Ever felt like a broken record, repeating the same instructions over and over to your team? This episode is a deep dive into communication, featuring the experience of DR, an executive who grapples with these very challenges. We reflect on the balance between seeking connection and imposing control, and the magic that happens when understanding takes centre stage.
If you've been trying to get your team aligned or find yourself stuck in the cycle of repetition, this is your guide to enhancing your communication as a leader. Let's get started!
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Ever felt like a broken record, repeating the same instructions over and over to your team? This episode is a deep dive into communication, featuring the experience of DR, an executive who grapples with these very challenges. We reflect on the balance between seeking connection and imposing control, and the magic that happens when understanding takes centre stage.
If you've been trying to get your team aligned or find yourself stuck in the cycle of repetition, this is your guide to enhancing your communication as a leader. Let's get started!
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Speaker 1:
Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization and even out into people's personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real life stories of leadership so you can gain a deeper understanding and level up your own skills From communication to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict and more. Join us and make sure you're creating the ripples you want. Welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink.
Speaker 2:
Today we are talking communication. Now. This is a big topic. We're going to be talking about it lots throughout this whole show. We talked a little last week, going even deeper into it, and of course it's much more complex than we're going to be able to address now, but we are starting to talk about some of the core concepts around why communication works and doesn't work.
Speaker 2:
Dr shared his story with us. He says I'm an executive at a company that has been around for a couple years. My team are all pretty skilled at their jobs and overall, I think we have good communication. What frustrates me is that when we have a team meeting, or I meet with an individual staff member, we'll talk through something and I think everything is clear. They say that everything is clear, but then they go do their work and it turns out they maybe didn't get it after all. So the majority of the work will be done, but they miss something, or they come back with a ton of questions I thought we'd already answered, or they go this different direction than I thought they would and now we have to do more work to get things done right.
Speaker 2:
I don't want to be critical of my team, as I think they're doing a great job and are hard workers. I want to trust them. It just drives me crazy how much I have to repeat myself. I want to know what I'm doing wrong or what I need to say, to make sure they actually understand me and they don't just say that they do. So, dr, thank you for sharing that, and this is a great question. It's probably a situation a lot of leaders can relate to, and leaders here are probably meaning not just in a professional role, but maybe as a parent, maybe in other roles that you've taken on. Of course, it is super frustrating to repeat yourself, to feel like you're not being heard, and why the heck is this happening? I thought I was so clear.
Speaker 2:
Now, one thing I really like in what DR talked about is he said specifically, basically, that he's trying to trust his team. He wants to be able to give them this autonomy, to be able to keep working the way they do, and this comes down to one of the core pieces we need to talk about around communication, and that is what is the purpose of communication. So, of course, in this context, we are trying to convey an idea, a concept, a thought. We're also trying to find ways to get our own needs and wants met. And this is where we can run into something that might be a bit challenging. Are we trying to reach out and seek to connect with people as a way of trying to get our own needs met, or are we seeking to control people and make them do what we want? Now, as much as I suspect that everyone will say that they want to do the former, that it's about connection and caring about people and coming to some sort of agreement, often especially, unfortunately, in leadership roles we can go the other way. We can go to this place of I need you to do what I want you to do. So I'm going to tell you that and I expect you to do it.
Speaker 2:
Now, ironically, the more that we do this, the more that we try to go to this place of control, as though we can control another person what they do, the less likely we actually are to get those needs met or to get those wants met. So contradictory. If you are feeling that sense of a need for control, maybe you need to go the opposite way. And, of course, this is really easy to not control when we are feeling calm and regulated, when things are going well and our company is moving into a good direction. We're in a good space, we're well rested. It is much harder when we're feeling stressed or fear or upset about something. Now we have to really work to regulate ourselves. So the first thing we do isn't jump to what can I control in this situation? But how do I connect with this person so we understand each other as communicators? Now, as a leader, if you go that control route, you're probably going to end up as a micromanager, because what you're trying to do is take every factor of what that person is doing and have a say over it or be able to mold it in the exact way that you think. So kudos to DR. It sounds like he's trying to stay away from that space, and everyone most people have had an experience of a micromanager and did not like it. So good job, don't try to go that direction. So let's look at this other space. If we're talking more about this space of relationship and empathy, what does that mean?
