Category Archives: listening

How To Be A Generous Listener

Posted on May 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” — Winston Churchill

The biggest influencing skill is the skill of listening. You cannot hope to be heard until you’ve listened. Your influence will only reach to the extent you’ve payed and attention – and have been seen to pay attention.

As a listener, most of what we think of as listening happens inside our head. Let’s set the table and invite our speaker to sit with us:

Be a Generous Listener

Generous listening is the assumption of favourable intent. It means if somebody says something that can be taken in more than one way, they meant the good way. Or they are, in their own way, trying to help you. Or maybe you misunderstood?

I told a close friend of mine once that she “had to own her own shit.” I meant that she had to take responsibility for her own emotions and actions. She thought I had said “had to eat her own shit.” A subtle but important difference. Hilarity ensued.

Be a Respectful Listener

Is it safe to tell you bad news or give unfavourable feedback? Can you handle the truth? Listening means being vulnerable sometimes. Putting yourself out there. Exposing yourself to things that are hard to hear and maybe even hurtful.

Can you be compassionate and understand that the person telling you the bad news might be feeling vulnerable too? That if they’re telling you something unfavourable that it might actually be happening?

Be a Calm Listener

Your silence is not mean you agree with what is being said. Not interrupting, however, shows respect. Not interrupting is listening.

Sometimes people take a while to get to their point. They need to feel safe before they can get to what they really want. Personally this drives me nuts, but my therapist was really good at it.

President Lyndon Johnson was especially good at this. He could actively listen for hours, and spent much time on the telephone, waiting patiently to pounce when the speaker got to what they really wanted. [On listening to Johnson's private phone calls]

Your Actions

Can you think of a conversation you’ve had in the past that might have gone differently with using any one of these techniques? What upcoming conversation can you apply these techniques too?

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Posted in communications, conflict, conversation, engagement, influencing, leadership, listening, relationships

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Outstanding Entrepreneurs Do This Well

Posted on May 20, 2012 | Leave a comment

Are you getting sucked back into the daily drama, details, and problem solving that you (supposedly) hired others to take care of? Are you unable to pull your head out of the minutia of running a business to think about where that business needs to go next? Are you reacting to daily and hourly crises instead of being “proactive”?

Sprinter and Rabbits

If you’re a successful entrepreneur, you probably have a strong bias towards action. You’re a doer, a decider, the action gal. It’s a big part of why you’re successful. Like a fast running sprinter, or the hard to catch rabbit, you move fast..

A sprinter runs so fast and so hard they leave everybody else behind in the parking lot. That’s good if you’re ahead of your competition. If you’re leading a business it may be a problem.

If everybody else is still trying to figure out where the finish line is when you’ve already crossed it, then you’re not really being a leader. The idea of leadership is to get everybody across the finish line as quickly as possible. Not just you.

The rabbit is also fast. A rabbit who is trying to evade a coyote will zig-zag and change direction quickly. Also not a bad thing if you’re taking advantage of opportunities and can change direction quickly to stay ahead of your competitors.

This doesn’t mean your staff knows which way you’re going next, or if they’ll be able to keep up. It may seem to them that they’re chasing a crazy rabbit who keeps changing its mind.

If Nobody Else Can Keep Up, Maybe They Aren’t the Problem

Your bias to action comes with a blind spot, sometimes. Making sure the team understands where you’re going next as a company. This helps them make decisions that line up with the company strategy (so you don’t have to), or anticipate where they need to be next. You may be frustrated that people don’t seem to get it, or keep up, or have the same excitement or energy or engagement as you. But they’re frustrated with you too.

They’re frustrated because you’ve left them behind, or they’re tired of chasing your zig-zagging rabbit backside. They can’t see the stuff you, the leader, can see.  And you’ve taken off without sharing what’s happening in your brain. So what are they supposed to do next? You could hire mind-readers, but my wife isn’t available.

You’ve lost your staff. As an entrepreneur or leader you can’t do it all yourself, and you’ve learned (hopefully) how to delegate and supervise. This frees you up to do what you do best: Create and discover new opportunities, get out in front of emerging markets, anticipate changes, hire the right people.

You may keep getting sucked back into the daily drama, details, and problem solving that you hired others to take care of because you keep running away without telling them where the finish line is.

You Need Them, They Need You

You do have to recognize that people can’t read your mind. People don’t know what you know, and they certainly don’t know what you’re thinking. Changes in speed and direction need energy, especially for the non-rabbits.

Those  detail guys and gals sometimes drive you nuts, but they keep you out of trouble. Worker bees get the mundane but important things done every day. The ones that are effective and efficient and complete because they take their time and think things through. And drive you crazy because they can never decide anything without you.

Maybe you can’t slow down to their speed, and maybe they can’t accelerate to yours. But you can meet them halfway.

