Meetings and Communication – “Regular” is the Key

In meetings and communication – “Regular” is the Key.Often, the remedy for many problems in miscommunication is to hold simple regular staff meetings, where people sit down together and talk about the plans or the challenges.

But the key is to sit down with a goal in mind, a planned agenda and an organized leadership. The question "Why is there so much material waste in the production area?" requires listening to those who work with the material: "Here, come with me and I’ll show you". Then go and listen. Then brainstorm together.

Truly, a few minutes of meeting time will prevent hours and days of destructive staff and customer dissatisfaction.

After the hiring, one important ingredient of good communication in personnel management is for managers/supervisors to provide regular meetings to discuss performance and expectations.

"Regular" is the key word here. It is mind-boggling how few places do that. I personally do not recall anywhere I've worked at where this was done. There were meetings, but not regularly.

But when I've operated my own business, no matter how small it was, I learned to have meetings with even the people of the lowest levels, even trainees on government sponsored programs. It created an atmosphere of openness and trust and understanding. This was the time for anyone to talk about what troubled them, what frustrated them over coffee and donut provided by the company.

More on holding meetings in the next blog.

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Communicating With Clarity – Don’t Leave Others Hanging With Uncertainty

by Diane M. Hoffmann

Here’s another example of bad communication.  True story.  Fredda is part of a team that provides weekly events to seniors in their community.

Each one member does his/her one day per week and when one cannot make it, works out with another who can fill-in for that person for that day.

Rick, one of the team members, often changes his days because of various family and work activities. He took the month of July off and asked Fredda to work the events in his place. When the month was over, Fredda sent the following email to confirm whether or not Rick would be back to his normal routine at this time.

“Rick… Jim will be doing his regular 1st Monday of the month, this Monday... are you still wanting to be off during August? Let me know if you want me to continue filling in for your days this month. Fredda”

His answer was:

“Hi Fredda…Our holidays are done now. I would be delighted to be back in the schedule. Perhaps next Monday would work? See you tomorrow. Rick

Now, tell me… does that answer the question? Or does it leave the whole communication open, requiring another email or phone call from Fredda for clarification?

First, Rick says that “he would be delighted” – that does not say that he will be back on schedule. Second, he then uses the word ‘perhaps’ which declares uncertainty, and even adds a question mark to it.  His response leaves the whole issue up in the air. And his last line "see you tomorrow" was pure assumption that Fredda would be at a particular place totally aside from these events.

Simly, the answer from Rick should have said something like this: “Fredda… our holidays are done now. I will be back to my regular schedule starting with August 11.”

Now, that’s proper communication!/dmh

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All of life is about communication

It doesn't matter what area of life, whether it is our simple individual life, family, society, local, municipal, regional, national, global – it's all about communicating with one another.

Let me begin with an example of a local situation...

I'm always amazed at how bad people are at communicating and/or at realizing how they communicate with others.

For instance, I like to help people. I give a lot of my time to volunteer activities in various organizations, etc.

One of the things that I often see is that when someone offers their services for free (volunteer) to an organization, they are often – too often – received nonchalantly (indifferently, detached, unappreciatively). And then they wonder why they have a hard time getting volunteers.

Case in point:

I joined a seniors group some time ago.  After hearing they needed some help in a particular up-coming event, I went up to the activity organizer and offered to help out. The woman brought me to the person who is supposedly in charge of that event and who would show me what I needed to do, etc.

She told me to be there at 10 am on the day of the event, the following week.  So I scheduled this time on my busy calendar and showed up on time (5 min. earlier as I usually do – another communicating issue I'll talk about next).

I looked for her and didn't see her around. I then checked with the receptionist and she told me the lady wasn't in and whe didn't expect her until 11.  So I indicating that I was asked to be there at 10 and had put that time from by business aside for them. She told me to talk to another person, pointing to the vice-president of the organization in the center of the hall.

So I proceeded toward her who was at this time totally immersed in a hot discussion with a senior member.  I waited, and waited, trying to get her attention, but she wouldn't budge. After about 10 minutes of this, I left, letting the receptionist know that I would try and come back later.

Of course, my time being money, I never go idle for long, so I proceeded to do some business while I was in that area. One thing led to another which got me into other issues and next thing I knew I was back in the office taking care of pressing matters that followed. So, I never did get back to them, but had they been there as planned, they would have had my time for a couple of hours of my business time given to them for free.

