Communication Key #5: Build a Foundation of Trust

by Angela Gallogly
Vice President of USA Operations, Advanced Team Concepts
http://www.atctraining.com

I recently facilitated a two-day retreat for a group of customer service representatives (CSRs) in the Dallas area. The focus topics included teambuilding, communication and dealing with difficult customers. I really enjoyed working with the group, particularly through the teambuilding module. It was obvious that the participants were attentive, engaged and open during our work together.

As I was driving home from the retreat, I remembered another group that I worked with a couple of years ago. This group was comprised of IT professionals. Although their roles and industry were different, they had similar goals for the retreat. The hope was that the experience would help them communicate and work more effectively together. Wow! This retreat was a completely different experience.

I remember the pre-consultation with the IT group. They wanted the training to contain models for better understanding roles and responsibilities and models for better communicating. According to the team’s leadership, they just weren’t communicating as well as they could. He felt that they needed some new tools for their toolkit.

As I progressed through the material that morning, I recall the feeling of the group. Rather than engaging in the process and talking candidly together, they hung back, used silence and obviously kept their true feelings guarded. In a short period of time, I made an important discovery about this group. They already knew how to communicate, but they chose not to. No one seemed to trust anyone else.

At that point, I abandoned my carefully designed curriculum and changed tactics. We spent time in the afternoon focused on breaking through barriers and rebuilding the team. I was pleased that we made some progress, and the team opened up a little more as the day progressed.

Unfortunately, with the time that was left, I didn’t get to the core of this team’s issues. I wish I would have had more time with them, because there was so much potential in the group. These individuals were skilled, educated, and engaging when I spoke to them one to one. They just didn’t feel that it was safe to share in the group. I encouraged the team’s leadership to revisit teambuilding in the future. I shared my belief that their lack of trust was getting in the way of their success, not a lack of communication skills.

Communication Key #5: Build a Foundation of Trust.
The tools introduced at the CSR retreat worked because the participants made this connection. They talked about differences, worked through them and agreed to solutions. They set team goals. They communicated.

You can spend all of the time, training and money in the world on communication, but it the team doesn’t have a foundation of trust, it’s going to be a waste.

How do you build trust in an organization?

It’s not a one-time effort, like flipping a switch. It takes time. Make teambuilding a priority. Help the team get to know each other. Create operating rules for the team that shouldn’t be broken. Examples might include:

-Fostering mutual respect
-Encouraging listening
-Making it safe for the team to share
-Keeping feedback constructive

There are endless possibilities. The key is to understand that building trust in a team is an important priority. It takes ongoing work, but the results will undoubtedly contribute to the success of the organization.

Professionalism

by Scott Airitam
President, Scott Airitam's Leadership Systems, LLC

Whenever I bring up the word "professionalism" to people, many take it differently than I intend. A lot of people associate it with "image." I guess it is true that if a person is unprofessional, a certain image will be connected to that person. Others associate it with clothes--with dress. Again, how we dress can come across as unprofessional, but that's not what I'm talking about either.

I suppose the peripheral issues of image and dress are to be expected, so it generally doesn't bother me or even require me to correct someone. But, I have a blog, so it's a good chance for me to clear this one up. With all of the focus, over the years, on "Dressing for Success," or "Dress Like the Person You Want to Be, Not the Person You Are" it's no wonder we get these things confused. And what is this about dress as the person you want to be? If I did that, I'd constantly be dressed in a swimsuit, with a straw hat and a koozy as accessories.

No, what I'm talking about with the word professionalism is different. Professionalism, to me, includes only behaviors that support the mission--the ultimate goal. That's it. Plain and simple. There is no need to make it all convoluted, but people do, and will. Think of it this way, "unprofessional" is the opposite. Is gossip professional or unprofessional? That's easy, it's unprofessional. It sabotages the mission instead of furthering progress toward it. It is divisive and it is petty and small. Is harassment or retailiation of any kind professional? Again, easy. It is not. Harassment places the focus squarely on the harassing behaviors and the environment created in its wake. It does not put the focus on the mission. Is how you dress professional? This one isn't as cut and dried. Dress can be so unprofessional that it takes attention away from the mission and puts it onto itself. That's one extreme. Where there is one extreme, one must only look far enough in the right direction to find the other. With that being said, then, dress can impress and create credibility. If impressing specific people and creating credibility furthers the mission, then, yes, it is professionalism at it's best! However, I'd squarely put most clothing in the category of irrelevant as far as professinalism goes. (Some of you are feeling the impulse to talk about how badly I dress right now, right?) That is to say, that even though someone selected the blue tie or the beige skirt this morning, if they'd decided to go with the red tie or the black skirt, it wouldn't have made a difference as to whether their focus was directed toward their mission or not.