What You Can Do

* Think a little more

Sit on your new ideas before throwing them out, and expecting people to understand what they’re supposed to do next. Not every idea you have is a good one, so don’t overwhelm the detail guys and gals with stuff that’s not going to happen because you change your mind tomorrow

* Over-communicate.

Keep your message simple and repeat it constantly. If you can’t explain what your company does and who its customers are in a way an eighth grader can understand, then it’s not simple enough.

* Listen more than you talk

Close the loop and listen as intently to your internal staff as you do your customers. You listen to your customers, right? This will tell you if your message is getting through, and having the desired effect. Adjust as necessary.

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Posted in coaching, communications, conflict, delegation, developing staff, engagement, execution, leadership, listening, mentoring, motivating, self-awareness, teamwork

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Is Your Company Listening?

Posted on April 29, 2012 | Leave a comment

The problem is never the problem. The response to the problem is almost always the real problem. (Perception is all there is.) ~ Tom Peters

Some business owners react badly to social media. One of my clients was railing against on-line criticism, now that he was on Facebook. He took it seriously, superior service being a big part of his strategy, and something he personally believed in. It’s how he was and how he built his business.

He couldn’t make somebody take it back, he couldn’t fix it. For the action-oriented entrepreneur guy that he was frustrated.

Then he went for lunch with another very smart woman, who told him: “Garry, people have always been saying that kind of thing about your business. The only difference now is that you’re hearing it.”

When he related this too me he was calm. The realization was, he told me, that the internet wasn’t just about getting his message out. It was also about hearing what his customers had to say and using that to make his business better. Even when what his customers had to say was something he didn’t really want to hear.

Especially when what his customers had to say was something he didn’t want to hear.

My recommendation? If you want to have an effective on-line presence, it’s less about pushing your message and more about listening to your customers. As Covey said: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Here is an example of good “seeking” that I wrote about earlier this year, when I wrote about my encounter with an on-line bookstore. They listened hard and used it as an opportunity to turn my customer experience around.

What is your company doing to listen to your customers? What you’ve heard and what you feel doesn’t count. What does the research and the facts tell you? What are your customer actually saying?

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Posted in customer relations, feedback, listening, media

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Simple Communications For Outstanding Managers

Posted on March 12, 2012 | 1 Comment

Got a meeting request from my manager the other day. It had a simple title: “Performance Review”. Nothing else.

Now some more context: I’m not against performance appraisals, and welcome the opportunity to sit down with my boss and see where we’re at. Haven’t have one in a while. So this is good.

Yet I was in a mild panic. To quote Hortsman’s Christmas Rule: if it’s important, and you don’t do it very often, it’s going to be stressful. Just like Christmas. Was it just me he was having this chat with? Did I miss something? Who else was going to be there? What did he want to talk about?

My response was: “Anything you’d like me to prepare?”

Now I get accused of being too nice sometimes, so maybe I could have worded that a little more strongly. I was a little pissed but didn’t want to show it. At least not yet.

Back in my Air Cadet days, one of the leadership troupes they taught us about communicating and speechifying was: tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them. A little simple but it worked for fourteen-year-old brains. This communique didn’t have any of those elements.

So here I am, doing what I think is a fairly decent job, and now I’m wondering if I’m getting called on the carpet, in trouble, or even about to get fired. No worries, I’ve kept my network warmed up and ready to go. I figure I’m good.

The other thing that was missing was what I like to call the Three Questions. When doing a presentation or communicating, ask yourself: what three questions would my audience like answered? 

That helps take us out of the “what do I need to say” and into a “what do they want to hear” mode. Being more focused on the audience helps us connect with them better.

It wasn’t two hours before the boss came out with a follow-up email which explained his intentions, agenda, and what he’d like us all to prepare for our one-on-one sessions. Turns out this is going to be a regular, on-going check-in for all of us. Some two-way communication going on. Yeah!

Which I’m sure was his intention in the first place. He just forget I can’t read his mind. Maybe asking “what three things does my audience want to know” might have avoided any of the short-lived misunderstandings.

p.s. this works for public speaking, town-hall meetings, newsletters, etc. too. What three things does your audience want to know?

p.p.s goes to show that even us experts get things wrong once in a while. The hardest thing about management is not managing, sometimes it’s remembering what to do in the right context at the right time.

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Posted in communications, emotional intelligence, listening, performance appraisal, performance review

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No Points for Difficulty

Posted on March 5, 2012 | Leave a comment

Running a business is not like Olympic diving. You don’t get points for difficulty. Which is why is was a little frustrated with one of my clients last week. We were talking about role scorecards – a one-page description of the key responsibilities, measures, and expected behaviour of any position.

We’d done a good job of walking through the CEO role, but when I’d asked them to replicate the same for other roles, she sent me a two page description of roles and responsibilities. She said it’s what “she needs”.

