Communication

3 Questions to Ask to Drive Better Conversations

Andrew Cooke Communication , ,

The Newport Question Trio for Better Conversations

A client of mine recently shared several questions that they use in her organization to help leaders and managers, at all level, gain clarity, focus and accountability in their conversations. I call them the Newport Question Trio after my client. These questions are:

  1. Why? – Is this conversation going to make our business stronger?

This question gets straight to the point, is this conversation going to be of value and contribute to the business’ success? If not, then the conversation should not be held.

Key to doing this well is to make sure you frame what the conversation is about (and equally importantly what it is not about) properly. Your conversation frame needs to be tight, well-defined and clearly articulated so there is a shared and common understanding of what it is and what it is not.

  1. What? – What is our role? Should this be our decision?

Role: Too often conversations are held for their own sake, this leads to lots of discussion and no action. If the conversation is going to make your business stronger then you need to determine what your role is in what is being discussed. Your role may be key in which discussion is needed, or it may be tangential in which case no or little discussion is necessary.

Decision: You need to decide is this your decision? Here you have to distinguish between being accountable for a decision (i.e. the buck stops with you) and actually being responsible for making and implementing a decision. Too often senior executives get pulled into operational issues when they should be standing back and allowing those responsible for the work to do it. The decision should be made at the level which it is best made and implemented by those with the right knowledge, expertise and insights required.

  1. How? – Are we being clear in our conversation

Here there are two guidelines to help you. Firstly, are you saying everything that needs to be said? And secondly, are you saying nothing that doesn’t need to be said? Focus on what is important and relevant, don’t get side-tracked, and keep on point.

Use these 3 questions for yourselves and your peers, and cascade them to those who work for you and see how your conversations improve and help to drive better actions and results.

To view or download a PDF version of this blog click here

Share your thoughts and ideas here, or email me at andrew.cooke@business-gps.com.au

If you found this article of use or interest please don’t hesitate to share it with others.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

What You Said Is Not What I Heard – How to Communicate Effectively

Andrew Cooke Communication ,

Message Distortion – What You Said Is Not What I Heard

What you said is not what is heard…

by Andrew Cooke, Growth & Profit SolutionsSherlockHolmes

Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle wrote his first Sherlock Holmes story in 1886. The fictitious character was based on a real man, Dr Joseph Bell, a renowned forensic scientist at Edinburgh University. Conan-Doyle wrote 60 adventures in total. The collection is known as The Cannon. All but 4 stories are narrated by Holmes’ loyal sidekick Dr Watson. Together, they solve the most amazing mysteries. Now think for a moment. What’s the most famous Sherlock Holmes expression you know?

Most probably you answered, “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

Now here’s the interesting part. The character Sherlock Holmes never actually uses this precise phrase. You won’t find it in any of Conan-Doyle’s books. Holmes does say ‘Watson’ all the time. He was his loyal companion after all. He also uses the word ‘elementary’ repeatedly, as a way of showing how smart he is. (They run into the most complex situations. Holmes points out the solution and states it’s ‘elementary’ as if the solution is the most obvious thing in the world). And somehow, both words ended up together. Why? Because there’s a nice fit. We can easily imagine Sherlock Holmes saying, “Elementary, my dear Watson,” showing his unique ability and intellectual superiority towards his friend Watson.

It’s a characteristic of a communication phenomenon science calls Message Distortion, another villain on the execution road. Gordon Allport and Joseph Postman researched message shortening. And their results are astonishing. A message loses a whopping 70 percent of its details after 5 to 6 mouth-to-mouth transmissions.

Imagine the effect of this happening with the messages you are putting out internally and externally. Internally we can get message distortion when senior management cascade messages downwards. How these are communicated and the essence of the message changes slightly with each repetition, often making the final transmission of the message quite different to what it started out as. Similarly, when information is escalated up the management chain we find that details, nuances and key information is often omitted or changed giving a very different picture to what was intended or expected. There is a large body of research that indicates the effects of the hierarchy on the distortion of messages.  Just a few of those findings are that:

  • Employees tend to send more favorable than unfavorable information is sent up the organizational hierarchy, especially when that information is important.
  • Employees tend to send messages that please their supervisors or managers.
  • Employees tend to send information up the hierarchy that they think their supervisor or manager wants to hear.
  • Unfavorable information is more likely to be blocked from being sent up the hierarchy.
  • The more upwardly mobile an employee is, the greater the distortion of messages that go up the hierarchy.
  • The less that employees trust their supervisors or managers, the more that information is distorted as it moves up the hierarchy.

