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The Advisor’s Corner – How Should I, as a Leader, Communicate?

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How Should I, as a Leader, Communicate?Question:

Everyone talks about communication being a problem in our company. As a leader, what am I supposed to do about it?

StrategyDriven Response: (by Roxi Hewertson, StrategyDriven Principal Contributor)

A recent Development Dimensions International study, Driving Workplace Performance through High-Quality Conversations: What leaders must do every day to be effective, reminds us in no uncertain terms, that leaders, peers and direct reports need to hold more effective conversations at work to receive more effective business performance.

Technology gets a lot of the blame for the continued degradation of communication skills among leaders over the past two decades. But technology, like any tool, can be used in positive or negative ways. What really matters is how we choose to communicate and how we choose to use our tools. Technology works well for:

  • Sharing information,
  • Setting up meetings,
  • Keeping records

But it does not work well when:

  • We need to have a dialogue and a conversation,
  • We copy the world to cover our bases or boost our egos,
  • There is emotion involved

Since communication norms are deeply woven into the fabric of every organization’s culture, this challenge starts with the CEO and involves all his or her leaders. The DDI study validates how important emotional intelligence competencies, particularly self-awareness and social skills are in human interactions.

Everything we do happens through our relationships – at work and outside of work. When communication is poor or stops, the relationship is poor or stops. In the DDI study, the authors point out that senior leaders have not mastered these communication skills any better than less senior leaders, even though they have been at it longer. To me this strongly indicates we think we are communicating well when we simply… are not.

Take a few moments over the next several days to see if you notice any of these poor interaction habits in yourself and/or leaders you know:

  • Jumping to task before understanding the full picture.
    One solution: Take the time to gather information and listen carefully.
  • Unskilled at, or choosing not to have, effective conversations.
    One solution: Learn this skill or get out of leadership.
  • Failing to engage others in decisions that impact them.
    One solution: Ask yourself, “Who is impacted by this decisions?” Then, engage those people in the process.
  • Failing to demonstrate authentic empathy.
    One solution: Slow down and truly put yourself in another person’s shoes. What might it be like to be him or her right now? Don’t know? Ask.
  • Ego and personal agenda driven.
    One solution: Ask yourself, “Do I really need to be or prove I am right? Or do I want my team to succeed no matter whose idea it is?”
  • Unable to facilitate a productive meeting or discussion.
    One solution: Learn these skills and/or engage skilled facilitators to help you.

The systemic, long-term solution to improving interaction and communication skills in your organization is to make it MATTER. It’s quite simple to do…

What you reward is what you will get. What you don’t reward, you will get much less often.

Leaders generally know what a good conversation looks like. Knowing is the easy part. Doing is the hard part. The leader’s number ONE responsibility is to create and nurture a culture that will bring out the best in their people. Those choices and priorities will roll downhill. This is particularly true for the behaviors we model for our direct reports – all the way from the C-Suite to the front line.

At the end of the day, when we are not truly listening, we are not leading. Period.

About the Author

Leadership authority Roxana (Roxi) Hewertson is a no-nonsense business veteran revered for her nuts-and-bolts, tell-it-like-it-is approach and practical, out-of-the-box insights that help both emerging and expert managers, executives and owners boost quantifiable job performance in various mission critical facets of business. Through AskRoxi.com, Roxi — “the Dear Abby of Leadership” — imparts invaluable free advice to managers and leaders at all levels, from the bullpen to the boardroom, to help them solve problems, become more effective and realize a higher measure of business and career success.

The StrategyDriven website was created to provide members of our community with insights to the actions that help create the shared vision, focus, and commitment needed to improve organizational alignment and accountability for the achievement of superior results. We look forward to answering your strategic planning and tactical business execution questions. Please email your questions to [email protected].

Getting closer to the customer is the key issue for Marketing Execs

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What are the most important topics for marketers?

Last month, in an online vote with Incite Marketing and Communications, 579 marketers ranked the following as their top five topics:

1. Data-driven creativity: An oxymoron? Use what you learn to drive better marketing campaigns
2. Think Fast, Act Faster: Real-time insight for quick decision-making and responsive marketing
3. Hit them when they’re listening: Choose the right channels, and use them at the right time for better engagement
4. Keeping it super-relevant – Personalized Marketing: Granular customer understanding to ensure every message is relevant
5. Define your impact on the bottom line: How new data sources give you more detail on your marketing’s effectiveness

So, what does the above tell us about the state of mind of executive marketers in June 2013?