That's just one example. I have a lot more in my book "Contextual Communication, Organization and Training". If you're interested in getting a copy, don't miss out on my Spring Special going on right now for 50% of the regular price!

Check it out at this link.

Email Communication in Tech Support and Email Writing

 We talk a lot about verbal and nonverbal communication, but there is also an email communication that needs to be addressed, especially in the tech support email writing.

Email writing is great, speedy, easy and concise. However I have been noticing in personal, business and technical email writing, as well as on internet forums, the way that people write emails is often very poor. Sometimes it is appalling. There is room to improve email writing everywhere.

Too many do not bother to check their email writing before sending out their email communication. The worst offenders are sales or business and tech support emails that are full of errors. More and more, we even see this sloppiness in the correspondence of tech support groups who are front end customer service representatives!

Ok, small occasional typos are understandable. We all make them. But unfortunately they are too common in the virtual platform of tech support and email writing. Big typos, one after another, along the whole string of e-conversations can be very unpleasant to say the least, and does not express a demonstration of customer appreciation nor any type of professionalism.

Imagine standing in a real time face-to-face discussion and the person you're conversing with stumbles at every other word, stringing together a couple of words at regular intervals, skipping pronouns and endings, and leaving off whole consonants and prepositions. Imagine if you had to put up with several of these communicators in your place of business within the inter-personal activities of management, customers and suppliers day after day. Imagine a salesperson dropping in on you this way to try and get you to buy from him or her.

How would that feel? What would it say about those people you’re communicating with? Well, this happens all the time in the virtual office under tech support and email writing! It covers all spectra of email writings and correspondence. It is especially hard to take in Customer Service.

In the last while, I began to record a whole number of these e-communications email writing while working with several technical support groups at various e-service establishments. Some of these are million-dollar outfits.

For example, with one on-going dialogue, after several email exchanges, the tech support person 'suddenly' realized that I 'was an affiliate' and therefore had been giving me the wrong information all along -- but I had told him clearly right at the beginning of our email writing that I *was* an affiliate.

So, what is the problem here? That told me immediately that the support person had not read my email properly right at the start. What does properly mean? Well, too many are speed-reading and miss the critical points, or don’t concentrate nor focus on the email communication, or don’t care at all.

On top of this, there were bad spelling and grammar items in all of our lengthy correspondence. OK, I understand that support people are busy and don’t have a lot of time. However aren’t we all?  Isn’t this part of doing business?  And is there any place in business where we are excused from being businesslike and professional – especially, again, in customer service?

It truly only takes a minute to read over the email before hitting the send button. But, wow, the clean-up that that minute will do! As some experts have said, poor spelling and grammar show a lack of attention and sends the wrong message about the company’s reputation. The badly formed sentences can even give a completely wrong message that can irritate, frustrate and even totally lose a customer.

In another instance I recorded two totally different and opposite answers in email writings, to the same question that came from two tech support people from the same tech support department. Again, why? Because they don’t “r-e-a-d” the emails. They skip and scan. This is no time for speed-reading.

And to write correctly, one has to also read emails correctly. I remember one tech support person who totally lost the issue at hand, after several emails, and apologized profusely to the customer for "misreading" her email when, in fact, he hadn't! Why? Again, because he had not taken the time to properly read the emails that had been written.

So let’s watch what we do when we set out to read and write our emails, spell-check and save a great amount of time and money by actually slowing down. An once of prevention is still worth a pound of cure. /dmh

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Beyond active listening

We have to provide training on, not only active listening, but Tough Active Receiving.  In other words, it's not just a passive job of listening but rather it is an  active job of receiving.  Listening is passive, but Receiving is Active.

It is like a batter's attempts to hit the pitcher's strategic deliveries approaching him with all the tricks and twists of the thrust within them.  As Receivers, we have to learn how to receive communication however it might be sent, and interpret that information  to our benefit -- even turning possible or implied offenses into favourable ammunition.

If the boss or a peer tells us we do a lousy job, we should re-learn to "take it like a man" (or a woman).  It may be that we haven't done such a hot job after all.  If we think or know we did a good job, then we ask constructive questions (Smart Questioning) to get feedback about unclear and incomplete statements -- before reacting; for example:  "Oh, I'm sorry you feel that way, can you tell me what exactly you mean by a lousy job?" Active Receiving includes all of the activities that come into play in Interpreting and Understanding.