Externally message distortion can also happen when you communicate with customers, suppliers and other stakeholders – and when messages are misunderstood they can be costly in terms of money, time, relationships and management attention.

To reduce the incidence and effects of message distortion use these three techniques:
1. Communicate only the essence of the message – keep it brief and succinct.
2. Check that the other person has understood what has been said.
3. Check that the other person has interpreted it correctly, ask how they will share the message with others.

This won’t eliminate message distortion, but it will help to reduce it significantly, and to help people communicate clearly and consistently, and to avoid misunderstandings and mistakes.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

Understanding How Others Respond – And the Implications

Andrew Cooke Behaviour, Business Agility, Coaching, Communication, Growth, Learning, Performance, Psychology, Strategies, Uncategorized

Understand how people can react – whether they take control of themselves, or abdicate responsibility…

There is a simple, but useful tool that helps you to understand how people respond to situations, and to anticipate their likely behavior. It can also help you identify those who are likely to be winners and losers. This tool is called the Locus of Control.

Everyone wants to know what separates winners from losers? One of the significant factors limiting the attainment of your vision is the degree to which you believe you are in control of your destiny. Your locus of control can be internal or external. You can have a combination of both but normally one will outweigh the other.  So what are the differences between an internal Locus of Control and an external Locus of Control, and how can you identify them?

  • External Locus of Control – listening to what you say, or your team members, when talking about your business and your life. If you hear things like, “I would have been successful but the economy turned sour” or “I got caught by a pile of bad debts so I had to close the business down” you or they have an external locus of control. People with an external locus of control blame the external factors for their failure.
  • Internal Locus of Control – people with an internal locus of control feel that they can influence the issues around them. You’ll hear them say things like “I misjudged the market so I put on too many people which ended up costing me a packet of money” or “I found that my skills weren’t sufficient to handle the negotiation”.

Get into the habit of listening to the people to determine whether they have an internal or external locus of control. Of course, those who have an external locus are the ones who find it difficult to change. It’s always someone else’s fault or responsibility.

If you are setting up a team or looking at staffing make sure you have plenty of people with an internal locus of control. In simple terms, a person with an external locus of control is problem focused, while a person with an internal locus of control is solution focused. Remember, you will always find what you are looking for. Sometimes you find that by teaching someone about the locus of control and helping them to change their own mindset they can change from having an external locus of control to an internal locus of control.

There is little point in developing a focused and aggressive business strategy if you are surrounded by people who believe that the Government, their people, and even their customers are conspiring against them. You are defeated before you start. How can this be resolved?  By having people with an internal locus of control!

To view or download a PDF version of this blog click here

Share your thoughts and ideas here, or email me at andrew.cooke@business-gps.com.au

If you found this article of use or interest please don’t hesitate to share it with others.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions,

4 Questions for Debriefing and Learning

Andrew Cooke Behaviour, Business Growth, Coaching, Communication, Growth, Innovation, Learning, Management, Management Development, Performance, Strategies, Teams, Uncategorized

Four key questions by which to learn from your experiences!

We often get so involved in doing the work, that we rarely make the time to review how we are doing in a structured and creative manner that allows us to extend our curiosity into what has happened, and to learn why. In short, we rarely take the time to debrief and when we do so, we generally do it poorly.

Debriefings can help you accelerate projects, innovate new approaches to problems, and hit difficult objectives. More than a casual conversation about what did and didn’t work, a debriefing digs into why things happened.

“Two things are infinite; the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe” – ALBERT EINSTEIN

A debrief should review four key questions:

1.What were we trying to accomplish? Start by restating the objectives you were trying to achieve.

2.Where did we hit (or miss) our objectives? Review your results, and ensure the group is aligned and has a shared understanding of what has happened.

3. What caused our results? This should go deeper than obvious, first-level answers. You need to go beyond the symptoms and get to the underlying causes of your results. A good way to do this is to use the Five Whys Tool.  Here you take the first-level result, and ask “Why did we achieve this result?” This exposes a second-level item. Ask the same question again. You normally do not need to ask this question more than five times.

Example:

Results:  Sales down by 25% compared to the same time last year.

Why? #1 – Because the market is more competitive.

Why is the market more competitive?

Why? #2 – Customer demand for our products is down

Why has customer demand reduced?

Why? #3 – The market price has come down and we are charging a high price.

Why are we unable to sell our quality products for a higher price?

