Maximise your important business conversations

MAXIMISE YOUR IMPORTANT CONTENTS 1 It’s more complicated than you think – common myths 12 1.1 Giving information is communicating 12 1.3 What you say is the most important element of com

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FIONA COHN

MAXIMISE YOUR

IMPORTANT BUSINESS CONVERSATIONS

ACHIEVE A POSITIVE AND

PRODUCTIVE RESULT IN

ANY CONVERSATION

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Maximise your important business conversations:

Achieve a positive and productive result in any conversation

1 st edition

ISBN 978-87-403-1556-1

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MAXIMISE YOUR IMPORTANT

CONTENTS

1 It’s more complicated than you think – common myths 12

1.1 Giving information is communicating 12

1.3 What you say is the most important element of communication 13

1.4 It’s obvious what you mean when you communicate 14

1.5 Communicating effectively takes too long 15

1.6 You don’t need to plan your communication 15

1.8 Big words make you look clever 16

2 The key components and basic principles of communication 17

2.1 Verbal and Non Verbal Communication 17

2.2 Choose your Channels wisely 25

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3.6 The consequences of communication break-down 33

Section 2 Putting Communication Theory into Practice 36

4 Conducting productive appraisals 37

6.3 Principles of change communication 56

7 Delegating to get great results 65 7.1 Delegating versus Dumping/Abdicating 65 7.2 Understanding preferred management style 66 7.3 Basic principles of delegating 67

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fiona’s background is in media, marketing communications and management and she brings a wealth of experience gained in a variety of business sectors She has sound commercial acumen and experience of supporting businesses to grow their market

share and proits She works with business owners, executives and teams, improving eiciency and productivity and saving them time, and their businesses money…by doing things diferently

After a 15-year career in the competitive world of sports broadcasting, marketing, PR and sponsorship, she moved into business development and consultancy, in industries

as diverse as insurance, distilling, international courier services and sport Using her marketing skills, she built and enhanced clients’ brands to increase market share She has also managed major accounts in IT and Telecommunications businesses to increase proitability and provide communications expertise

A frustration with the way businesses communicated with their staf, led her to specialise

in corporate and internal communications She has run successful communication

activities for a range of business transformation, consultation, organisational change and employee engagement projects She has experience of embedding change, making it work for staf and the organisation; and coaching and mentoring staf through the process

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Passionate about efective communication and employee engagement, often overlooked

by businesses, but fundamental to business success, she has worked with organisations

to improve management/staf relationships through better engagement his has resulted

in more commitment and productivity from staf, improved customer service, retention and inancial performance.She has also been responsible for ensuring the success of a variety of change initiatives including organisational and people change, IT and systems, business transformation and client transfers

She has a natural coaching style, and even before qualifying as a coach, she successfully coached and mentored staf in the workplace for many years Her coaching qualiication gave her the conidence to set up her own business with the aim of making workplaces happier, healthier and more productive

hat often starts with focussing on leadership behaviours, attitudes and communication practices She works with ambitious business owners and senior staf to help them

overcome barriers to growth, helping them develop the mindset, skills and systems

essential for high performance

She is an engaging trainer who has worked with managers and teams to make them more efective In addition, she has coached small business owners to become more productive, focussed and successful

Fiona’s strength is a natural ability to solve business problems Her client led, pragmatic and goal centred approach is designed to achieve improvements in performance

Additionally, her clients beneit from increased conidence, more focus and more

structured, client focussed ways of working She provides a balanced external

perspective and holds her clients to account so that they implement changes and make sustained improvement

Fiona enjoys working with businesses on the following activities:

Communications and engagement – consultation, employee lifecycle, recruitment

and retention, induction, channel creation and management, messaging, event

creation and management, feedback, employee investment, performance and

productivity measurements

Leadership and management development – including diagnostic, communication and

presentation skills, performance improvement, training and behavioural change

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Customer Focus and Marketing – Internal engagement – building the business

strong from the core; sales, marketing, account management, client and supplier

relationship management

Making Change work – overcoming resistance to change, embedding change,

maintaining productivity during the change process

Strategic Planning – bringing the business plan to life and ensuring staf support

business growth and work to further the business objectives

Business diagnostics, planning and systemisation – research, analysis and action

planning making businesses scalable, monitoring and evaluating

“People are the reason why businesses succeed or fail and that means employing the right staf and treating them with the care and respect they deserve Workers are no longer willing to tolerate a ‘command and control’ management style and that means that business owners and leaders will have to become better at leading and inspiring, communicating with their teams and working with them to achieve better results

Most business owners I speak to believe that the customer is the most important focus for their business, but they often focus on the customer at the expense of their staf I believe that businesses are built from the inside out and the internal brand and values need to be strong and inform behaviour if the customer is to be served well

I’ve been a professional communicator for my whole career and I have seen and

experienced the beneits of great communication on business performance Sadly, the instances of poor, inefective and destructive communication practices vastly outweigh the positive experiences I’m on a mission to help the businesses I work with change that.”

