behavioral problem.

Communication with subordinates - if they happened to belong to this unfortunate stratum of society - was often limited to abrupt commands that were either loud and offensive, or pretentious and patronizing.

Housewives would sometimes insist on being addressed by their domestic servants as "Madam." They would issue such inane instructions as "Madam would like some tea now... please bring it to Madam."

The hapless servant, long accustomed to being treated as a child, would often show his or her insecurity by being excessively polite or flattering. He would then be accused of hypocrisy or calculating behavior. If, on the other hand, he would speak confidently or correctly, he would be branded as an upstart, showing impudence and arrogance.

The amazing thing was that the employer, as far removed from the servant's fears, aspirations and uncertainties as the moon is to the earth, would scratch his head and wonder why the poor laborer never took any pride in his work!

What do you say?

BTW, if you're about to apply for a job and think you might have to confront unreasonable prejudice, this is an article you'll want to read:
How to Overcome Job Interview Bias

Labels: the workplace

Stumble It!