Why? #4 – Because the sales force lacks the skills to sell the value of our product.

Why is the Salesforce unable to sell on value?

Why? #5 – Because we don’t hire the right people with these skills, or develop these skills in our existing sale team.

Solution: to address the fall in sales we need to train, equip and incentivize our sales people to sell on value, not on price.

1. What should we start, stop, or continue doing? Given the root causes uncovered, what should we do next, now that we know what we know?

Debriefing provides you and your team with a structured learning process that allows you to continuously evolve plans while they’re being executed in the light of your experience and results.  This helps you to learn quickly in rapidly changing situations and to address mistakes or changes quickly and effectively.

Remember, no plan goes to plan – never. We need to learn to adapt, and we need to adapt to survive, and we need to survive if we are to thrive.  Debriefing is an ongoing process that needs to be built in as a core part of your work, not something that is ancillary to it.

To view or download a PDF version of this blog click here

Share your thoughts and ideas here, or email me at andrew.cooke@business-gps.com.au

If you found this article of use or interest please don’t hesitate to share it with others.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

Distinguishing Between Your Leaders and Your Managers

Andrew Cooke Behavior, Communication, Employee Engagement, Leadership Development, Performance, Uncategorized

Leadership and management may complement each other, but they are very different

Most people use the words “management” and “leadership” interchangeably and usually only distinguish between the two by where the person is in the organizational hierarchy.  Here you have ‘leaders’ at the top, ‘managers’ in the middle, and ‘labor’ at the bottom. Simple, but wrong! There are significant differences between management and leadership, their areas of focus, what they do, how they do it, and their implications

A business needs to have both effective managers and effective leaders; it cannot operate without one of them. Leadership and management are different roles, not different people.  As such, all leaders are managers but not all managers are leaders.  Let me explain further.

There are many in management positions – those who control or administer part of the business who have a title such as “manager”, or “supervisor” or  “director” – who have the necessary management skills (for example, being able to plan, schedule time effectively, manage budgets etcetera). But titles do not make leaders.  To be a leader you need to have people who will willingly follow you.  This has two implications:aders.  To be a leader you need to have people who will willingly follow you.  This has two implications:

  • If no one is following you then you are just a manager.
  • You can have no formal title or authority but, because people follow you, you can be a leader.

As such, leadership is not a noun, it is a verb. But leadership is not just about having followers, and management is not just about control – there are differences that collectively make management and leadership very different but complementary. Kotter concisely defines management and leadership as the following:
“In fact, management is a set of well-known processes, like planning, budgeting, structuring jobs, staffing jobs, measuring performance and problem-solving, which help an organization to predictably do what it knows how to do well. Management helps you to produce products and services as you have promised, of consistent quality, on the budget, day after day, week after week. In organizations of any size and complexity, this is an enormously difficult task. We constantly underestimate how complex this task really is, especially if we are not in senior management jobs. So, management is crucial — but it’s not leadership.

Leadership is entirely different. It is associated with taking an organization into the future, finding opportunities that are coming at it faster and faster and successfully exploiting those opportunities. Leadership is about vision, about people buying in, about empowerment and, most of all, about producing useful change. Leadership is not about attributes, it’s about behavior. And in an ever-faster-moving world, leadership is increasingly needed from more and more people, no matter where they are in a hierarchy. The notion that a few extraordinary people at the top can provide all the leadership needed today is ridiculous and it’s a recipe for failure.”

The essence of the difference between management and leadership can be summarized in one sentence: Management is about coping with Complexity; Leadership is about coping with Change.  As such, Management is about Resources, Leadership is about People.  Let’s explore this further in the table below which highlights some of the key differences.

Key Differences between Management and Leadership

Management Leadership
Doing things right… Doing the right things…
Efficiency Effectiveness
Transactional Transformational
Speed Direction
Practices Principles
Things People
Manage complexity Manage change
Drive stability, efficiency, and order Drive innovation, adaptability and change
Task-focused People-focused
Operational role Situational role
Content is important Context is important

As you can see from this list there is a tension between management and leadership which, if you achieve the right balance between the two, can be highly productive and beneficial.
However, if you have management with weak leadership or leadership with weak management you will have an imbalance. We explore this in the next email when we look at the Leadership/Management Matrix tool.

