Category Archives: relationships

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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Stay Calm and Carry On

Posted on May 14, 2012 | Leave a comment

Photo by Shayne Kaye. Used under the Creative Common Attribution license.

Sometimes things happen you can’t plan for. Like riding your bike up the back of a bear. My trainer says she didn’t see the bear until she was on top of it. Literally, with her mountain bike.

She came around the corner, peddling furiously, looking over her shoulder and trying to stay ahead of the Scout troop following her. Scouting in Calgary has many advantages. Access to the mountains and wildlife are some of them.

The bear was sitting in the middle of the single track, facing uphill. The way she told us the story at the training workshop, she didn’t understand what had happened until the bear turned to look over its shoulder at her. It’s one of those “no sh*t, there I was” stories that’s funny only later when you’re telling it around the campfire.

She backed down slowly, keeping herself between the mother bear and cubs and the Scouts. By hand signals and whispering they got back to the last branch in the trail and took a different route.

That’s the kind of leadership I prefer. Calm, competent, cool. There are many things that could have gone wrong with this scenario, and any drama on the leader’s part wouldn’t have helped.

What do I mean by drama? In an already emotionally laden and potentially dangerous scenario adding more emotion is drama. If she’d screamed, or panicked, or froze, or attacked, things could have gone very horribly wrong.

Worst places to work? One sign is when your day depends on the boss’s mood. “Better keep your head down. Ian is in a foul mood because the budget is due.” Managers and executives need to control and manage their emotions instead of letting their emotions manage them.

Be enthusiastic, be positive, have fun. All good. But if you’re angry, or yelling, or throwing things, or even quietly calling people names now you’re either out of control or you’re a bully. Now you’re a “boss-hole”. Not inspirational nor effective in the long run.

It’s a simple thing outstanding managers do well – keep calm, be consistent.

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Posted in behaviour, conflict, emotional intelligence, influencing, leadership, outstanding managers, relationships, self-awareness

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Your Profile Is Not An Excuse

Posted on April 15, 2012 | Leave a comment

I’m a fairly detailed, action-oriented kind of guy. In fact, if you look at my DISC profile, I’m about as far away from the “people” side of the chart as you can get. But it’s not an excuse for me to be a jerk.

What it is an opportunity for me to understand how other people see me, and how might sometimes need to change my behaviour to be more effective in working with other people. Notice how I said “change my behaviour”.

Sometimes people seem to think that learning about communication styles and behavioural profiles is  to learn how to manipulate people. The question they’re trying to answer is “How do I make other people do what I want?” The answer is “You don’t.”

What you can do is understand how and when changing your own behaviour makes you a more effective leader, team member, or follower. Where your own blind spots might be. To understand that it’s not always personal, or about you, or about them being a jerk, a liar, a bully, or a milk toast. Their perception of the world is different.

Stated more accurately, your perspective of the world is different from theirs. “They”, people who see the world differently, are in the majority. It’s not up to them to change.

I’m never going to be a Brian Mulroney or a Bill Clinton, with my own personal charismatic-reality-distortion-field. But I can learn to sit up straight, smile, speak clearly, and look people in the eye when I talk to them. In fact, I like to think I’ve done a pretty good job at that, and it’s made me better and more effective in my job.

What are your blind spots? How can you meet the rest of the world half way?

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Posted in behaviour, change, communications, emotional intelligence, influencing, relationships, self improvement, self-awareness, teamwork

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It’s About People, Really

Posted on March 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

I got a huge compliment from one of the company partners this week. He said “You’ve done a great job learning to connect with people the last year.” Now, this might sound like a left-handed complement, but for me it’s something that I’ve consciously focused on the last little while. I’ll never be a Bill Clinton, but it’s something that was important to get better at.

Changing behaviour like that is hard and requires continuous focus. I came from a software and project management background, and in my earlier life I was little better than most at persuading people to work together. Which is to say that I was a little better than a company full of engineers, programmers, and project managers. When I started working at RESULTS.com I realized that not only was I going to have to raise my game to the next level, but that there are levels above me that I wasn’t even aware of.

In my current role as a business execution specialist connecting with people and building trust and a relationship is the biggest part of the job. They are trusting me with their companies, their livelihoods, and livelihoods of everybody in their company. If you’re a CEO you’re even more so in the hot seat. The buck stops with you.

Which is why I was surprised when I got briefed in on a new client recently. Part of what I was told is that they don’t want any of that fuzzy-wuzzy psychology mumbo-jumbo. Just come in and fix what’s wrong. This gave me the first sign of what my approach was going to have to be. Except I would have to be patient. Spend time face-to-face with the players. Build trust. Establish a relationship. You know, all that fuzzy-wuzzy psychology mumbo-jumbo stuff. Because at the c-suite level it’s all about the people. And trust. And relationships.

If you’re a lumberjack you’d better know how to use a chain-saw. If you’re a manager, leader, or CEO, you better know what makes your people tick and how to get them working together. Either that or you can pay somebody like me a lot of money to “fix what’s wrong”.