I guess my rant for today is that professionalism is much more about the work, the goals, and the mission than it is about much more arbitrary and subjective measurements. Professionalism, thus, becomes the overlay for all work-related concepts such as Leadership, customer service, collaboration, sales, or communication.

Give this some thought next time you are wondering if someone is being professional or not.

Communication - Listen Up!

by Angela Gallogly
Vice President of USA Operations, Advanced Team Concepts
http://www.atctraining.com

For a couple of weeks, I’ve been focusing on the value of effectively communicating with those we work with. Whether face-to-face, on the phone, or via email, there are tools available that can help you compose and deliver your message in a clear and professional way. Today, I want to focus on what I consider one of the toughest aspects of communication.

Communication Key #4:

Listening. For many of us, this is a challenge. It certainly is for me. I’ve got a huge toolkit and lots of experience when it comes to sending the message. It comes naturally to me. That’s probably why I love training – I get to speak to an audience! But even when I’m facilitating, my ability to listen to the group is critical. I’ve got to hear my participants’ questions, concerns, and thoughts around the material that I’m presenting. Without their contribution, the learning experience is diminished. It’s the sharing of those in the class that really brings the learning to life.

That’s why I like the title of facilitator instead of trainer. To facilitate means to make easy. I want it to be easy for my participants to learn. We should all try to be facilitators when it comes to communicating. If we want communication to go well, we need to make it easy for the other person to share their story.

When we listen well, there are tangible outcomes that are very positive. We can probe into problems and get to the correct solutions. We can air concerns and solidify relationships. We can offer assistance that’s needed and get results. I’ve also noticed that if I listen to someone else, they’re a lot more likely to listen to me.

Sometimes our emotions get in the way. It might be a sense of urgency, enthusiasm, or even anger that propels us into cutting the other person off. Or, we don’t cut them off, but we don’t really listen. While the other person is talking, we’re creating our next message in our head.

When I do a poor job of listening, I lose the other person’s perspective, ideas, opinions and needs. This loss isn’t acceptable to me, so I’ve had to put some habits into place that encourage me to be a better listener. Sometimes I write myself a note to “BE SILENT” when I’m communicating with others. This visual cue reminds me to be the listener once in awhile. I also make an effort to ask questions. This encourages the other person to share.

Regardless of how you do it, find a way to listen. You’re probably familiar with Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Habit #5 encourages the reader to Seek first to understand, then to be understood. I love this, and personally commit to it. I know that if I miss this, and forget to listen, I’m not communicating successfully, no matter how polished the delivery of my own message. But if I truly attempt to understand the other person first, chances are I’m really listening and communicating well.

Petty and Small

by Scott Airitam
President, Scott Airitam's Leadership Systems, LLC

I know that for three posts in a row, I've talked about Leadership.  It's a topic that is close to my heart.  However, there are a few pet peeves out there that fight for some attention every time I get ready to write up a post.  I think I'll let one of them out now just so that it will leave me alone.  Who knew writing a blog could be so cathartic?

In the course of working with other people, regardless of title or position, we have to reconcile ourselves to certain realities and understand when the reality we think we see is really something we just made up.

The prime example of all of this that comes to my mind is one from a client firm.  This company provides a professional service and had a few hundred employees in the Dallas area.  One employee, in particular, comes to mind.  This person is a manager of a department and she offices next to her boss, the Vice President.  She consistently finds ways to produce little work herself, but regularly takes the credit for the work her employees produce.  She is not very knowledgeable in her field, but is smart enough to have people on her staff that were very knowledgeable.  That does little to earn her respect among her employees, but it does allow her to seem competent to her boss and her peers.  I bring all of this up to illustrate that she has reason to be insecure in her position and that she fights very hard to make it look like she deserves to be there.  Insecurity happens.  It doesn't have to happen, but it does.