To view or download a PDF version of this blog click here

Share your thoughts and ideas here, or email me at andrew.cooke@business-gps.com.au

If you found this article of use or interest please don’t hesitate to share it with others.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

Guidelines for Managing Conflict Successfully

Andrew Cooke Communication, conflict, Decision, Learning, Uncategorized

Six key guidelines to manage conflict effectively

When dealing with a conflict you want to manage it effectively.  Conflicts are difficult to resolve as resolutions are rarely reached which everyone is happy with.  A conflict that is well-managed provides the basis for an approach that everyone will accept, commit to and action. Remember, you want to achieve the best outcomes possible whilst preserving and building on your existing relationships.

There are six things to do:

  • Focus on the position, not the person – you want to focus on what the underlying problem is.  Often the other person is not just being difficult, but has real and valid reasons for their position.  Focus on their position and reasons, don’t focus on the person – it makes the disagreement personal and adversarial, and brings people’s emotions into play.
  • Seek first to understand before you are understood – focus on where the other person is coming from. Try to understand their thoughts, feelings and position.  Once you have understood this, and have checked that your understanding is correct, then you are better positioned to explain your position and to do so from their context,
  • Relationships are your first priority – you need to build mutual understanding and trust.  A good relationship is a necessary precursor for a good outcome. If you lack this then you will not achieve a good relationship or a good outcome.
  • Listen – you need to listen actively  to what the other person is saying, checking for understanding, clarifying where necessary, and ensuring that what is said is what was heard, and that what was heard was what was meant.
  • Jointly establish the objective – what do you both want to achieve from the conflict? Doing this will allow you to scope out the extent of your conversation, to determine what factors are important and relevant, to help prioritize your goals, and to focus and align your efforts.
  • Develop and explore options together – either or both of your preferred choices may not be suitable, or can be improved upon.  Creating new options opens up the conversation and stimulates your collective thinking in finding a ‘best-fit’ alternative on which to agree.

By following these rules, you contentious discussions can be kept positive and constructive, and antagonism and dislike which can exacerbate the conflict can be prevented.

To view or download a PDF version of this blog click here

Share your thoughts and ideas here, or email me at andrew.cooke@business-gps.com.au

If you found this article of use or interest please don’t hesitate to share it with others.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

3 Steps to Help Your Managers Prepare for Difficult Conversations

Andrew Cooke Behaviour, Business Agility, Business Growth, Communication, Management, Management Development, Uncategorized

In times of challenges and uncertainty, supervisors might be experiencing an increase in the number of difficult conversations with their staff. These could include delivering bad news about an employee’s job, informing staff about work restructuring, or discussing other complicated and stressful work situations.

  1. Preparing for the conversation

Before going into the conversation, ask yourself several key questions. Consult with peers, and other appropriate resources to be sure you’re comfortable with the answers.

Key questions include:

  • What is my purpose for having the conversation?
  • What do I hope to accomplish?
  • What is the ideal outcome?
  • What assumptions am I making about the other person’s reaction to the conversation?
  • What “hot buttons” exist – for me and for the other person?
  • How is my attitude toward the conversation contributing to the intended outcome?

Practice the conversation. You can mentally rehearse it in your mind, or practice it out loud with your supervisor, Employee Assistance Program, or Human Resources.

  1. Holding the conversation

A successful outcome will depend on two things: what you say and how you say it. How you approach the conversation and how you behave will greatly influence what you say and how it is perceived.

Acknowledge any emotional energy that might be fueled by the conversation. The emotional content is as important as the facts.

Keep aligned with the purpose of your conversation. Don’t be distracted by side tracks.

Suggestions for opening the conversation include:

  • “I’d like to talk to you about. . .”
  • “I want to better understand your point of view. Can we talk more about. . .”
  • “I’d like to talk about ________. I think we may have different ideas on how to ______.”

 

  1. Working Toward a Successful Outcome

Approach the conversation with an attitude of inquiry and discovery. Set aside assumptions and try to learn as much as possible about the other person’s point of view. Let the employees complete what they have to say without interruption.

Acknowledge that you’ve heard what the other person is trying to say. The best way to do this is to repeat their argument back to them. You don’t have to agree. Saying “it sounds like this issue is very important to you” doesn’t mean that you have to decide the way they’d like you to.

Advocate for your position without diminishing theirs. State your position concisely and clarify points they may not have understood.

End with problem solving. Find mutual areas where you can agree on solutions and identify what steps need to be taken. If there is no common ground, return to inquiry.

To view or download a PDF version of this blog click here

Share your thoughts and ideas here, or email me at andrew.cooke@business-gps.com.au

If you found this article of use or interest please don’t hesitate to share it with others.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.