Skip Weisman 7CommSinsMiniReport
THE 7 DEADLIEST WORKPLACE COMMUNICATION SINS The 10 questions in the Small Business Workplace Communication Challenge were designed to assess behaviors in a workplace that manifest due to the seven most common, and most damaging, communication mistakes occurring in every workplace culture. Whether your quiz results came out as Outstanding, Average or Troubled, understanding The 7 Deadliest Workplace Communication Sins offers you, the people in your company, and on your teams, the opportunity to create an even more positive, productive and profitable work environment. Based on more than 15 years of client work and 20-years experience as a small business leader, who started at a very young age making many of the mistakes you, your co-workers, your subordinates, and your bosses are making today, this report will provide insights into how you can take charge of communication in your workplace, on your individual teams, and between individuals you must impact and influence one-on-one. To make the most use of this short report, you must first adopt one powerful belief, which is that communication is the direct cause of every success, failure, challenge, setback, issue, or frustration you are experiencing, both professionally in your business life and also in your personal life.
When improving organizational culture, employee morale, and teamwork, in companies and non-profit organizations so that it creates greater positivity, productivity and profitability individuals in those work environments always point to communication as the primary issue that needs improving. But, workplace communication comes in many contexts; and it is very personal. By that I mean every person in your organization can identify his or her impression of how communication needs to be improved. Organizational leaders must drill deeper to frame the conversation to address it effectively. Few rarely do. Only those small business leaders who possess true Communication Power are equipped to embark on that journey. This report is a good first start and primer to begin building your Communication Power. You’ve probably noticed by working within organizations with communication issues that go unaddressed experience cultures of low-trust, which prevent the openness necessary to get the real issues on the table.
P.O Box 5094 – Poughkeepsie, NY 12602 845-463-3838 – [email protected]
THE 7 DEADLIEST WORKPLACE COMMUNICATION SINS It can be a catch-22. It’s a conundrum for organizational leaders to properly facilitate, address, and correct the communication challenges in their work environment. To help frame and refine the conversation on communication for you I’ve created this report so that you can begin to dig deep and engage your team members in discussions to jointly identify solutions. The 3 Contexts of Workplace Communication Challenges Technical – this is the technical infrastructure of the voice and data flow throughout the organization. Among considerations in this area include the functionality of the equipment necessary to effectively transmit communication efficiently, such as current technology and compatibility in software. Strategic – this includes how well leaders communicate strategic objectives down through the organization so those responsible for implementation understand the strategy and their role helping to achieve the strategic objectives. This brings into play interpersonal communication skills of the leaders and how they interact and communicate with their direct reports. Tactical – this is how individuals responsible for implementation of the specific actionable tactics in an organization are communicated to, and how they communicate with each other. This is where the interpersonal communication skills take on a larger role throughout the workplace and where problems manifest. This report focuses solely on the latter two, strategic and tactical. Many leaders of companies and non-profit organizations are subconsciously sabotaging the performance of both their senior leadership team and employees due to poor communication habits. Most organization leaders will tell you they would like their people to raise performance in one or more of the following areas: §
Take greater responsibility and accountability for the job for which they are being paid
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Being more proactive to identify innovative solutions to challenges that arise
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Are more responsive to customer service requests, both internally and externally
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Act with greater sense of urgency
P.O Box 5094 – Poughkeepsie, NY 12602 845-463-3838 – [email protected]
THE 7 DEADLIEST WORKPLACE COMMUNICATION SINS §
Support their peers in the organization to promote greater teamwork
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Communicate with peers and subordinates in a more respectful manner
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Follow through more consistently as business opportunities are presented
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Communicate their schedules more consistently to those who need to know
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Improve their attitudes and behaviors in the workplace
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Be less resistant (and thus more open to) change
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Stop the passive-aggressive behavior
Working with hundreds of small business clients in the last 15 years I’ve seen patterns of workplace communication that never fail to be present, regardless of industry and organization size. And, in speaking to 10s of thousands of business professionals from the stage in keynotes and seminars, asking about these patterns I’ve noticed, the feedback always reinforces what I’ve experienced.