Anyway, the manager has been caught several times listening in to her bosses conversations. You see, there is an air vent behind the door to her office and it is connected to her boss' office. So, anytime the boss closes her door for a private conversation, this manager tends to listen to the conversation.  She has been caught at this several times because she does not close her door. Instead, she stands behind her open door, just below the vent, to catch snippets of the conversation. It's like she can't help herself.  She doesn't usually get to overhear whole conversations, so she draws conclusions about what is being said or decided.  She starts rumors. The thing that gets me the most, though, is that she has been known to take action against her own employees based on what she thought she overheard her boss talking about behind closed doors.  She has taken action against employees that she has thought the boss had given praise to and she's taken action against employees she thought her VP was irritated with.  It's amazing how she could take a small piece of a conversation and make up all the rest.  It's more amazing that after making up the rest, she felt justified in acting on that made up info.

When did we become so petty and small, as a workforce, that this type of behavior can be found in almost every workplace?  I'm sure it's not ususally as blatant as standing behind an open office door to snoop, but, I'm sure most of you reading this can think of someone that is a bit like the manager I described.  (It would be interesting to hear her comments if she were to read this...she has been confronted about her behavior in the past.)  I mean, this particular woman easily became jealous of her own employees.  So jealous, in fact, that she would make life difficult for them if their hard work yielded them attention instead of her.  

Another way we've become petty and small is when we see or hear of someone getting something we didn't get.  People get so irate sometimes when they think someone else got some benefit or something extra that they didn't get.  Why do we take this so personally?  The manager in the story took it personally.  When this happens on the job, we tend to cal it favoritism.  In my job as a consultant, I can site many cases of one department in a company believing that another department didn't have to work as hard.  On the strength of the belief alone, no proof, the first department would become passive-agressive toward the other department sometimes to the point of actually sabotaging the work.

It's these types of things that slowly poison otherwise good places to work.  Leaders need to stand up and address these issues in a positive, professional way. That's exactly how I teach Leaders to deal with these situations in my course Leadership First!  More effective, though, is when the culture has been cultivated and developed to the point where Leaders do not have to step in to deal with these types of situations, peers do it first.  It might seem like your culture can't get there from here, but I promise you, it can.

For me, petty and small has no place in the measurement of the quality of work life that I lead.  I don't need that type of drama around me and I'm not afraid to address it.  It's unfortunate that many people do deal with this type of stress on the job every single day.  Because I know how interconnected things are, I also know that the stress that we download on the job often comes out at home.

Effective Email Communication

by Angela Gallogly
Vice President of USA Operations, Advanced Team Concepts
http://www.atctraining.com

It’s probably no surprise that the number of organizations that are requesting “Email” classes has grown significantly over the last several years. We use email all day, every day. For many of us, it’s a central component of our communication.

Unfortunately, through misuse, this tool that is designed to enable communication can actually impair our ability to communicate effectively.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m a big believer in email. It’s a great tool for connecting us and allowing us to communicate with one another quickly. Our organizations often operate on a global scale, and email allows us to cross the boundaries of distance in seconds. It’s cheap, it’s fast, and it’s easy. So why do we encounter email problems?

You’ve all been in a scenario where email wasn’t used effectively:

- The thirty emails generated around a lunch meeting
- The emotional email that escalates a conflict
- The email that is really directed to one person, but is “copied” to everyone
- The email that’s so full of abbreviations and acronyms that it’s indecipherable

These are a few examples of the email misuse that takes place in our work environments every day. In my training classes, I often hear complaints about emails like these.

Communication Key #3:

Use email appropriately. My boss shared a great story about email. He observed two team members that were interacting in a hallway. They ran into each other on the way to their cubicles and stopped to share a brief greeting. One of the individuals shared, with some enthusiasm, “Hey, I need to talk to you about this new project. I’ll email you.” They each headed off to the safety of their cubicles, where I assume they started a lengthy brainstorming session via email. I can understand this type of exchange if you’re in Iowa and you teammate is in China, but when you’re cube neighbors?

It seems to me that we’ve begun to use email as our “default” communication choice, even when it’s not the best choice. We also use email in ways that aren’t effective. We create email overload with our habits of copying everyone and forwarding long email chains. I think we know better. But we do it because it seems that everyone else does, and that creates some contagious negative practices in our work culture.