If you are interested in inding out more about how Fiona can support you or your business, please connect with her: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/ionacohn

email her at: excelarate.uk@gmail.com

Call her on: +44 (0) 7971 103232

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BUSINESS CONVERSATIONS

At work – and everywhere else for that matter, inefective conversations lead to

misunderstanding and conlict In business, not only is this frustrating for business owners, managers and staf, but it costs everyone time (something we all complain we don’t have enough of ) and it costs the business money It is possibly the single greatest barrier to achieving business objectives and business success

George Bernard Shaw summed it up perfectly:

“The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place”

Can you remember the last time you delegated a piece of work or asked someone to

do something for you – and what you got back just wasn’t what you expected? How frustrated were you? And what about the other person? Was there a bit of ‘strained relations syndrome’ going on as a result?

his happens at work every day of the week and all because people don’t know some

of the basic rules about efective communication We think that because we were born with mouths and ears that we use every day, and we often get away with it, that we can communicate But in my decades as a communication professional I have seen otherwise

his book sets out to help you understand the basic principles of efective

communication and show you how to put them into practice And unlike most books covering this topic that are aimed at managers, I’ll be looking at conversations from a variety of perspectives so it will be as relevant for you if you are the most junior person

on the team or the business owner hat’s because it’s all about perspective…not yours but the person you are communicating with

he book will focus on four of the most critical business communication conversations that regularly take place at work and have the greatest inluence on staf productivity and business performance hese are:

Delegating to others

Giving and receiving feedback

Appraisals

Managing change

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Communication is how we do business – we get it wrong at our peril

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SECTION 1

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BUSINESS CONVERSATIONS IT’S MORE COMPLICATED THAN YOU THINK – COMMON MYTHS

1 IT’S MORE COMPLICATED THAN

YOU THINK – COMMON MYTHS

I’m talking about communication We think we know what it is – but many of us don’t his chapter will unpick the principles of how to communicate efectively, what

communication is and is not, and what works with diferent personality types

Before you can put it into practice, you need to understand the theory

I’d like to start by busting the most common communication myths

1.1 GIVING INFORMATION IS COMMUNICATING

In business, people often mistake giving information for communicating It’s not Giving information is one way It is either broadcasting if you’re giving the information to a group or narrowcasting if you’re in a one to one situation

You can give people as much information as you like but you’ll not know their reaction unless you engage in a dialogue of some sort

1.2 COMMUNICATION IS TWO WAY

Two-way communication usually referred to in business as top down and bottom up is better than one-way communication Communication is in fact three-way, peer to peer communication plus the other two Never underestimate the inluence of colleagues within teams to inluence each other Peer to peer communication is vital if you want to create a culture of innovation and collaboration

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1.3 WHAT YOU SAY IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ELEMENT

OF COMMUNICATION

Research done by Professor Albert Mehrabian in the 1960s came up with the

statistic (now hotly disputed) suggesting how the key elements of communication are broken down

Figure 1: Elements of Communication

Words are probably much more important than this study suggested but they are only one element of communication hink about the last time you asked a colleague who seemed in a bad mood if they were OK and they hissed back at you through clenched teeth ‘I’m ine.’ How much did you believe them? Or another colleague who habitually apologises for not responding hey say they are sorry, but if they keep doing it you’re left wondering if they really are

It would be more accurate to say that communication can be broken down into

two elements:

Verbal communication – the words, or ‘raw data’ you use and

Non-verbal communication – the ‘lavour’ of the words his is the element that adds underlying emotions, motives, feelings and attitude to what you say

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What you say, how you say it and how you behave (what you do) are all important and

to communicate efectively you’ll want to master all three And a word of warning, if you contradict something you say with something you do, everyone will believe what you do and not what you say

1.4 IT’S OBVIOUS WHAT YOU MEAN WHEN YOU COMMUNICATE

Let’s paint a scenario here You’re asking for someone to help you with a project at

work You tell them what you want them to do and leave them to it You are completely familiar with the project and they are not So you believe you have been completely clear

in your instruction A few days later they come back having completed the task you

asked them to do It’s not remotely what you expected What did you assume when you were asking them in the irst place? his is all about perspective It was obvious to you what you meant by the instruction but it was not obvious to your colleague And that’s your fault If you communicate from your own perspective, more often than not, you won’t get what you asked for

360°

thinking.

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Another common misconception is that if you repeat yourself enough times, the other person will get it I’m sure you’ve heard an exasperated colleague saying ‘but I’ve told you

a hundred times.’ hat’s the communication equivalent of the deinition of madness – doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a diferent result!

It’s not about what you say but rather what the listener hears All communication takes place in the mind of the listener

1.5 COMMUNICATING EFFECTIVELY TAKES TOO LONG

‘I don’t have time to explain things in detail,’ is a common management complaint hat’s ine if you have the time you’ll need to spend redoing the work when it was done incorrectly in the irst place Communicating efectively does take a little longer to start with In the end it will save you a lot of time when things are done right irst time, most

of the time

1.6 YOU DON’T NEED TO PLAN YOUR COMMUNICATION

I’m astounded by the lack of preparation people put into important conversations or meetings hey don’t take the time to think about what they want to achieve and how they will know when they have achieved it his is the reason why many conversations and meetings fail to achieve their objectives and are a waste of time Planning your communication is the irst step to improving productivity

1.7 STORIES ARE FOR CHILDREN

Everybody loves stories If you can illustrate your point with a story, people will engage with it his is as important when communicating a business strategy as it is when

encouraging colleagues to get involved with a project Stories are a powerful way to present a business case or argument Create stories based on a simple formula:

What the situation was

Who was involved

How it resolved

Why this information is useful

Start to build a bank of relevant stories that you can use at work

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