The issues identified in your quiz results, and those issues identified above in the anecdotal aspirations of your small business peers, comes with real bottom line dollars and cents cost to your company. Think about the behaviors above and how much time they waste, how much productivity is lost by engaging in those behaviors. Most people in my clients and speaking audiences tell me it’s at least one hour per employee daily. Research by international surveying companies Towers Watson and Siemens and other related studies report that the average employee wastes an average of 40-minutes per day due to poor and ineffective communication. Either way, through anecdotal experience or actual research, poor communication in the workplace is a real a waste of productivity. Productivity means time, time means money. In terms of employees’ salary and benefits the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics estimates the average employee in the U.S. in 2015 equated to $5,220 per year in lost productivity due to that 40-minute per day figure.
P.O Box 5094 – Poughkeepsie, NY 12602 845-463-3838 – [email protected]
THE 7 DEADLIEST WORKPLACE COMMUNICATION SINS If your work environment is like my clients when we first start working together and your employees waste an hour or more, add 50% to that figure; meaning that poor, ineffective communication, and low-trust, are costing your work environment $7,500 per employee per year. How many people are on your team or in working in your company? You do the math? The level to which the behaviors above manifest in your workplace and the level to which those behaviors cost your company and projects the real dollars and cents in lost productivity calculated above, is directly due to the quality of strategic and tactical communication. More than any other form of communication the strategic and tactical (as defined above) directly impact the level of trust in your workplace. This means the level of trust between these contexts of personnel: •
The organization’s leadership and all employees
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Individual company leaders and their individual direct reports
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Individual team members who work together intimately in the work environment.
And, it is the quality of trust in those three contexts that most impacts productivity and profits. Stephen M.R. Covey engaged extensive research for his book The Speed of Trust, and in it is quoted, “as trust goes down speed goes down and costs go up. Conversely, as trust goes up, speed goes up and costs go down.” That is the power of trust. And, the quality of communication in your workplace drives the quality of the trust in it. The challenge most people are not aware of is that there are only three potential outcomes from any strategic or tactical communication when it comes to trust. The communication is either: •
Building trust
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Slowly eroding trust
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Instantly destroying trust
As you can see, you are taking a 67% risk every time you communicate that you are going to damage the trust in the relationship. The odds are forever not in your favor.
P.O Box 5094 – Poughkeepsie, NY 12602 845-463-3838 – [email protected]
THE 7 DEADLIEST WORKPLACE COMMUNICATION SINS The 7 Deadliest Workplace Communication Sins are the culprit causing the damage to the quality of your communication that negatively impacts the quality of trust in your work environment, and in your interpersonal relationships. Thus, they are negatively impacting productivity and profits. Building a keen awareness of The 7 Deadliest Workplace Communication Sins and beginning to apply simple tips, tools, techniques, and strategies to build new habits of Communication Power can transform results in small business work environments.
“After working with you to improve how we communicated and interacted with our staff, Skip, we’ve become much smarter at managing our people and our bottom line. It has made a significant difference. “Our profit went up 50%!” Joe Beccalori, President Interact Marketing
“You told me your program with us would pay for itself 5-10 times over. I had trouble seeing how that was going to happen, but, you were right! “It did pay for itself to that degree!” Garry Williams, President Utility Survey Corp.
P.O Box 5094 – Poughkeepsie, NY 12602 845-463-3838 – [email protected]
THE 7 DEADLIEST WORKPLACE COMMUNICATION SINS Communication Sin #1: Lack of Specificity This is an epidemic in our culture and in most cultures, actually. It causes the recipient of the communication to have to mind-read what is meant, desired, requested, expected, etc. Details are left out or are at best, vague. The recipient for many reasons fails to ask follow up questions to garner necessary specifics and is left to figure it out. This leads to assumptions creating the misunderstandings and “miscommunications” that erode trust between the individuals involved. This can be as simple as lazy communication habits in language such as “as soon as possible,” “whenever you can get to it,” or “sometime next week” leaving things open ended with each party defining that time frame differently. It can be as complex as someone with low self-esteem and low self-confidence setting a low standard for themselves to purposely avoid providing a hard deadline to complete a task so they are not at risk of being accountable to delivering in a committed timeframe. Most times just being aware of this helps people to step up and communicate with greater specificity, and to begin asking for and expecting greater specificity from others. Creating a “specificity” standard to raise expectations for communication in a work environment, a team culture, and even an individual one-on-one relationship, will explode productivity while building high-levels of trust at the same time. If you do nothing else suggested in this report, doing what is suggested in the previous paragraph will generate significant results for you.