OK, fine, but in the end it’s not about us. It’s about them. It’s about making clear to the people working for us what’s expected of them. But the longer we talk about it (or the more we write about it) the less clear it becomes. Which is why getting a job description down to one page is really really hard, but really really worth it.

I was emptying the dishwasher and catching up with my teenage daughter on the weekend, telling her about my week. Now maybe I’ve just rubbed off on her a bit, but she got it.

This is a girl who wants to open her own retail fashion store one day, and gets that if she wants to design and manufacture her own clothing line, she’s going to have to a) make money, and b) have people working for her that can do the job. Business is hard enough. Why make it harder?

I hugged her. She doesn’t let me hug her very often, but this time I insisted.

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Posted in communications, emotional intelligence, focus, listening, motivating, relationships

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Improv Rules For Business and Life (Part II)

Posted on January 30, 2012 | Leave a comment

Part 2 of Karl & Bernie’s conversation about how the rules for comedy improvisation can and should be applied to business and life. Have fun!

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Posted in behaviour, communications, emotional intelligence, engagement, execution, feedback, focus, listening, motivating, persauding, teamwork

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How to Piss Off Your Internet Customers

Posted on January 23, 2012 | 7 Comments

I don’t like to use my blog as a soapbox for complaining. I like to use it as a soapbox instead. But recently I got perturbed by a company’s shoddy website design, which made me feel like they really just didn’t care to have me as a customer.

Please view this as an exercise in how _not_ to treat your customers. The actions applicable to your company are left as an exercise for the reader, but this at least:

Make sure your organization’s feedback mechanisms are actually working. Yours are? Really? Prove it.*

Update: I have a call with Martin, a customer service rep from Indigo, scheduled for this afternoon. They’ve done at least one thing right: monitoring the social media for signs that things aren’t going well. Good catch. I’ll let you know how it goes. 

Update #2: Just finished my call with Martin, a pleasant CSR who walked through all my issues with me and documented them for his Vice President. After my initial experience I have to say I’m impressed. They were on top of things right away, and even if the website is a little kludgy, they’ve won me back. I’ll try again. Thank-you.

“Dear Unnamed Traditional Bookstore Trying to Claw Back Market Share From Amazon,

Why are you making it so hard to use your website? There’s no reason for it and it just makes you look stupid, as if you don’t want customers, or both.

1) When hitting the feedback button, and I’m ALREADY SIGNED IN, why do I have to fill in my name and e-mail address again? You already know who I am.
<Yes, I realize I’m shouting. there’s no reason for bad interface design. This is bad design at it’s worst: punishing the user for your lack of forethought. Ever heard of a “use case“? They’ve been around for a while.>

2) My original challenge was to add an existing reward card to my account. In this regard the help is less than helpful. Telling me that I can do it, but not telling me how or providing a simple link to the appropriate form is just malicious. Hunting around the “My Account” pages (which also has dead links, by the way) hasn’t endeared me to your company either. Maybe it’s there, but I can’t find it. MAKE THINGS EASY FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS PLEASE!

3) I received an e-mail from you because of my in-store rewards card. The e-mail led me to a website that encouraged me to create an account, which I did. I now have two reward card numbers? Really? Isn’t that just confusing for your customers and a headache for your staff? Isn’t the cost of administering two numbers for one customer driving up your cost and reducing your responsiveness?

4) When I finally hit the submit button I expect my feedback will actually submit. Instead it gets stuck in limbo and never actually reaches your company servers. That’s time and effort I’m never going to get back.

I came to the website looking for an e-reader, ut if you can’t run a simple retail website why should I trust you with my money? Retail e-commerce is not that easy, but it’s not like you’re inventing the wheel here, is it? It’s been done before.

I was sceptical that I wanted an e-reader to begin with. Some of my clients and peers told me I should really try it out. I like books. I like the feel, the weight, the fact that I can write in the margins and turn down the pages. That I can go back years later and re-read my favourites, lend them to friends, or even pass them down to my children.

You think I’m kidding? My wife has a cabinet with glass doors dedicated to her grandmother’s leather bound books. That grandmother was one of the first women to graduate from McGill University at the turn of the last century with a degree in literature. We don’t have a family room downstairs. We have a library with room for a TV and a sofa.

I’ll stick to my real-life books for now**, and you’ve lost a revenue stream.

In summary:

1) Stop wasting my time (like identifying myself more than once, looking for simple functionality that doesn’t exist, submitting feedback that doesn’t get to you)

2) Stop doing things more than once (like issuing more than one loyalty number to a customer)

3) If you want feedback, please make sure the mechanism for submitting that feedback works so you can identify and fix issues.

