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As a leader, communicating can sometimes feel like Groundhog Day. No matter how hard you try to get your message across, it is all too easy to find the next day that you face the same blank stares, predictable objections, and questions that indicate that you failed to make it stick — that people just aren’t getting it. One reason leaders find themselves in this cycle is that their approach to communication is based on an outdated mental model. It’s a model best described as a “post office.” They view themselves as the sender of a message and others as the receivers.
The post office model focuses most leaders’ attention on the sending process, rather than the give-and-take of effective conversations. By contrast, true two-way conversations reflect a more open, balanced, and reciprocal sharing of perspectives.
Although many leaders have personally experienced the power of this type of dialogue, few have mastered the art of initiating it. The following strategies can help.
Slow down. If others find you stressed, overloaded, or distracted, they will avoid disrupting your fragile focus. By slowing down and being truly present, you create the opportunity for people to come to you with new information, questions, or ideas.
Create a safe space. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson’s work shows how important it is to create psychological safety, if you want to explore diverse views and foster ideas.
Ask inviting questions. Questions help you focus a conversation without limiting creativity.
Listen with a willingness to be influenced. The best way to improve communication is to focus on the listening part. When you create time and listen with an open mind, you bring out others’ confidence and encourage them to share their questions, needs and ideas. And as you learn more about their mental models, you can frame your ideas more effectively.
Use reflection to deepen the learning. You can build the skills for dialogue by periodically pausing to reflect on your conversation.
Summarize and ask for commitment. Because two-way conversations are usually wide-ranging, it is very important to recap what was discovered, where you are now, and what is needed next. Where relevant, this is an excellent time to ask for commitments that move the ball forward.
In the end, the real magic of two-way conversations is that they break the cycle of predictable, ineffective communication, replacing it with fresh thinking and actionable solutions.
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Convincing employees to go above and beyond the call of duty may be the epitome of personnel management. We all want our employees to be engaged and motivated. Of course, that’s easier said than done.
Some people are intrinsically motivated to exceed their job descriptions in order to support organizational goals. These self-starters need no external cues to help a co-worker learn a new skill; offer suggestions for process improvement; recruit a new employee; or volunteer for an assignment. Most, however, require some external motivation to go above and beyond their jobs. But can pushing too hard to create “good soldiers” lead to unintended consequences?
To find out, we designed a pair of studies that would measure the ethical repercussions of externally motivated organizational citizenship.
Our first study examined its effect in the workplace. From surveys of 82 work teams representing a wide range of organizations and industries in eastern China, we concluded that efforts to persuade employees to exhibit above-and-beyond behaviors at work initially led to good citizenship behaviors. But they also led to subsequent deviant behaviors such as making fun of a co-worker or taking office property without permission.
Our second study examined the effect of externally motivated organizational citizenship both inside and outside of work. Surveying 180 teams of employees and managers at U.S. organizations, we confirmed that employees who were externally compelled to be good soldiers at work were more likely to engage in deviant actions both inside and outside of work, such as cursing at a coworker or a stranger.
Why the bad behavior? Our research draws upon “moral licensing” theory which asserts, essentially, that doing good things gives us license to do bad things later.
In both studies, we observed that employees who feel compelled by extrinsic forces (supervisory demands, formal and informal norms, threat of punishment) to exhibit the admirable qualities of a team player tend to develop a sense of psychological entitlement. This entitlement is funded by those recently deposited credits in the moral bank account. And it’s powerful enough to act as a moral license, freeing employees to engage in bad behaviors that can be unrelated to the good organizational citizenship behaviors they’ve been persuaded to exhibit.
In other words, compliance leads to deviance.
To prevent a sense of entitlement within organizations, we advise a two-pronged approach:
- Temper the urge to motivate employees to go above and beyond the job description.
- Develop a work environment in which people are more intrinsically inspired to participate in pro-organization behaviors.
Ultimately, the key to avoiding the negative consequences of moral credentialing is to create a culture that values and emphasizes the intrinsic value of good organizational citizenship behaviors.
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George Bernard Shaw said ‘The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place’.
What then is the Illusion of Communication?
Many people talk, yet very few communicate. Do we have an audience or do we think we have an audience and then even if you have an audience why are you assuming they are listening to you? What have you done for them and what is the vision or hope that they will derive from your message?
What should we be doing to ensure that our communication actually took place, what actions should we be looking for?
Leadership starts with us, and you are probably thinking “but this article is about communication” – yes it is and when we are able to effectively communicate we are also able to lead our own lives and possibly the lives of others through our example.
Here are the actions we should be looking for:
- Listening – did we listen effectively? When we are able to listen to the conversations of others and hear their needs we are able to communicate effectively with them, only by listening to others can we start by showing that we actually care for them.
- Emotion – playing big and tough, only wanting the facts and not the emotion when we listen is just as futile as only giving facts and no emotion when we communicate. We can be factually correct, but unless we believe in the message and how it will change the lives of others, we have simply given facts and not connected with the emotions of our audience – we are then co-creators of the Illusion of Communication.
- Questions – only when people start to ask us questions can we really know they listened, without questions we can be very confident that we missed the mark.
- Feedback – Sometimes the audience will be reluctant to ask questions, we need to be prepared to make broad sweeping generalisations so that we can get a reaction from the audience. This is a controversial way of approaching things but if you are bold enough it can work in your favour. As a leader you should always be ready to communicate with people.
- Conversation – some of the worst communication we can give is a complete statement, all the facts or say anything where we don’t welcome feedback. NO, that is arrogance not leadership, we never have all the facts, we can never make a complete statement and we always need to show that we care for the opinions of others.
If we are able to follow those simple steps we can begin to seek better ways to listen and understand others, so that ultimately we may be able to communicate a little more effectively with them.
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The key to solving complex problems may be to simplify as much as possible and approach them with a beginner's mind.
We all know the merit of simplicity in life and business. But creating simplicity, as Apple’s Jony Ive described, is anything but simple.
"Designing and developing anything of consequence is incredibly challenging. Our goal is to try to bring a calm and simplicity to what are incredibly complex problems so that you're not aware really of the solution, you're not aware of how hard the problem was that was eventually solved." – Sir Johathan (Jony) Ive
This idea of "simplification" is not only complex from a technical or business point of view; it is even more complex from emotional and philosophical point of view.
Once I had the rare privilege to dine at the sushi restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro in Ginza, Chūō, Tokyo, Japan. It is owned and operated by sushi master Jiro Ono. Anyone who has seen this master work his craft can sense the devotion that goes into his simple yet complex creations. Master Ono exudes the very essence of the Japanese word Shibumi, which means "effortless perfection." In this context, Shibumi suggests complete harmony, tranquility, and balance.
It is "eloquent silence" and "understanding, rather than knowledge."
Jiro Ono creates each sushi piece with a state of calm and tranquility with a "beginner’s mind" each time — he does not focus on what he made before or what he will make next. It portrays his:
- Discipline: the ability to say no when something doesn’t fit into his plan
- Patience: that allows for the true quality of his devotion and experience
- Strength: to stay focused on his singular purpose
One could argue from Jiro Ono’s mastery that he has "found" simplicity through the complex process of understanding what simplicity meant for him.
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