Key Point:

Boris Groysberg is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Michael Slind is a writer, editor, and communication consultant. They are the coauthors of Talk, Inc.: How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power Their Organizations. They have some great research and work on leadership through conversation. Their model, which you will find at the end of this blog, will provide additional guidance.

Character Move:

1. Be Intimate. Great conversation means finding a way to be personal and authentic. Even in large groups we can have a more personal discussion. Top-down pronouncements and being on transmit just isn’t very effective. Associates become good at taking mental vacations while sitting back looking at a monitor and/or watching us standing at a podium. We have to find ways of connecting personally. I would love to see organizations filled with real or metaphorical kitchen tables and a lot more old-fashioned “family dinner” settings.
2. Be Interactive. It is important to have a conversation WITH colleagues and not just at them. Face-to-face is the best. Yet even with all the work mobility, workplace variety, and employees scattered everywhere, interactive tools like Yammer or others allow for more open and interactive dialogue. Blogs and discussion forums need to be common discussion tools for all of us. We can be interactive at a distance.
3. Be Inclusive. The best way to engage others is to involve them in understanding and building the message. Everyone in the conversation has to work at it. In today’s world, informing does not necessarily mean that we’ve communicated. Dialogue means we are active with each other. How often do you see people sitting back, arms crossed while some executive is out in front trying to be profound, sweating and doing all the work as the transmitter? Everyone has to be involved in telling the company story and/or communicating the key message.
4. Be Intentional. What is the intended outcome of your conversation? Does everyone you’re communicating with know what the expected result is? How do you know? Make sure the agenda and outcome is clear. Sometimes the communicator thinks it’s obvious. That is often not the case. Verify the target audience gets the intention. Check in with them before, during and after the conversation.

Being on transmit and exclusive top-down communication is a telling process. It is not necessarily effective communication. Email is often a lousy surrogate for communicating and a long email string is rarely representative of a great conversation. It certainly is not using conversation and dialogue as part of the leadership system. So when you’re about to send that email and/or give that big speech and think you’ve communicated, you may want to test it against the framework of an organizational conversation and supplement it accordingly.

More conversation in The Triangle,

Lorne

Most of us have seen and even participated in the strings of unproductive emails that lead nowhere. In their wake they have left a carnage of wasted time and bruised egos. This increasing trend to using digital media for conflict resolution is a lousy use of digital tools. These tools are better suited for conversation, clarity, and confirmation but usually NOT for conflict resolution or problem solving. Emailing and texting may be easier and less stressful (initially), but become convenient vehicles of issue and conflict avoidance. Having disagreements and the ability to constructively resolve them are necessary for the progression of any group. We need to embrace the idea of positive conflict, and NOT get slicker at avoiding it, with the right context and medium. And that usually means us talking to each other. Yes, good ole fashioned face to face, “kitchen table” dialogue.

A recent Harvard Business Review blog noted the following difficulties with digital media for conflict resolution and decision making:

1. It is hard to get the EQ (emotional intelligence) right in email. The biggest drawback and danger with email is that the tone and context are easy to misread. In a live conversation, how one says something, with modulations and intonations, is as important as what they are saying. With email it is hard to get the feelings behind the words.
2. Email and text often promote reactive responses, as opposed to progress and action to move forward. Going back to the zero latency expectation in digital communications, it is hard for people to pause and think about what they should say. One of my colleagues suggests not reacting to any incendiary message until you have at least had a night to sleep on it, and always trying to take the higher ground in email. While by definition reactive responses occur in live discourse, they are usually more productive. The irony is that while email, as an asynchronous channel, has the potential to be more thoughtful, it often promotes the opposite tendency to be immediately reactive. Why? Because the bark is almost always bigger than the bite behind remote digital shields.
3. Email prolongs debate. Because of the two reasons above, I have seen too many debates continue well beyond the point of usefulness. Worse, I have experienced situations which start relatively benignly over email, only to escalate because intentions and interests are easily misunderstood online. When I ask people if they have called or asked to meet the counterpart to try and reach a resolution, there is usually a pause, then a sad answer of “no.”