P.O Box 5094 – Poughkeepsie, NY 12602 845-463-3838 – [email protected]
THE 7 DEADLIEST WORKPLACE COMMUNICATION SINS Communication Sin #2: Lack of Focus on Desirable Behaviors People are great at saying what they don’t want or what they don’t want others to do, but have challenges identifying the desired behaviors they want instead. Where your focus goes, grows. As such, people keep getting more of what they don’t want because they continue focusing on it by using language that directs attention towards the undesirable behaviors, reinforcing it in the mind of the perpetrator. Your brain does not process the negative command in a phrase such as, “don’t come late to the meeting.” What registers is “come late to the meeting.” This communication sin is a subset of a lack of specificity with a very specific language pattern you need to break. Additionally, when confronting individuals with negative attitudes or who are not supporting teamwork, or change initiatives, or using some other negative label to describe how people tend to show up, the subject typically will resist being identified with that label. Can you blame them? Using a label when giving “constructive feedback” or asking for a behavior/attitude change, such as “you need to have a better attitude,” or “I hear from others you’re not a team player.” This causes defensiveness. Instead the conversation should be about the actual observable, undeniable behaviors in which the individual is engaging that creates the ‘impression’ the label is describing. This makes the conversation much more productive. Continuing to focus on the undesirable behavior is negative; it comes across as nagging, and focuses only on the past. It causes trial and error and the individual feels as if they are continually having their hand slapped. It erodes trust in the relationship. You can’t do a “don’t.” So begin communicating the opposite, focusing on the future desired behaviors.
P.O Box 5094 – Poughkeepsie, NY 12602 845-463-3838 – [email protected]
THE 7 DEADLIEST WORKPLACE COMMUNICATION SINS Communication Sin #3: Lack of Immediacy, Urgency & Promptness This is a fancy way to saying “communication procrastination.” Communication is avoided because the conversations are difficult because most small business leaders and their employees don’t know how to communicate effectively in these situations. No one likes to hear bad news so we put it off until a “better time,” which rarely comes. Most of the time the situation festers and gets worse. In addition to communication procrastination so many small business leaders tell me how they wish their team members had a greater sense of urgency. This is especially important when it comes to communication. Communication procrastination comes in three levels; distracting, debilitating, and destructive. This, as you are probably aware can have real implications with customer service, both internal customer service (teamwork inside a work environment) and external customer service (serving the customers who generate income for the company). If it ever gets beyond the “distracting” level in your work environment, a new standard and expectation needs to be set. Your small business culture must commit to a communication habit of communicating at “the first most appropriate time.” Now, you can argue that is a non-specific timeframe, committing Communication Sin #1. And, you would be correct. It’s impossible to judge each situation and what is appropriate. Most times I’ve found most professional adults have a good sense for what is appropriate. I suggest the guideline that any situation should be addressed in some way within 48-hours. There are a lot of nuances to this and can’t all be covered here, so I encourage you to explore what ways to commit to a greater sense of urgency when communicating in your work environment with your team members. At the end of the day, err on the side of communicating with more urgency, immediacy, and promptness, and always commit to a specific time in the future to do so. Then, follow through as promised to build trust.