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About the Author

Nick Johnson is the founder of Useful Social Media and Incite Marketing and Communications. Johnson runs a business devoted to facilitating conversation between, and asking challenging questions of, the marketing and communications community. Moving beyond standard business intelligence models, he leads a team devoted to building a customer-centric business delivering real value through the creation of an exclusive, dynamic community of senior strategists.

The difference between presentation and communication

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How do you communicate?
How good of a communicator are you?

If you want to make a winning sales pitch, it takes a combination of your presentation skills and your communication skills. It’s the little known sales skill: How to get others to listen to you. Or better stated, WANT to listen to you.

SALES TRAINING REALITY: Time is spent on presentation skills, and the presentation itself, but very little or no time is spent on communication skills. Until now.

All your life you heard the lesson: It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it.
Presentation is what you say.
Communication is how you say it.

The best way to clarify communication skills is to ask you to think about the teachers and professors you had in school. Sometimes the most brilliant ones were the worst communicators – and as a result, left you short of both education and inspiration.

Then think of the teachers you loved. You couldn’t wait to get to their class, and you hung on their every word. In fact, you still remember him or her and you talk about them. They were great communicators.

In sales, great communication skills are one of the lost secrets of success. Sales messages focus around ‘value prop’ and ‘value add’ and other sales drivel. You get a slide deck form marketing, that’s both boring and repetitive – WITH NOT ONE WORD ON HOW TO COMMUNICATE YOUR MESSAGE.

Here are several “wake up” questions to get you thinking about your communication – and I’ll throw in a few challenges:

  • What is the clarity of the meaning behind your message? What’s your motive?
  • How clear is your delivered message? Not clear to you, clear to them.
  • How understandable is your message? Would I get it, and agree with it?
  • What’s the attitude behind your spoken words? What’s the tone of your words? How do they sound?
  • Are your gestures in harmony with your words and your delivery? Do your gestures indicate and confirm a relaxed, confident style?
  • How succinct is your message? Short and sweet or way too long?
  • Does your message or your words sound scripted or insincere? Conversational is the best communication strategy.
  • How organized is your message? Are you fumbling or on a roll?
  • Does your message have a start and a finish? A finish that ends in a commitment from the prospective customer?
  • Do you make solid and consistent eye contact? Especially when asking for the sale or confirming the offer.
  • Are you making statements or asking questions? Who are the questions in favor of? NOTE WELL: Questions create interactive dialog, and will tell you, both by body language and gestures, the level of genuine connection – the smiles, the willingness to talk and tell the truth.
  • How transferable is your message? Does the prospect “get it,” and agree with it?
  • Are you asking for confirmation that what you’re saying is completely understandable?
  • Can anyone/everyone define exactly what you mean to say?
  • Do you talk too fast? Only your recording will tell you that.
  • Are you using industry buzzwords that could create misunderstanding? Classic example of miscommunication.
  • Are you using acronyms that everyone understands, or are you just showing off? Another classic example of miscommunication.

And the ultimate self-tests of communication:

  • Have you ever recorded your message so you can hear your own communication skill level? Most salespeople have not.
  • Have you played your message for others? A huge opportunity for coaching and improvement of your communication skills.

I TWEETED THIS: A passionate message without clarity will fall on deaf ears. #gitomer #communication

The object of communication, especially sales communication, is for others to UNDERSTAND your message, AGREE with your message, and then TAKE the correct ACTION. Buy.

If you’re really interested in better communication skills, take a course in it. Dale Carnegie (www.dalecarnegie.com) offers the best programs. All of them are based around the 75-year-old business book classic, How To Win Friends and Influence People. It doesn’t get any better than that.

If your communication skills are the heart of your sales message, maybe it’s time to uncover just how strong they are.

Reprinted with permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer.