Character Move:

1. Develop your own framework for determining when to use email/ text or to have a live conversation. Have the courage to make personal, authentic, live contact. Be timely! Don’t avoid it and let it stew.
2. Decide to become a MASTER communicator by consciously building a dialogue tool set. It will be one of the most important things you can do for bettering your personal and professional life. If you cannot describe the communication tools and skills you practice then I think you’re kidding yourself about how effective you are (e.g. the STP tool for listening and problem solving in the “free resources” section of www.lornerubis.com.
3. Stop that next unproductive email string, and talk live to your counterpart(s). Keep consciously practicing your “crucial conversation” skills. Embrace the opportunity.

Talking Live and Real in the Triangle,

Lorne

“Well, I had Tucson to Indy all four weeks, and Chicago crews. Eleven out of twelve, there’s twelve flight attendants, individual, never the same flight attendant twice, eleven f***ing over-the-top, f***ing a**-f***ing homosexuals and a granny. Eleven. I mean, think of the odds of that. I thought I was in Chicago, which was party-land.

After that, it was just a continuous stream of gays and grannies and grandes… Well I don’t give a f***. I hate 100 percent of their a**es.

So, six months, I went to the bar three times. In six months, three times. Once with the granny and the f*g, and I wish I hadn’t gone.

At the very end with two girls, one of them that was part do-able, but we ended up going to the bar and then to the crew at St. Louis, and all these two women wanted to do was, one wanted to berate her sister and the other wanted to bitch about her husband.

Literally, for three hours, me and the F.O. (First officer). When that was done, got back to my room, I’m like why the f*** did I stay up?”

The rest of the transcript I heard deteriorated from there. Frankly if I was the CEO of Southwest, I would have fired this guy! I would have gladly taken on any lawsuit to make my point. Apparently he’s attended diversity training since that recording. But my experience is that people like this, who are so blatantly disrespectful and hate filled, will likely think of themselves as victims of misfortune (open mic) or liberalism (the politically correct). But let’s exchange his discrimination of choice to blacks, latinos, disabled; you name the group. It is all wrong. No excuses.

Character Move: If people talk like this in your organization, they need to be stopped. This doesn’t mean staying silent. This means confronting people and telling them that any personal attack is wrong. This takes courage because often the ignorant are bullies too. You could incur their wrath. It won’t be fun. We have the responsibility to treat others and ourselves with the utmost respect. Shame on this pilot for his behavior.

Respect in the Triangle,

Lorne

“First, let’s define gossip: I believe it’s anything you say about another person that you would not say to their face.

There are many consequences to our engaging in this verbal exercise. First, the gossip is often negative or even nasty – and that brings everyone’s mood down, even though it can be a juicy social experience! Most importantly, you label yourself as someone who is unsafe, petty. People almost always wonder “What is he/she saying about me when I am not present?” Other fallout in the workplace includes conflict, hurt feelings, and rumors running rampant.”

Ott acknowledges that while, gossiping is human and commonplace it is unacceptable. She offers some guidelines:

1. Before you open your mouth – check your intention. The only green light would be using this discussion to get help in identifying a solution to deal with the issue or person. Be honest with yourself.
2. There is no trivial comment (verbal or nonverbal) ever made by a leader. Every comment is noticed and given meaning. Never, never speak negatively about any other member of your management team or ANY employee. This includes nonverbal gestures like eye rolling or heavy sighs when the person’s name is mentioned. People will be eager to talk about your negative judgments and they will spread faster than a virus.
3. When you hear what sounds like a rumor, gently ask the person if they have “checked it out” with the source or would be willing to do so. Stop feeding the rumor mill.
4. If you are with someone or a group and the talk turns to bad-mouthing someone else, politely excuse yourself (…gotta go!) or gently say something like “I’m uncomfortable talking about _______ when they are not here. Let’s change the subject.” Listening to gossip perpetuates it – silence doesn’t count.

Gossiping flies directly in the face of respect as a value. Let’s be self accountable about gossiping. If you and I stop it, the chain is broken.

Character Move: let’s be really observant about gossiping. Let’s see if we can go a week without participating in gossip. Let’s build from there.