P.O Box 5094 – Poughkeepsie, NY 12602 845-463-3838 – [email protected]
THE 7 DEADLIEST WORKPLACE COMMUNICATION SINS Communication Sin #4: Lack of Respectful Rebuttals A few years ago I was getting ready to deliver a post-lunch keynote address at an association event sitting around the lunch table with 7 other members of the association. From a side conversation I heard my introducer say to a colleague, “I love my wife, but, there is no way I was going to do that!” I immediately interrupted the gentleman, whose name was Julian, and asked, “Can I use that?” That conversation has since become part of my keynote address on The 7 Deadliest Workplace Communication Sins. A “disrespectful rebuttal” is simply a positive, empowering statement that is followed by a “but,” “however,” or “although.” It is disrespectful because those three words (and some other euphemisms) negate whatever comes before it. Imagine back to a time when you were the victim of a “but” statement, such as “that was a great idea, but…” or “you did a really great job, but…” You knew there was some “constructive feedback” coming, didn’t you? Most people tell me they shut down, stop listening, and lose respect for the person delivering the disingenuous message, damaging the relationship. This is a hard habit to break. Start now by simply noticing how many times “but, however, or although” come up in a conversation. The way to change is to use the word “and,” as the transition. It is a very hard pattern of communication to change because this “but” vernacular has become an ingrained part of our communicating for many, many years. Changing is difficult, and the nuanced communication will have more of a subconscious impact on those with whom you are communicating; and it will be noticeable in the level of emotional intensity of your interactions. This approach offers people a softer communication style from you. It also permits you to be more direct and candid with people in those situations, creating a win-win relationship that, instead of shutting down the conversation, it keeps it moving forward.
P.O Box 5094 – Poughkeepsie, NY 12602 845-463-3838 – [email protected]
THE 7 DEADLIEST WORKPLACE COMMUNICATION SINS Communication Sin #5: Lack of Appropriate Tone & Body Language Early in my young baseball executive days I hired a new receptionist for our company. Her name was Allison. One day my best friend, Ric, came to pick me up for lunch. Ric had not yet met Allison. While he was waiting for me to get off the phone to join him, Ric engaged in a conversation to get to know her. As I was walking up the hallway towards the reception area I could hear them talking. As I turned the corner they went silent. I asked Allison a question and the conversation went like this: Skip: “So, I heard you guys talking and as soon as I got to the corner you got silent, what were you guys talking about?” Allison: “Well, your buddy, Ric, here, asked me if I had gotten your “look” yet? Skip: “What do you mean?” Allison: “Well, Ric says if you don’t like something someone says or does, you don’t say anything, you just glare at them.” Unconsciously, I immediately turned and glared at Ric, who started jumping up and down and pointing his finger at me yelling, “That, that, that is what I’m talking about, you just did it!” I had a glare, a stare, a “look,” as Ric called it. This was one of my communication habits I had to learn to break. It was devaluing the people I need to influence and motivate. It was eroding trust between us. Other ways this manifests includes: • • • • • • •
Rolling eyes Sighing Raising your voice Yelling Folding arms/crossing legs Leaning back Sarcasm
What inappropriate tone and body language habits do you have that devalue others? How do you make your opinion felt in a passive-aggressive, or even an aggressive-aggressive manner? This communication sin may be the quickest way to immediately kill trust in a relationship.
P.O Box 5094 – Poughkeepsie, NY 12602 845-463-3838 – [email protected]
THE 7 DEADLIEST WORKPLACE COMMUNICATION SINS Communication Sin #6: Lack of Focused Attention Ever been in a meeting with someone and their phone rings, could be a mobile phone or even their desktop, and while you’re in mid-sentence comment they pick up the phone, totally dissing you? Ever have someone type a text or email during a conversation with you while saying, “go ahead, I’m listening?” Have you ever done either of those things? st
With the 21 Century technology growing ever more intrusive we need to set personal boundaries for its use, and define its use by creating agreements around it for the work environment. As with most things as an organizational leader you need to model the behavior you expect from those in your workplace. Stop the multi-tasking, put down the technology and give your people who need it, your full attention, or deflect it to a more appropriate time when you can give it. Remember, listening is not a skill. Listening is a choice. You get to make that choice every minute of every day as to what you are going to focus your attention on. If you’re communicating with another human being, anything less than your full attention is devaluing someone you probably need to build trust with. Decide to give them your full attention or decide on a better time for the conversation. If you would like your team members to provide you their full attention, there are two important strategies that most people don’t use. You need to both “command” their attention and “demand” their attention. Command means to speak about things important to the other person from their perspective so that they get it. You must understand their “what’s in it for me,” and speak to that. Commanding their attention also means speaking concisely and succinctly because all of our attention spans are shorter these days. You have to communicate so that people want to listen to you. “Demanding” attention simply means asking for it at the beginning. Frame the conversation asking for a reasonable amount of someone’s time to be focused on your conversation. This should also be done at the beginning of meetings to keep people focused on your agenda. This will set expectations and when people know what to expect they are more likely to comply for all the right reasons.