Kindest Regards
Bernie May

* This post started with me actually filling in the feedback form on the Indigo / Chapters / Coles “Plum Rewards” website. When I hit the submit button it didn’t actually go anywhere. That’s when my calm became damaged.

** Just in case you think me a Luddite, I begin my professional life as a programmer. Most of my hesitation about getting an e-reader centre around Digital Rights Management, which have real-world impacts.

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Posted in customer relations, listening, relationships, selling

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Improv Rules Applied to Business and Life

Posted on January 16, 2012 | Leave a comment

So my buddy Karl and I finally recorded another podcast on the topic of Improv Lessons for the Corporate World. Give a listen and let us know what you think.

You can also find some previous resources at:

Karl’s guest blog on Give Feedback
Rules of Thumb for Improv in Life and Business: Embrace Failure, Reject Fear 

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Posted in behaviour, communications, creativity, focus, leadership, listening, teamwork

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How Your Body Language Is Hurting You

Posted on October 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

Imagine the following unfolding in a boardroom: the CEO is holding his head in his hands, both palms covering his entire face. The person reporting to him is leaning back in his chair, ankle on knee, hands behind his back. The subordinate seems to be totally oblivious to the CEO. Even without hearing the words being spoken, what conclusions can you draw from this scenario?

My perception of the message was: “To hell with all of you. I didn’t meet the commitments I made. I don’t care, and there’s nothing you’re going to do about it.” Without intending to, and totally undermining his own credibility and long-standing relationships.

Was this his intended message? Probably not. He works in a high-stress, highly volatile, deadline driven world. He’s good at what he does. I assume he wants to see the company succeed and grow. So why the subtle but loud message that contradicts this?

Bottom Line:

1. Watch your own body language. Especially when you’re under the gun.

2. You get paid for results, not effort. When reporting, give the results first and the story second.

When you’re reporting to your boss, you’ve either delivered what you promised, or you haven’t. If you haven’t and you start be describing all the effort (not the result) you’re not fooling anybody. If you have and you start with the story, you’re giving the (false) impression that you’re making excuses.

Further Reading:

Body Language Basics for Dates and Job Interviews

How Science Can Teach You to Spot a Liar

How To Build Relationships Without Talking

 

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Posted in behaviour, communications, conflict, emotional intelligence, engagement, influencing, listening, relationships, self-awareness

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What Are You Communicating?

Posted on July 25, 2011 | 1 Comment

One of the more frequent issues facing organizations is around internal communication. Sometimes employees say they don’t know what’s going on despite great effort made at communicating, or the leader has a clear idea of where they want to go but nobody seems to be following.

Even worse is when the leadership thinks it’s doing a good job communicating (“Look, we have a newsletter!”), but the internal survey comes back with “lack of communication” written all over it. This is what I like to call failing the “Am I smoking crack?” check.

Good news: at least you’re checking. That puts you ahead of 90% of the companies out there.

What simple behaviors do leaders who communicate well engage in? Here’s a couple of things I’ve noticed.

  1. Listen  - Maybe your one-way communication to your organization isn’t the problem. Maybe it’s that you’re not listening to what they’re saying. People generally aren’t ready to listen until they feel they’ve been heard. Maybe they’re trying to tell you something important? What are you telling people when you listen to them.
  2. Have a Simple and Consistent Message- remember KISS? “Keep it Simple Stupid?” The “stupid” in this case is not the people you’re talking to. It’s you. If you think that a wordy, complicated, bland message  is going to engage people to action then you’re being stupid.If you’re going to ask people to listen to you at least do them the courtesy and have the courage to actually say something. Be bold, brave, and brief.What is your message?
  3. Link Purpose to Action- can you answer the “So What?” question? Does everybody in your organization know where they fit in? If they don’t know how what they do supports the company – what the company is trying to do and what their part is – then they tend to switch off.If you can’t draw a line between somebody’s role  in your company to the company’s larger vision, strategy, and goals, then why do they work for you again?
  4. See Every Interaction as an Opportunity – every interaction with all employees is an opportunity to communicate. Beginning at the hiring process, on-boarding, newsletters, celebrations, feedback, one-on-ones, coaching, how your company runs meetings, who you fire (or not), who you promote(or not), etc. All the simple things that outstanding managers do well.How does your company behave during a crisis? What does how often and how you communicate say about you and your company? Sometimes it’s a case of “your actions are so loud I can’t hear what you’re saying”.
  5. Forget E-Mail – notice how I didn’t mention e-mails (until now). If you think you’re communicating through e-mail you might want to have another think.  Talking a lot is also not communicating (see point 1. above).
How important do you think communication is in your current rôle? How much time do you think you spend communicating? How much time do you dedicate to “communicating” (and listening) in your daily schedule?

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Posted in behaviour, change, coaching, communications, conflict, delegation, engagement, execution, feedback, influencing, listening, mentoring, motivating, persauding

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