No gossiping in the Triangle,

Lorne

I have given a lot of thought about my communication skills and ways to improve them.  Here’s what I wish I had understood early in my career.  Effective communicating is almost ALL about CONNECTING and just a little about presenting.

1. Connect with the audience by “playing” for them more than you!

Every successful artist or entertainer knows this but it’s not talked about much in business. Here it is: when presenting, we have to be giving all that we have for our audience. They have to believe that we care about them and that our presentation is sincerely meaningful for them. Groups can sense when it’s more about you and what you have to sell.  It’s not about how you sound, how flashy your PowerPoint is, etc. Whether around a lunch room or boardroom table, when we are given center stage our content has to connect to what matters to the listeners. It works better if the audience includes great listeners, but we are accountable for all aspects of the connection: from the subtleties of eye contact to the precision and clarity of language that makes them feel what you’re talking about.  Whitney Johnson, a founding partner and president of Rose Park Advisers, shares a personal experience that reinforces this in a recent Harvard Business Review blog.

2. Paint a picture or tell a story so they feel the content not just hear it.

John Kotter, emeritus professor at Harvard Business School and one of the leading experts on organization effectiveness, tells the following story in his book The Heart of Change: Read-Life Stories of How People Change their Organizations.

A large organization had an inefficient purchasing process, and one mid-level executive believed that money was constantly being wasted with each of the organization’s factories handling their own purchases. He thought there could be tremendous savings from consolidating the procurement effort. He put together a “business case” for change but it went nowhere. His boss said that senior executives didn’t feel it was truly a big problem, especially with so many other daily challenges taking up their time. So the manager had an idea: he collected the 424 different kinds of work gloves the factories collectively purchased and tagged each one with its different price and supplier. He carted the gloves in and dumped them on the boardroom table before a senior executive team meeting. He first showed the pile to his boss, who was taken aback by this powerful visual display of the waste inherent in having dozens of different factories negotiate different deals for the items they needed! The boss showed the CEO, who scrapped the meeting agenda to talk about procurement because what he was looking at was so memorable, so compelling, and so real. It galvanized the executives to action. Ultimately, they overhauled their procurement process and saved a great deal of money. 

John Kotter’s blog has more on this point. Too many times in my life I’ve walked away from a meeting with the “they just don’t get it” attitude. The harsh truth is that I didn’t get the “it” to them. I didn’t put the “gloves on the table.”

Character Move: Remember that in being a great communicator Connection more than just content is King.  When we have the stage, play for the crowd and think before hand what your “424 glove moment” is going to be.

Connect in the Triangle,

Lorne

“Who is responsible for making the first move to clear up a miscommunication?” Peter’s response, “Whoever sees it first.” I couldn’t agree more. It is not about who is right or wrong or who makes the first move.  It is about clearing up the misunderstanding. And as I stress so often, it’s the self accountable thing to do.

“How do we know that there is something deeper going on in a communication process?”  Peter’s view is that “tone” is a clue. When the tone of the discussion has an edge to it  there is probably something not right. That may seem so obvious but how many times do we just run by that signal? My view is that this is a good time to really be present and try to take in those vibrations Evelyn talks about.

If the other person’s response or view does not seem reasonable, especially when that person is normally reasonable, this is an alarm bell that something deeper is driving the response. Bregman’s advice: “Don’t slam the other person for being unreasonable. And don’t make the mistake of telling that person what they’re really trying to say. Instead, even if you think you know what’s going on, ask a question.” Holy cow… I couldn’t agree more. And don’t ask a patronizing or loaded question. First ask yourself what’s going on and then ask the other person genuinely what is going on; you need to understand their feelings at a much deeper level.

The Respect value of the Character Triangle is based on listening and understanding. At work we come from such different angles and today much of our contact is remote.  Fighting for understanding is the best for our team mates and the best for us too. It is however, hard work. It may be easier at the outset to ignore the miscommunication but it has a negative cumulative effect on our relationship. Be self accountable; take the action to address it. Respect means asking a lot of questions for understanding. Bregman gives us a few good practical guides.

with Character,

Lorne