Some organizations are creating “best practices” around the use of email. I think that’s a great idea.

Here are a couple of simple examples:

- Do use email to provide short bits of information.
- Do use email to end telephone tag.
- Do use email for administrative tasks.

- Don’t use email for time-sensitive messages.
- Don’t copy all unless it’s appropriate
- Don’t disclose confidential information without authorization.
- Don’t use email for discussions requiring dialogue.
- Don’t say anything in email that you wouldn’t want everyone to see.

These are easy steps that can make a real impact on your teams and organizations. The culture will change when individuals commit to emailing appropriately, or using proper “netiquette.”

Debunking Leadership Myths - Myth #3

by Scott Airitam
President, Scott Airitam's Leadership Systems, LLC

You'd probably be amazed at where I learn my best organizational Leadership lessons.  Most people learn strictly by reading books.  For some, because it is in print means it's valid.  I know there are a lot of books out there where the author has scientifically validated their theories. I try to read as many of the books as possible because that language is the only language that some of my clients really want to hear.

But, out of all of the conflicting information that has been validated, I choose to only integrate some of it into the Leadership dogma that I'll put my consulting and training company's name on.  How do I choose?

I select the Leadership lessons from data that's collected in books and backed up as I observe real life.  You see, I have the unique perspective of being able to integrate my personal experiences and the experiences of the many Leaders I talk to and observe in the many client organizations and volunteer organizations that I serve.  I get to see the Leadership myths in action and talk to people about them.  I also get to see how it plays out when those myths are debunked in real life.

Of all of the myths that I see repeated and repeated, there is one myth that is insidious. Truly, it sneaks into the mindset of a Leader, and with that, the mentality of the group being led.  Once it is in, it appears to represent a complete view of all the Leadership options available, but it's really only an illusion.  In fact, following where this myth takes a Leader only serves to slowly place increasingly restrictive limits on that Leader's ability to influence, and, it increases the group's dependence upon being led at every single step.

Leadership Myth #3 is: The Leader must step in and correct every mistep, small or large, that is made within his or her group.

Before I give an example of this, let me explain the problems with this approach.

1. When a Leader takes this course, they go into "firefighter" mode.  Being the one to come up with the solution and pull the group out of the fire can be addicting. At the very least it can be a great ego boost.  This is fine and good for the Leader's self-esteem and sense of self-importance, but like anything addicting, too much can be a bad thing.  Every time the Leader does this, it focuses the Leader in the short-term at the expense of the long-term.  The Leader is not growing future Leaders and, instead, creates, over time, a group that refuses to take ownership or accountability.  Instead, every time things go wrong or unfamiliar territory is to be covered,  the group looks to the Leader for instruction. What was once an ego boost erodes into an overwhelming and redundant pattern of behavior for everyone involved.
2. Using this technique creates another issue. Lack of creativity in the group. Or, better stated, a lack of risk taking. Over time, fewer and fewer in the group will go out on a limb to suggest a better way, they will simply take the direction they know is coming from the Leader.  It's tough, because the group loses the diversity of thought that it posesses and instead becomes dependent upon the limited ideas and vision of a single person. This causes stagnation.
3. The most important thing that this mindset causes is a draining of passion from the entire group, including the Leader. Passion is one of the elements that puts many miles between good team results and great team results. Passion is an intangible who's effect cannot be measured. It is easy to recognize how much harder a person will work and how much more discretionary effort a person will apply to the cause when passion is present. A passionless team might get along with one another, but there is no way that it can match the output of a team passionate about its work, its goals, and its purpose.

So, I'm going to share one of those real world experiences with you.

I was asked once to step in as a consultant in a company where this was the predominate Leadership approach.  This organization had little passion. The only identifiable passion to be found resided in top leadership. There was no creativity or risk taking in the group. Almost to an individual in the group, there was a feeling of powerlessness. Whenever something went wrong, the leader's stepped in and "fixed" it--usually in a blame assigning move.

The company, based in the St. Louis area, blamed the quality of employees it had to choose from for its woes and accepted that as just the way it was. The cultural mess it found itself in was accepted as "the way it is" and, the leadership couldn't see that there were better alternatives at its disposal. It could not see the doors within its reach, and, when these doors were described to them, they didn't believe that they were real. Add to this the real threat of obsolescence in a declining market and the pressures of this organization were real and difficult.