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Posted in behaviour, communications, conflict, conflict management, delegation, developing staff, emotional intelligence, engagement, influencing, persauding, relationships, teamwork

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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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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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Creative versus Planner: How to Get Along

Posted on December 12, 2011 | Leave a comment

I’ve been accused of being “pie are squared”, a little too much of a colour-inside-the-lines kind of guy. Which is fine. If I’m trying to get something done I set my goal, set out the steps, and start ticking things off my to-do list. That doesn’t mean that I always succeed, but I enjoy the process of steadily making progress towards my goal, and the anticipation of completion.

Which is why I couldn’t figure out why how entrepreneurs were just as successful with their approach. It seemed to me that they couldn’t make up their mind, didn’t know were they were going, and changed course at random. Their approach was puzzling to me until I realized they just go through life in rapid-prototype mode.

They start with were they are, figure out what they have, and try to put it together in strange and interesting ways to see what happens. If something useful comes out of it, so much the better. If not, they’ll quickly drop it and go onto the next thing. They’re the creative types.

So if you’re a planner working with a creative type, remember that they don’t think in terms of process, but in terms of what if. For you this means you have to figure out what you (collectively) are trying to accomplish in the long term, which will give you a context for figuring out where the hell that latest idea came from and what it means to you. It also means that you need to check in with the current environment often, to make sure the plans haven’t changed. Sometimes this means waiting a day or two to see if the latest idea stuck, but also be ready to move quickly on it.

For you creative types working with us planners, please remember you’re working on a team now. If you could do it all yourself you wouldn’t need to hire other people. Let them know where you’re going, and try to cross the finish line with all of your people together. There’s no point finishing the race if the rest of the company is still in the parking lot tying on their running shoes. And remember: all those good ideas mean nothing if you can’t make them reality.

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Posted in emotional intelligence, engagement, relationships, self-awareness, teamwork

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What Does Your Reality Look Like?

Posted on November 14, 2011 | Leave a comment

“You can ask me for anything you like, except time.” – Napoleon

I was having a beer with a former Scout of mine last night at a local brew pub. He works as a pyro-technician full-time and he’s been running his own little business for the last ten years. As a kid he was fascinated with fire, and had set up a forge in his backyard when he was sixteen so that he could make swords. You can imagine what his mother had to say about that.

Currently he owns and runs his own storefront selling swords, armour, and chain-mail to the medieval re-creationist market. His store, Dark Age Creations, is doing  well and he’s plowing all the profits back into the business.

Turns out he’s a good salesman and understands how to make money. He has no problem calling others when they don’t do what they said they were going to do, and he surrounds himself with people who support what he’s doing. In five years he wants to sit back and collect dividend cheques while the store runs itself. Not a bad plan really. Better than many I’ve heard.

Pay Attention to the Numbers

Problem is he needs an accountant, but he hasn’t done anything about it. He doesn’t even know what his tax liability is going to be at the end of the year! I pointed out the irony (between holding others accountable and not himself), gave him a figurative smack upside his head, and told him to get straightened out now.  It was like being back in the days when he wasn’t taller than me.

He’s been lucky so far, but no business can base its success on the hope of an unbroken string of charm and good luck. Even when we’re doing what we love and living our passion the tax-man and the landlord are always ready to step in when they think they’re not going to get theirs. It only takes one “bad quarter” to put you out of business.

Sense of Urgency

So I told him the story of one of my former clients that allowed their CFO six months to report on the year-end. They were unable or unwilling to do what was necessary to get things moving. When the year-end was finally ready, they had lost half a million dollars on the year – on $15M of revenue. Not something that a company that size can easily swallow.

It was a big lesson for me – all the vision, people and customer focus in the world is useless if you’re not on top of the cash. Yes, you need a higher purpose – other than just making money -  to inspire and motivate. One that engages your clients, employees, and shareholders. All the enduring, profitable companies have one. That’s not going to make you feel better when you’re emptying your desk because your company’s gone bust.

Face Reality Quickly and Constantly

I lost that client, but I learned a valuable lesson that day. Face reality, and face it quickly. Business has enough uncertainty and risk without ignoring what is right in front of us. We can’t control everything, but we’d better be paying attention to what we can control.

Put another way, as I said it to him: “Pay attention to the freaking numbers. Don’t be those other guys who didn’t know they’d lost half a million dollars.”

Relentlessly face race reality. Be skeptical. Don’t take hand-waving or indefinite answers. Have the difficult conversations when you need to, and while you’re holding others accountable, hold yourself accountable too.

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Posted in communications, delegation, engagement, mentoring, relationships, values

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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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Building Relationships in Meetings

Posted on September 26, 2011 | 1 Comment

Here’s a quick but powerful tip for building relationships, even while you’re sitting in meetings all day:

Pay attention to the person who’s talking.

Sit up, shut up (your electronics), turn your chair and actually face them. Make eye contact. Not the stalker kind of eye-contact, but enough so they know you’re paying attention to them.

Don’t believe it’s that simple? Next time you’re in a meeting, take a look around at who’s paying attention or not. Not just turning their head, but actually turning their entire body and facing the speaker. Now compare that to somebody who’s merely turning their head. While this is better than not paying attention at all, just turning your head gives off the  body language “I’m better than you” message.

Try it and see what difference it makes in the follow-up relationships you have with the people you meet with regularly.

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Posted in behaviour, communications, engagement, influencing, relationships, self-awareness

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