Speaker 2:
I'm going to start by suggesting that all our behaviors as leaders, as people, tend to sit along a variety of spectrums, preferences, so that one end of the spectrum will be one thing, at another end will be another thing, neither good or bad, but just polarities. Basically, in each situation and with each skill that we have, we have a different place that we naturally will sit. Along that spectrum, the place where we're comfortable feels habitual. An example I could give really simply is that of introvert to extrovert. You could say as a spectrum you could see a line introvert on one side, extrovert on the other side. You've probably met someone who's a very, very extroverted person. They could be around people all the time, very happily, always happy to talk and engage. That would be a far end of the extrovert. On the introvert side you might have met someone that's very internally focused. They're really reflective, they want that space and time. That'd be far on the introvert side. Most people will sit somewhere along that scale and if you think for yourself, you'll go. Yeah, I know roughly where I sit comfortably on that. Now that's not to say that you can't move along that scale. You can have someone very introverted. They go to a party, they talk to people, they really love that relationship, they go home, they want some space. You can move along that depending on the situation.
Speaker 2:
And as we go further and further into leadership as the weeks go on with this podcast, we will be going more into some other spectrums. It's actually an incredibly important piece of leadership that we be aware of what our habits are, where we feel comfortable and, mostly, how much can we move along those different spectrums to match different staff, that we work with, different situations we're facing. It's when we get really rigid on those spectrums that we tend to get in trouble because we've only seen one solution to that problem or one way of dealing with it, and especially in relationship, of course, where people are often so dynamic and have these different needs. When we come to communication specifically, there is one spectrum that tends to come up a lot and that's the spectrum of task to relationship. So at one end, you have, you know, tasks, these things that have to get done. On the other end, you have how you're connecting with people.
Speaker 2:
Now, if you think of yourself and you can probably think once again of people that you know who are very much on the task side or very much on the relationship side, take just one sec and think about where you sit on that spectrum, and I'm going to encourage you to think about it in your role as a leader. What feels most natural for you, wherever that is, that's fine. Once again, there's no good or bad in this situation. Now, on top of that, I want you to think about your organization or your team. Where does your organization sit on the spectrum of task to relationship?
Speaker 2:
When you think about communication, most organizations sit pretty heavily on that task side, because what is a business? It's providing goods or services, and to do those things, you need to complete a series of tasks. Those tasks could be relational based, but they are essentially these are the things that we need to do to run this business. So it's very common that businesses will sit far over on this task side. Now, once again, there's nothing wrong with this and you can, of course, see pros and cons to each and task focused communication works really, really well when people are already in agreement and understand why that task exists.
Speaker 2:
So think about a kid who doesn't want to clean their room because they don't see the point. Probably not gonna be too great to just go tell them to clean their room. I think a lot of parents could probably relate to that situation. This happens a lot, though, as well with our employees or of their staff team. So you think about DR and his situation where he's saying my staff cared. They're hard workers, I give them these tasks. They say they understand, and yet something's not coming across. They're not getting to that point. So I would hazard that maybe we haven't gotten as much understanding and agreement as we thought we had. So what do you do Now?
Speaker 2:
We go to the other end of the spectrum, and on the other end of the spectrum is relationship. And now relationship doesn't just mean talking to each other and having those discussions about personal matters. It means listening for things that are actually more deep and meaningful to people, and we talked about this last week with EMEA situation as well those values, and you'd be amazed how we don't often talk about this or listen for this. But even in people talking for a couple sentences, you can really start to hear what they care about deeply. This is why it was so important, like we talked about last week, for your organization to know their values, to be able to articulate those. But you can hear them even when people talk. So, even if I told you that my favorite moment this month was I made a really great dinner for my family and had a great dinner together One or two sentences, but from that you might start to think I wonder if she values quality time with people she cares about. I wonder if she values competence, that she made this dinner for people and they enjoyed it.