The leaders would step in to solve every problem, from the largest strategic issues to the smallest details, and the group felt powerless. Soon, I got a phone call from the organization asking for help. 

The problem was cultural.  Culture forms paradigms.  Paradigms form habits.  Each of these areas was corrupted due to a short-term leadership approach being applied over a long-term period.

Fortunately, the problem wasn't strictly ego. Leadership wasn't unwilling to change, they simply didn't know what other options were available to them. They didn't know another way to Lead. I knew how to help with that and so a journey began that lasted a little over a year.

We worked with them in a three-pronged approach. We had to fix the cultural aspect, the paradigms, and the habits at the same time. If we worked on any one exclusively, the other two would stunt the potential growth of the one we worked on.  So, we used a product that Leadership Systems developed, the Cultural Assessment Tool (CAT) to gather data on the culture and to share both the great strengths the organization had and the hard to swallow weakenesses that it possessed. Simultaneously, we produced a very targeted, company (and issue) specific 3-day course for top Leadership to reveal to them some of the opportunities they couldn't see, re-equip them with appropriate tools, and recondition them to create an environment that allowed for enhanced communication, risk taking, and creativity. We set out to change paradigms. Finally, we spent time with them--coaching.  We confronted the Leadership on behaviors that were both great and poor and we worked with and talked to the group--all in an effort to change habits. We guided, but we didn't do for anyone. This allowed them to have their own successes and not attribute them to us.

Today, this organization has grown tremendously and has found such a high degree of success in how it handles its people that it's become a high-performing work group. The company is TEC (Television Engineering Corporation) and it has grown its revenue tremendously with creative new offerings and solid and stable original products.  To a person, the people that work there are proud to work there and have a passion about what they do.  Leadership actually Leads instead of pushing people out of the way and trying to do all of the work for them.  The turnaround in this organization is astounding and it allows TEC to be more competitive, more agile, and, ultimately more successful.  Jack Vines, Jr., the Leader this organization, who always acts with wisdom and passion gave me permission to talk about the journey this company traveled.  It is still on the journey, he'd tell you, only the road is a lot easier to navigate now.

Communication - Checking for Understanding

by Angela Gallogly

Vice President of USA Operations, Advanced Team Concepts

http://www.atctraining.com/

The value of effective communication hit me again this week, this time in a more personal way. I had to have a couple of important customer conversations, and I needed to put the tools that I teach to use. One of the companies that I work with is experiencing some policy changes that directly impact their training requirements. Another customer experienced changes in their team and was feeling concern about how this would impact the training goals that have been set.

Both customers had a message for me, and I had to make sure that I understood what that message was. It turns out that my initial assumptions weren’t correct. It took a little more dialogue to get the right information, with enough detail, to allow me to provide for my clients what was really needed.

Communication Key #2:

Check for understanding. How many times have you left a conversation having heard what was said to you, but misunderstanding what was meant? Last week I wrote about slowing down our communication, and that applies here. The best communicators slow down, watch out for assumptions, and confirm understanding.

There are many techniques that you can use to check for understanding. Some of the simplest and most effective:

- Ask questions
Make sure you have all of the details needed. Don’t fill in the blanks yourself.
- Paraphrase
Rephrase what you think you’ve heard to reduce misunderstandings
- Summarize
Still paraphrasing, but also reviewing progress or pulling ideas, facts and feelings together

These techniques helped me with both of my customers. With customer #1 and the policy changes, I used probing questions and summarizing. I discovered that the real impact on the training was around measurement and accountability. My first workshop for the client under the policy changes was earlier this week, and I was equipped with a new pre and post-assessment that met the new requirements.

With customer #2, I used paraphrasing. I thought I heard that a new training approach was required to accommodate the team changes. When I paraphrased this, the customer corrected me. All he was asking for was some additional detail. This was enough to reassure him that we were on course.

Use the same techniques when you’re the one sending the message. If you’re worried that it will seem patronizing to ask the other person to paraphrase or summarize, put the responsibility on yourself. “I don’t always give enough detail or make the message clear. Tell me what you heard.”

These techniques aren’t new. In fact, you’ve probably heard them before. It’s really about getting into good habits and using the tools that you have. You don’t have to do this every time you communicate, but if the message is important enough, take the time to get it right.