P.O Box 5094 – Poughkeepsie, NY 12602 845-463-3838 – [email protected]
THE 7 DEADLIEST WORKPLACE COMMUNICATION SINS Communication Sin #7: Lack of Directness & Candor This is the second most damaging of the most damaging workplace communication sins, tied with A Lack of Specificity. Workplaces that lack directness and candor become the most toxic of all and often lead to, and or are a cause of, the other five middle communication sins. In what type of situations does your communication lack directness and candor? Are there things you need to say to others in your work environment that you avoid telling them? Are there things in your work environment that people just don’t talk about or ask about, yet know they’re impacting the company and the people in it? Typically, a lack of directness and candor occurs when discussing performance and behavior issues individually with team members (overcoming Communication Sin #2, A Lack of Desirable Behaviors and communicating with a focus on future desirable behaviors can help in this area). Often, team leaders rely to much on offering generic feedback to entire teams in a group setting when the most appropriate approach is to have direct/candid communication with individual or individuals who are dropping the ball or not being accountable to their individual commitments. This undermines trust in the environment on two levels. The non-perpetrators on the team lose respect of the team leader for not addressing issues candidly and directly with the perpetrator (whom everyone knows who the problem team member is). It also reinforces the lack of trust with the perpetrator who continues to under-perform and cause problems for the team whom they have to cover for. Also, every organization has “elephants in the room,” topics people are unwilling, unable, or discouraged from speaking up about. Yet, “championship caliber” organizations have a level of candor and direct communication that builds trust within the environment as team members generate confidence by knowing what their roles are, and what the expectations are for their contribution.
P.O Box 5094 – Poughkeepsie, NY 12602 845-463-3838 – [email protected]
THE 7 DEADLIEST WORKPLACE COMMUNICATION SINS So, those are The 7 Deadliest Communication Sins. This report just scratched the surface providing an introduction with insights into the most damaging communication mistakes occurring in your workplace. You are making them. Everyone in your work environment is making them. Everyone is both a victim and a perpetrator. Imagine the cumulative effect of all those communication mistakes occurring in your workplace. Each communication sin has a multitude of contexts with strategies and techniques to work through to create the communication skills that can transform a work environment into a “culture of championship caliber communication” that leads to a high-trust workplace that delivers more positivity, more productivity and even more profitability. Leaders like you have a choice to make. You can begin to be the communication solution or you can continue to be part of the problem with the rest of your team. To understand how you can start the process visit www.CommunicationPowerForLeaders.com/7-Communication-Skills While there check out the Communication Power for Leaders 7 Critical Communication Skills Self-Study course. As a reward for getting this far reading this report you’ve earned a 40% discount off the program. On the checkout page use coupon code: 7Skills to get the 40% discount off the program tuition. Additionally, at the top of the page is a special FREE downloadable gift on The 5 Beliefs of Power Communicators, be sure to grab that while you’re there, too. I look forward to your feedback on what you learned in this report. Please email me at [email protected] on what you learned and how you think it will help you overcome the challenges you learned about in taking The Small Business Workplace Communication Challenge QUIZ! ‘til we speak again, remember, Communicate With Power! All My Best,
Skip Weisman, The Workplace Communication Expert
P.O Box 5094 – Poughkeepsie, NY 12602 845-463-3838 – [email protected]
