Effective Communication

Research indicates that employees spend somewhere between 75% – 80% of their total time at work communicating in one way or another.  This isn’t surprising, since communication is so crucial to everything that goes on in an organization.  Communication is the “life blood” of an organization.

Without effective communication there can be little or no performance management, innovation, understanding of clients, understanding of mission, alerts to changes, coordination of effort, etc.

Research also indicates that many managers and employees do not communicate well, and do not set an organizational culture where communication within the organization is managed effectively.

Poor communication is self-sustaining, because it eliminates an important “feedback loop”.  Employees are reluctant to “communicate” their concerns about communication because they do not perceive the manager as receptive.  Both staff and management play out a little dance.

Effective organizational communication, regardless of form, requires three things.

1.    All players must have the appropriate skills and understanding to communicate well.

2.    Effective organizational communication requires a culture that supports effective communication.  This involves trust, openness, reinforcement of good communication practices, and shared responsibility for making communication effective.

3.    Effective communication requires attention.  It doesn’t just happen, but develops as a result of an intentional effort on the part of management and staff.  Too often, communication, whether it is good or bad, is taken for granted.

You play a critical role in fostering and nurturing a culture that is characterized by open communication.  Without this culture, all the best laid plans, resources and skills in the organization will be wasted. We must bring communication to the forefront of our organization and give it attention.  If you make the effort to improve communication, your employees will recognize that it is important.  If you ignore it, so will your employees.

“True interactivity is not about clicking on icons or downloading files, it’s about encouraging communication.” Edwin Schlossberg

With Respect,

Georgine

Engage Play Laugh

This weekend marked the opening of the new movie, Eat Pray Love, based on the book by Elizabeth Gilbert.  While decidedly a “chick flick”, the movie’s message is universal: finding the meaning of life.  Well, this blog is not about the meaning of life – although it is certainly a worthy topic.  Rather, I wanted to pay homage to the title and devised Engage Play Laugh as an inspiration to leaders for creating positive energy in the workplace.

Engage.  We’ve written before on the topic of employee engagement and there is more evidence than ever that when employees are engaged at work, profits and productivity rise.  So, what can leaders do to engage employees?  Here are some ideas:

• Make sure employees have the tools they need to succeed. This includes procedures, equipment and training.
• Provide clear expectations through goals and performance standards.
• Recognize employees for their performance frequently.  Don’t wait until the annual review to let them know how things are going.
• Encourage innovation and creativity.  When you provide encouragement to “color outside the lines”, employees are more likely to create new solutions the old problems.
• Ask for their opinions and ideas.  Involve them in projects and strategic planning to give them a sense of ownership.
• Identify development and advancement opportunities and make sure they have the support needed to reach new performance heights.

Play.  Playfulness in the workplace can be a very productive activity.  In his recently published book, Delivering Happiness, the CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh talks at length about one of their core values:  Create Fun and a Little Weirdness.  Now, for those of you who have never heard of Zappos, it’s one of the most successful online companies in U.S. history (right up there with Amazon, which bought Zappos last year.)  Zappos grew to a billion dollar company in 10 years because they focused on building a vibrant and customer focused culture.  Fun and weirdness are an important part of their culture.  Hsieh makes the case that encouraging fun and weirdness “encourages people to think outside the box and be more innovative.”  So, ask yourself these questions:

• What can you do to be a little more playful and differentiate yourselves from the competition?
• How much fun do you have on the job and what can you do to increase the fun factor?
• What can you do to make your job (and the jobs of others) more fun?

Laugh.  Surely this is an extension of creating playfulness, and perhaps a little weirdness, in the workplace.  Laughter breaks down walls, reduces tension, and lightens up the energy in a room.  But, you don’t have to have weirdness to have laughter.  There’s a little too much seriousness in the world today.  We probably could all use a big belly laugh.  What’s your leadership style like?  Do you tend to take things seriously?  Are you able to laugh at yourself and your mistakes?  If you walk down the hall and hear people laughing, do you join in or does the laughter taper off when you appear?  Think about the energy you create at work and consider “lightening things up” a bit.

Decide to incorporate a little more playfulness and laughter into the workplace and see if you don’t get a lot more engagement from the team.

Lynae

Make Respect a Habit

“Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words.

Keep your words positive because your words become your behaviors.

Keep your behaviors positive because your behaviors become your habits.

Keep your habits positive because your habits become your values.

Keep your values positive because your values become your destiny.”  -Gandhi

I have always loved this quote from Gandhi and ran across it just the other day. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen it over the years, it still causes me to pause and affirm to live each day at my best.

The part of this quote that I am most focused on today is the part about habits. In our work with leadership development we know that people are creatures of habit.  Habits serve us well because once we have a habit engrained we become very efficient. We don’t have to exert much intellectual energy to accomplish tasks. Did you know that brain researchers estimate that out of every 11,000 signals we receive from our senses, our brain consciously processes only 40? This shows how often we operate on “auto pilot” as we go about our work and personal lives.

Habits, our automatic responses, can be bad or good. One bad habit I have worked on is interrupting people before they have finished talking. This behavior is not respectful. Even though I have never interrupted someone with the conscious intension to be disrespectful, this behavior doesn’t match my values and so I risk being perceived as not honoring what others have to say. I am committed to practicing good habits in listening because they align with my values and create the perceptions that I want others to have of me.

Og Mandino, author of The Greatest Salesman in the World, gives the advice to “make yourself a slave to good habits”.  Here are three simple tips to develop a good habit.

1.    Start simple.
Choose one behavior that you want to make habitual. Write it down on a piece of paper as an affirmation and post it somewhere that you will see each day. Visualize yourself behaving that way in a number of different situations.

2.    Commit for 21 days.
Three to four weeks is all the time you need to make a habit automatic. If you can make it through the initial conditioning phase, it becomes much easier to sustain. Consistency is also important during this conditioning phase so commit to doing your new behavior every day for 21 days.

3.    Celebrate outcomes.
Notice what the results are when you practice your behavior. If your behavior is a personal health related one, notice how you feel.  Good habits in self care result in higher levels of self respect. If your behavior is interpersonal, notice the results your behavior has on others.  Consider sharing your commitment with a friend or co-worker and ask him/her to give you feedback as he/she observes your behavior.

Warm Regards,
Georgine