Episode Five: Business Communication Coaching

Mark discusses how businesses can benefit from coaching.

Transcript

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Well, welcome to the Communication Mastery Podcast. And this is episode five of season two. Glad to have you with me. And uh, aren't we having a great time in this uh this season with having guests every other episode? We've had a great time with uh Stephanie in episode two, and then Jeff last time in episode four. And uh, between the two of them and other guests we've got coming, we're really learning about how communication can make a difference in life, uh but particularly in business and also in leadership. And uh you'll enjoy some of the guests I've got coming up as well. But this time it's just me back to uh talking about communication to help you to achieve communication mastery. And in light of the guests we've been having, I wanted to focus for this episode on uh how businesses can really benefit from coaching, from communication strength, from communication mastery. I've had a lot of businesses get back to me recently about some of the benefits they've been seeing, and it's given me a fresh insight into some of those areas that businesses can benefit from with communication coaching. And so I want to zero in on several of those in this episode. The first area, of course, is that communication coaching and particularly understanding yourself through the life languages profile can really help to reduce miscommunication. If you think about it, miscommunication is such a powerful hindrance to business, whether it's miscommunication between team members in your staff or in your business, or whether it's miscommunication with a key client or a customer that comes in. Maybe you're looking at customer service, and miscommunication there could really make a difference to retaining a customer or not. And uh, as the studies show, it's much easier to sell to an existing customer than it is to gain a new one. And so it behooves us to make sure that we're serving our cluster our clients, our customers well. Uh, and so reducing miscommunication can really make a difference. As you know, no two customers are the same, and so being able to dis determine which uh which language we need to be speaking or which communication intelligence category we're in in our exchange is really vital for us to have effective communication, to understand where the customer's coming from, what issue it is they're trying to solve, how I can be helpful, and to communicate what I have to offer to that customer. Again, with uh business teams, it can be vital for the team to not make mistakes in their connecting with one another so that their work together is most effective. And uh this grows teamwork. When uh when teams focus on their communication styles, it really increases the sense of teamwork because the more you understand the people you're working with, the easier it is for you to leverage each other's strengths and uh also to cover for each other's weaknesses. I've seen situations where folks have said, you know, you're much better in this area than I am. Why don't you lead this conversation or why don't you tackle uh this challenge as the leader of this uh this particular exercise or this particular issue that we need to face? And as you draw on each other's strengths in those ways, it builds the teamwork so the whole team works together. We're so much more effective when we can work together than when we're trying to just do things on our own. And that's where communication is so vital because you can't work together without communication. So growing teamwork is an area that I love to see, particularly small businesses and mid-sized businesses, benefit from communication coaching. Uh, their teamwork grows and therefore their fruitfulness in their work, in their exercise of their vision and their goals, uh, they get to those goals far quicker as an effective team and as a team that has good communication skills. Another area, we touched on it just now, but uh connecting with customers and clients can really make a huge difference to your bottom line. Uh, if you can connect with a client in a way where they feel understood, or they know that you've thought about what they need, or they know that you have a solution that meets a need that they feel in that moment as an urgent thing to be addressed, maybe something that needs to be changed for their particular uh their particular business or their particular situation to be transformed by what you can bring. If you know how to react and how to respond in the right way to each individual customer, you'll be far more effective in serving those customers. And then the word of mouth gets around, hey, so-and-so can really help you in this area rather than just blending in with the rest of your competition because you haven't mastered the art of communicating differently with different customers. Something that I've seen again and again with the groups that I work with, not just in business but in the nonprofit realm as well, is the great value of communication coaching in developing leadership. Every business and every enterprise needs good leadership. And as we work on communication skills, the person who's engaging their own profile and increasing their self-awareness is going to grow as a leader, especially as they then leverage that understanding to being able to understand and relate to those around them. Leaders stand out by the way that they can actually connect with the people that they're leading. People want to follow someone who understands them. And if your leader doesn't understand you, that's a great hindrance to being led by that person. And so that's an area where communication has really been paying off for some of my clients. They've been able to develop and promote people who've really taken this to heart. They've they've mastered the seven life languages, they've uh they've learned the keys to success with each of those languages, and they've learned to apply it with coaching, they've learned to apply it to the teams that they lead or to the teams that they're part of, and that's when they rise to the top and become leaders within that team. If you're a business owner or a business leader, a team leader maybe, it's very important to be able to identify the uniquenesses within your team. Because if you're not utilizing the individuality of each team member, if everyone's being treated the same, you're losing the benefit of having all these different people on your team. To be able to draw out which skills are needed at different times and in different settings is a key part of your leadership of your business or of your nonprofit or your enterprise, whatever it may be. And so identifying that uniqueness, what strength does this person bring, or what combination of passions can this person bring to our team? And then to be able to make room for those in different settings as time goes by and as different situations present themselves is a huge help to you fulfilling your goals and reaching the uh the mission that you're setting out to reach. It also broadens your own ability to address the challenges you face. None of us go through life without facing some challenge, and that's certainly true in the business world, isn't it? Uh you never know what the next challenge is going to be. Uh there may be just fresh regulations that you have to cope with, or fresh requirements from your client base, or maybe the whole area that you've invested, maybe even years, into developing into, maybe that whole area has begun to change, maybe through the advent of artificial intelligence, or maybe through a change of circumstances in your geographical area. Whatever it may be, we have to know how to adapt to challenges. And that's where knowing the strengths on our team, knowing the differences between each one, helps us to lead our business and to address those challenges. It broadens your ability if you can see the whole range of giftings and passions and character strengths within the people that are working with you and for you. And here's another area that I find very rewarding as I'm coaching. Uh, every business has its uh interpersonal challenges. Uh, folks on your team who really just can't get along or find it really hard to communicate with each other. I was talking to an operations manager just a week or two ago uh who said, Hey, I really need to get you in to help three of our team to work on some issues before the all-staff meeting that we've got planned for a couple of months' time. Because I don't want them to go into that meeting still being unable to understand each other. And so I'm gonna be working with those three, I think it's next week, in fact, uh, working with those three, pulling their profiles, looking at their crosstalks, and seeing how they can understand each other at a deeper level. Because uh, if those interpersonal differences aren't addressed before they get to crisis level, then you're really gonna have a problem on your team. But it's very simple to look at those things, and provided there's goodwill, obviously you can't fix every issue. Uh if there's ill will, uh, then that's not going to be solved by communication coaching. But that's the exception, thankfully, in most of the businesses I work with. In most cases, people are doing the best they can with what they've got. They just need to be helped to see things in a new light through a new lens, and that's what communication coaching can do for them. And so resolving those interpersonal differences can really make a difference to a business team. I've got several clients lining up right now who want to really address that area with their teams so that they see fruit moving forward, and so that they don't have the hindrance of people who feel like they don't fit pulling their team back in their mission and in them reaching their goals. All of this are these are benefits that uh businesses see from communication coaching. And uh, I realize we've been relatively brief in this episode. I try to keep these episodes short to honor your listening time. But I will put in the show notes a link to a longer interview I did with the Better Business Bureau a couple of months back, which covers some of the same areas of how communication coaching can benefit a business. And so uh take a look at the show notes and uh click that link to watch that. It's about a 40-minute uh podcast that I did with the folks at the BBB. And that goes into greater depth of how this uh this tool and this uh coaching can really make a difference to your business. So here's to next time. I'll see you in another episode and uh hope you help to apply uh these principles as you move forward. Let me know how I can be of help to you.