Not everybody who talks to us has gone through a communication training.  Even those who have don't all come out of a seminar transformed to perfection. We should be so lucky!  We all have to begin the work of  applying what we learned  after the training session.
/dmh

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How do we communicate now?

Poorly.  The majority of people communicate at a very shallow surface level. And that includes those in senior management.  Studies have shown that most people communicate at 50% effectiveness -- even in a two-way communication.  I venture to say that it is often less than that.

Just think how often you are frustrated by your boss, your peers, your spouse, your children... on a daily basis.  How many times are you misunderstood?  How many times do you have to explain that you didn't mean something the way it was perceived or received by your listener?  How many times at work have you been interrupted to never have had the chance to get back to that important discussion where you wanted to clear yourself of a misunderstanding? Often, even the explanation of a misunderstanding is misunderstood or received with arguments -- sometimes angrily, sometimes silently. 

How many times have you kept silent rather than risking offending someone as you would genuinely try to find out where a misunderstanding came from, or try to explain your position.

In the national bestseller  "That's not what I meant!" by Deborah Tannen, Ph.D., the author speaks of the linguistics in communication.  "Linguistics", she says, "is the academic discipline devoted to understanding how language works. Relationships are made, maintained and broken through talk".  She explains how people learn to use language, as they grow up, with different ethnic, religious or class backgrounds, in different parts of the country, even as different genders (male and female have different ways of talking or communicating).

The novelist E. M. Forster said this: "a pause in the wrong place, an intonation misunderstood, and a whole conversation went awry." 

In a telephone call to an associate, one day,  I left a message on his answering machine to call me back.  Somehow, he had been given a phone number which was a business line used for a specific on-going project, located in another part of the building; I had subsequently explained to him that he should not use this number and gave him the one he should call.
 
However on this particular day, when I called him, I was temporarily working from the first number location and left the message on the tape to call me on that number, at that particular time.  When he called me back a few moments later, he called on the other line which was in the other location.  What did that tell me? That he did not "listen" to the message on his answering machine.  (Just like many don't read their memos or emails).

This was indeed confirmed later. But, I could have "assumed" he did not listen properly.  If I hadn't found it important enough to pursue the incident in order to clarify, I might have wrongly perceived this of him.  It could have been that he was not careless at all, but that the tape on the answering machine broke (this was in the older days) or ended before the explanation about the phone number came on.  This would have disclosed my wrong assumption, which would have meant that if I don't know something, I should not assume.
 
Of course we don't always deduce and analyze our conversations in such details during our daily activities.  Who has the time?  However being aware of these possibilities, and including this awareness in our philosophical way of thinking, (thinking before receiving) will help us operate in a realm of understanding at all times -- a second nature as it were.
/dmh

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"Effective Communication - Understanding the Word 'Argument' "

Many people have the wrong concept of the word "argument".  I remember counseling someone on a marriage problem.  The husband was debating some points presented to him.  When I mentioned his "arguing" the point, he straightened up and defensively said, "I'm not arguing" and expressed his feelings about his interpretation of the word. To him "argument" was akin to fight.  His understanding of the word triggered a misinterpretation.

When two people argue, it is not fighting.  At least it shouldn't be.  Scientists argue; they present arguments all the time.  So do lawyers.  Arguments are a perfectly healthy part of communication. However, we have misunderstood "arguing" for so long because of our poor communication practices, that we have made it a misnomer.  We don't know how to argue anymore. Argument is based on logical debate. 

There is an excellent tape, "How to Argue and Win Every Time," (Audio Renaissance), by  Gerry Spence, who has been practicing law for over forty years and who is widely regarded as one of the most skilled courtroom advocates in America.  The author shows how to apply his techniques at work, in court, everywhere, every day.  He says that the success of a good argument lies in the preparation. 

Often, the one presented with an argument does not want to give into it because he or she knows that on the basis of logic his/her argument would lose.  To avoid interaction with "argument" the Receiver either agrees, gives lip service or terminates the discussion.  If the discussion does not terminate (i.e., the Sender continues the argument dialogue), the Receiver may then lose control, because of the lack of communication ability and/or facts, and start a word fight -- or even a fist fight -- which is where the word "argument" gets its bad reputation.


Tip:

The success of a good argument lies in the preparation.  So, next time you face an argument with someone, hold off and go prepare first!  In other words no one can jump into an argument without having some facts and realities on hand. This process would eliminate a lot of problems in marriage as well as in business. /dmh


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