There are many ways you can support your people, from offering encouragement, as we saw above, to providing a shoulder to cry on when things are going badly.
However, there’s more that you can do, and this is where it helps to know about John Heron’s six categories of intervention. These are:
1. Prescriptive – Give advice and direction, say how people should behave, and tell them what to do to solve a problem.
2. Informative – This is about helping people understand a situation – for example, by explaining the underlying princi- ples behind a situation or by sharing an experience.
3. Confronting – This involves highlighting behaviors and atti- tudes that people may not have thought about and getting them to consider whether they are appropriate. It’s also about
k k helping people avoid repeating mistakes. We’ll look at two
tools for doing this in Chapter 12 – the SBI feedback model (#68) and the GROW model (#69).
4. Cathartic – Here, you help your team members express thoughts and emotions they may not have confronted in the past, you empathize with them, and you help them think about how they can deal with a situation.
5. Catalytic – This involves encouraging people to reflect on the situation and learn for themselves so they can become more self-directed in how they solve problems.
6. Supportive– Finally, supportive interventions build people’s confidence by focusing on what they do well, giving honest praise, and showing that you trust in their abilities. This is all about encouraging people when they’re struggling.
Clearly, the first three types of intervention are quite autocratic (Heron’s authoritative interventions). Although the outcome may be positive, the person being helped can feel uncomfortable, and you may feel awkward using these approaches.
The second group of three (Heron’s facilitative interventions) are about helping people develop their own solutions and become more autonomous as individuals. These are much gentler and easier to use, but sometimes they just don’t do the job.
Don’t back away from giving the “tough love” of authoritative interventions when you need to!
Tip
Providing emotional support can be the last thing you want to do, particularly if you’re feeling emotionally exhausted yourself or if someone comes across as “being needy.” Make sure that you get help from HR advisors in situations like these – they can be very skilled at helping people solve problems the right way.
Learn more about Heron’s six categories of intervention: http://mnd.tools/59
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Other Ways to Get the Best from Members of Your Team
One important technique that narrowly missed being included in our top 100 was getting the right balance between laissez-faire manage- ment and micromanagement. Find out how to do this at http://mnd .tools/c10c.
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Chapter 11
Communicate Effectively
In the previous chapter, we described a set of techniques for under- standing and motivating people and supporting them so they can do their best work. Here, we put the spotlight on a particular set of skills every good boss needs: namely, well-developed communication skills. Although there are many styles that work – from the flamboy- ant to the understated – there are some common themes that all good communicators share. This chapter focuses mostly on these points of substance to give you some very practical advice on improving your written and oral communication.
The starting point for effective communication is perspective- taking – putting yourself in the shoes of the recipient of your message.
For the most part, the people to whom you are communicating are busy and easily distracted. Their scarcest resource is their own atten- tion. If an e-mail is confusing, they will ignore it and move on. If a talk is boring, they will quickly look down at their smartphones. Your job is to hold their attention for long enough to get your message across. It’s as simple as that.
We start with the seven Cs – the key principles of good communi- cation (#60). These were developed before the Internet came along, but they are as relevant today as they ever were. We discuss them here particularly in the context of written communication, but they could apply equally to oral communication.
We then discuss two practical techniques. One is learning how to speak well in public (#61) by preparing carefully and working on your delivery. The other is writing effective e-mails (#62), a skill that
k k many people still struggle to master, even though we typically send
dozens of e-mails every day.
We finish the chapter with two broader techniques for communi- cating in an interactive way, rather than through the mostly one-way medium of a speech or e-mail. One is building “high-quality connec- tions” with people at all levels (#63) to help you get closer to them and to build trust. The other is communicating effectively across cul- tures (#64), which we discuss using the classic framework of Dutch sociologist Geert Hofstede.
60. Understand the Key Principles of Good