Speaker 2:
You can start very quickly to pick out these subtleties. Of course you'd want to clarify that with someone. You don't want just to assume everything they care about. But when we start listening for these pieces, we start to find deeper meaning as to why people do or don't complete tasks. Or maybe you're completing tasks differently.
Speaker 2:
I have a great example of a group I was working with a little while ago doing a communication workshop, and one of the things that came up as she had this opportunity to share was one of the women was incredibly frustrated that no one was answering her emails with the timeliness she hoped. They were all answering them right at the deadline and she was frustrated and she'd sent out a whole bunch more emails saying could you please do this? She'd even talk to people and said, hey, can you make sure to respond to my email as soon as you can? It's really important to me. So what she's asking them for was basically a task respond to the email. Now that she had the chance to talk a little more openly. People had this opportunity to listen to why this was important. She was actually quite emotional as she talked about this because it was so important to her. She mentioned that when everyone sends their emails in right at the deadline, that night she has to work overtime. She doesn't get to see her family. That's a big difference than saying hey, answer my emails, and people respond very differently to that.
Speaker 2:
Everyone in the room. Instantly. They were concerned about her, they wanted to check in, they were offering solutions, they were making commitments to their own timeliness that they would be willing to do this to help her. Because they now saw the meaning. They agreed with why it was important. They saw that value and so they bought in and were willing to do something that previously had seemed like a bit of a chore. She'd sent out, she'd asked for this time after time after time, but we didn't go all the way to that end of relationship where she could be heard by them, where they would listen and realize the importance of this task to her.
Speaker 2:
Now, of course, on a team level. This is why it is so critical to understand those values. Hopefully after last week, if you didn't already, you've had this conversation with your team about the organizational values, about their personal values, having that chance to really listen to them on a deeper level and see what's important to them, why they care about it, how they're getting or not getting that from their current role. Because now, if you think about it, if you had a staff member who said, yeah, you know what, I'm not fully bought into these company values yet because I hadn't had a chance before that meeting to think about them and yeah, so with that I guess I don't really get why we're going the direction we're going. I could don't fully understand our strategy.
Speaker 2:
If you give that person a task, how likely are they to do that task wholeheartedly, to really jump in to understand all the nuance, based on the direction you're going, of how you want that task done? I'm going to hazard a guess that it's pretty unlikely that that person is going to be bought in and do that task in the way that you hoped. And, once again, we're not going to get there through controlling, micromanaging, telling them more and more times what to do and exactly how we want to get it done. We're going to get to that place through creating that understanding, having those conversations so they can really connect with the value behind those tasks and once you get a team that is bought in on that way, you can give them sometimes a task that you don't have to explain in a deep way, but they understand how deeply everything moves towards these values we're going towards. That culture is all about supporting that. So then tasks become easy and you'll find that once you have that, it can be a very concise process. Then you can just say those things to people. They'll understand them, they'll connect with them, they'll do them in the way you hoped and then you get to move forward, which is exactly what we want. You don't need to spend half of every staff meeting talking about feelings and going deeply into this value piece every time, but you do need to make sure that you have committed some time to exploring this, to making sure your team knows why you are doing things, what the value is, and also that they feel hurt.
Speaker 2:
Dr, I hope that starts to answer your question. As always, if you submit a story to the show, I will follow up with you after for a free session to make sure that we answered your question fully. As we don't use identifying details on this show, I want to make sure that everything actually does get answered and as a thank you for sharing your story with us today. If you want to share your story or ask a question, the form for that is below. You can fill it out and I will get back to you. If you would like to join the show live to ask your questions, make comments, please do. The link for that is also in the description below. I thank you so much for joining and being with us today and listening to this. I hope it gave you some valuable insight about where you might be missing that opportunity to listen before giving those tasks in your life, and I look forward to seeing you next week.
Speaker 1:
We hope you enjoyed the episode. Make sure to subscribe, comment and connect with Leah at meetleahca.