High-performing behaviors produce sustained results such as increased revenue, greater quality, customer loyalty, brilliant innovations and speed to market, and improved safety, retention, and bottom-line profits.
How to Pull Out Their Reality
To achieve the amazing results of this model, you will have to do everything in your power to inquire into the other person’s or group’s reality. You will have to step out of your world and let go of your assumptions, judgments, and fears and listen intently for a significant chunk of time in order to step into their world. You will have to use the power of your mind’s eye to see their reality – to picture what it is like to be them in this situation. Then you will have to reflect back to them, in your own words, what they are saying to demonstrate that you really understand them.
How to Pull Them into Your Reality
When you pull out the other person’s reality, you will build capacity and desire within them to understand and care about what you have to say. It’s at this point that you pull them into your reality by sharing a story, as David did. Use stories to invite others into your world. The graphic image of David weaving through traffic at breakneck speeds to get to his son had a lasting impact on his team.
Speak your truth productively in a very direct, respectful way. This will enable others to see and feel your reality. After you have done this, help them reflect it back to you until:
• They really get what you’re trying to say.
• They don’t walk away with anything you’re not trying to say.
Conversation: An Organizational Operating System
Conversation is the operating system of your organization. What is an operating system? Let’s say you want to create a PowerPoint presentation. You can’t communicate with the PowerPoint application in your computer without a translator. In many computers, that translator is Windows. Windows is simply an operating system that enables an application like PowerPoint to store and display itself through your hardware.
In the same way, the needs of your organization and the applications that will meet those needs require an operating system to link them and enable them. Conversation is that operating system. For instance, your organization needs to receive orders from your customers. The “application” that will produce that work is an order-entry process. The operating system that links the customer’s order to that process is a conversation between a call taker and the customer. The quality of that conversation dictates the quality of service to your customers.
Ultimately, every facet of your organization runs off this operating system of conversation: recruitment runs off hiring conversations; performance runs off training conversations; and revenue runs off sales conversations. Conversation translates employees’ talents to the needs of the organization.
Conversation translates employees’ talents to the needs of the organization.
What percentage of your day do you spend conversing? Edward Shaw, a corporate training expert, makes some interesting observations in his book The Six Pillars of Reality-Based Training. According to Shaw, studies show that people in white-collar workplaces spend their time in four main activities:
| Conversing | 60–95 % |
| Reading | 20–50 % |
| Writing | 10–45 % |
| Thinking/planning | 0–15 % |
If conversation is the activity you spend as much as 95% of your day doing, then every minute or dollar you spend fine-tuning this operating system will go a long way toward leveraging your and your organization’s effectiveness. In contrast, as the following stories illustrate, undervaluing and underusing the operating system of conversation will weaken all of your other systems.
Poor Communication: Pull the Plug
In 2001, a grocery giant pulled the plug on a $49-million IT implementation. That’s stunning. Picture yourself walking away from an investment of that magnitude just to cut your losses. And this company is by no means alone. A litany of thousands of other IT heartbreaks could be cited if one had the time and the stomach for it. Thousands? Yes, in their Chaos Report, 1994, the Standish Group estimated that $81 billion would be wasted on cancelled software projects the following year. In their Extreme Chaos report of 2001, they reported that in the year prior, 23% of the 30,000 technology-driven implementations failed completely and another 49% were “challenged – a term encompassing cost and time overruns and missing features.”
What is one of the key reasons that IT implementations fail? The same report attributed the failures to the poor communication skills of the project manager and primary users.
I could cite scores of other such examples. I have personally witnessed organizations investing many thousands of dollars on Balanced Scorecards, 360° leadership surveys, and performance-management systems that only delivered a fraction of what they promised. And the lack of skillful face-to-face conversations was the common denominator of the ineffectiveness of every one of these programs. For example:
• A leader gets 360° feedback indicating that she isn’t providing inspirational leadership. Instead of going face to face with her employees and pulling from each of them the specific adjustments she could make to meet their needs for inspiration, she makes her own guesses. Her modified behaviors after the 360° process are in danger of being inappropriate and damaging.
• An elaborate performance-management system is implemented requiring managers to populate multiple screens of performance data. Somehow no one thinks to converse about potential obstacles to performance.
• A wellness program has been kicked off in your organization. Because there’s no “budge-factor” on the results employees have to achieve in their work, the only way to reduce spillover between work and home is to give employees more job control and flextime. This opens the door to chaos. Employees who can’t work from home start resenting the ones who can, and employees who have to be at work at core times compare themselves with the ones who get to take advantage of flextime. If managers are not equipped to work through the chaos by way of some tough conversations, the wellness program is going to be a little sickly.
Conversation and Goal Clarity
Smart leaders find innovative ways to use the operating system of conversation to drive the most important applications of their business. Here, from Communication World, July–August 2004, is a unique story of a scooter company that begins each day with conversations designed to focus the entire organization on the goals that will move the business forward.
Huddles begin each day at 8:30 A.M. Within an hour, every employee will have communicated up, down and across the entire company.
For 15 minutes, frontline employees meet as a department with their managers. Then managers leave for a second 15-minute huddle with their directors. Directors then meet with vice presidents. Finally, vice presidents huddle with the CEO and finish by 9:30 A.M.
People in the field participate by telephone. The most any one person dedicates to the process is 30 minutes, and it gives everyone a daily connection to the CEO.
They talk about the day’s business priorities, anticipate problems and put rumors to rest. Each department has quarterly goals, and at every huddle, each employee states what he or she will do that day toward achieving goals.
“We go around the group, which may have as many as 10 people, for each person to give his or her number one focus for today, given the clear