About the Author

Jeffrey Gitomer is the author of The Sales Bible, Customer Satisfaction is Worthless Customer Loyalty is Priceless, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, The Little Black Book of Connections, The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way, The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching, The Little Teal Book of Trust, The Little Book of Leadership, and Social BOOM! His website, www.gitomer.com, will lead you to more information about training and seminars, or email him personally at [email protected].

What’s the sincerity level of your message?

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When someone tells me to “Have a nice day,” I don’t think they mean it. I think they’re just saying it as a kind of mundane, almost impolite, form of politeness. Forced nicety. Said out of habit, not sincerity. To me, it’s not just thoughtless, it’s also meaningless. Heck, half the time people don’t even look at you when they say it.

Oh, they don’t mean it as an insult. People say, “Have a nice day,” because they don’t know what else to say. Or don’t care what they say. Or they are trained to say it.

But think about it. Do they only mean THAT day? Do they want me to have a crappy tomorrow? Or they will go so far as to say, “Have a good rest of the week.” What does that mean, I’m going to have a horrible weekend? Or month? Or year? Or life?

If you are going to say something to me, or your customer, make it sincere, make it meaningful, and make it relevant. Otherwise, I mentally check you off – the same way you check people off. And the question here is, are you being checked off?

Consistency of message and expression is important – but NOT ROBOTIC.
Give people leeway to be human.

Boring and insincere typically has a way of permeating everything else in a company. The color of your logo.

  • The politically correctness of your slide show.
  • The stuffiness of your business card.
  • The boringness of your job title.

Who cares? ONLY YOU! (Your marketing people, your ad agency, yada, yada) Anyone preparing “boring” marketing tools in this day and age should be forced to take that crap out on a sales call and see how CUSTOMERS perceive it or care ten cents about it.

The key word is SINCERITY.
The secondary word is DIFFERENTIATION.

Here are some GOLDEN opportunities to be creatively sincere:

  • At the fast food window
  • When customers walk in your store
  • When customers pay for something
  • When customers board the plane
  • When customers are about to order in a restaurant
  • When customers are sent an invoice

These are all opportunities to prove differentiation, be sincere, and even WOW the customer.

  • Marketing and HR people: Get off your corporate hobby horse and saddle up your creative brain!
  • Employees: You’re an individual, not some kind of automated answering device. (Don’t get me started. Reality, if my call is so darn important, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, don’t tell me about it.) Use your friendliness and creativity to craft a message that the customer perceives as real.

FORCED CORPORATE POLITENESS: I love it when service reps or managers candidly you’re your piece, the other person is clearly wrong, won’t admit it, but are under corporate edict to be polite, but you know they hate you, and their life when they tersely ask, “Will there be anything else?” Makes me smile and feel sad all at once.

Southwest Airlines is anything but politically correct. Their people are happy, their customers are happy, their message is clear, and they make a TON of money. Jeez, I wonder if there’s a correlation!

What about you? How sincere are you?

Here are 4 things you can do tomorrow without anyone’s permission:

  • Look me in the eye. Make sure there’s a locked-in moment
  • Say something slightly different. “You’re all set.” vs. “Thanks for your business.”
  • Shake my hand like you mean it. Firm, with eye contact.
  • Smile. When you smile, it makes others smile.

IDEA: Make a goal to create 12 smiles a day through your words, actions or deeds. Creativity and sincerity will automatically materialize.

Have a nice day!

Reprinted with permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer.

About the Author

Jeffrey Gitomer is the author of The Sales Bible, Customer Satisfaction is Worthless Customer Loyalty is Priceless, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, The Little Black Book of Connections, The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way, The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching, The Little Teal Book of Trust, The Little Book of Leadership, and Social BOOM! His website, www.gitomer.com, will lead you to more information about training and seminars, or email him personally at [email protected].

Business Communications Best Practice 4 – Limit Expanding Ambiguity

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StrategyDriven Business Communications Article | Growing UncertaintyWe’re familiar with the childhood game where a verbal message is shared child-to-child around a seated circle and the last person in the chain hears a message completely different than the original oration. We experience this same expanding ambiguity in our business communications. These, however, are not a game and the differences can greatly impact the bottom line. Consequently, the question becomes why do our communications morph and how can these changes be limited?

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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.