Dial Up The Empathy

An intensely frustrating personal experience recently has focused my mind on its implications for how we connect and relate to others.

I locked myself out of my house.

Never done that before; but as I went into the front garden to talk with the engineer from my broadband provider, the front door clicked firmly shut.

I had no coat, phone, cards, cash, keys (obviously) or any way to get back into the house.

Calls, meetings and work awaited, it was freezing cold and my husband was in the City of London; an hour away.

We’d changed our front door locks a mere 24 hours early, and with high security keys, the normal spare key that is hidden outside was not yet in place.

I don’t know my husband’s mobile number off by heart (because it’s in my phone under his name). I borrowed the engineer’s phone to dial his work number… a tedious rerouting process which proved absurdly unhelpful then ensued.

A tale of woe for sure.

Here’s my point. The first 5 strangers I called (using the lovely engineer’s phone), in an attempt to get them to help me in some way, laughed. They laughed. What’s so funny? Why laugh when someone is genuinely in a difficult and frustrating situation? I simply don’t get it.

Secondly, listening skills were incredibly poor. Each individual offered (after getting past the hilarity of the situation) to take my number and call me back. Did I mention that I’d locked myself out and my phone wasn’t with me?

Thirdly, it got me thinking… was that just an odd day and these were odd responses? Or is it reflective of a more common trend?

Here’s my conclusion. Empathy is powerfully conveyed in the first, immediate moments of our response to others. How we respond dramatically impacts the perception others will have of us, the emotion others will feel about us and the long term memory that others will hold in relation to us. I’m also reminded of the fundamental need we as human beings have for empathy… especially in moments of vulnerability large and small. I’ve yet to meet a professional who doesn’t think that they show empathy, however I’m equally certain that we can completely miss the moments to show it, meaningfully, wholeheartedly, humanely, kindly.

If we want individuals to grow, if we want teams to evolve and strengthen trust; if we want our best people to really love working with and for our business, if we want them to achieve that which seems impossible at work, we need to encourage our people to take risks, get things wrong, learn from their mistakes, regroup and go again. That will require courage and vulnerability in spades.

So, when they do take that leap, my question for leaders is very simple. When it comes to empathy, how can all of us dial it up?

Turning Expertise Into Impact & Influence

 

For all of us today we work in the business of translation. Wait, what?

All of us are in the business of translation whenever we need to influence those who don’t have the same technical expertise as us.

In a fast paced, global, matrixed, changing business world, evolving through the consequences of a pandemic, professionals everywhere continue to drive performance amidst rapid change and challenge. We do so within a business climate which is trying to ‘fast start’ 2023, navigate a hybrid working environment, and where executives are trying to work out what their policy is regarding encouraging employees to come back to the office.

What Often Happens Is:

• The habit of ‘can you just put a few slides together?’ is a commonplace, reasonable, but often not useful request that comes our way when meetings appear on our calendar… and we readily comply.
• The purpose of the conversation isn’t clear or agreed, in order to help manage the scope of the discussion.
• The virtual environment has reinforced an over reliance on too many slides to enhance presenter confidence and bring more control to the way in which we manage the audience.
• Slides are eye wateringly dense, data heavy and without a clear message.
• Remote audiences can readily, openly and often disengage because either they don’t understand and/or care about what is being said.
• Alternatively, our audience can gloriously – and without rancour – disrupt and derail what we wanted to communicate.

To Translate Our Expertise We Must:

• Be far more rigorous around what the objective of what we share on slides.
• Provide context immediately. Why this topic? Why now? Why should your audience care about what you’re talking about?
• Embrace this fact: credibility does not come from sharing lots of detail, data, expertise. It comes from the clarity of your message. This means we must learn to let go of the ‘the audience needs to know all this’. Often, they don’t.
• Organize your message first. Notice this post is in 3 clear parts and reflects the narrative arc from storytelling. It enables the message flow to be quickly, readily, easily understood.
• Hone soundbites. Soundbites have a personality, pack a punch, leap in the ear and stay there. We want our audience to remember and repeat key phrases, soundbites, conclusions which resonate and persuade.
• Translate our expertise means leaving out a lot of content. This is uncomfortable and difficult to learn to do; and yet it is essential. For your message to have clout, you need to leave the density out. Get to the point, refine the essence, be more crisp.
• Realise that ‘FYI’ is not influence. That’s sharing information. I’m talking about influence. Your audience wants to know: what do you want from me? We need to be absolutely unambiguous with our ask.

Everything about communication is easy – in theory. However, doing this effectively, consistently and persuasively is not. It takes focus, practice, experience, repetition, rigour. We must assume that our colleagues believe we have expertise. Our challenge is to hone the skills which translate that expertise into impact and influence.

When Does Empowering Our Teams To Deliver Become Enabling Bad Behaviour?

My conversations this month have - as always - focused on communication in leadership; and specifically, the challenge of getting the balance right between challenge and support when it comes to driving performance from our team. We live in a world where talent is hard to find, harder to recruit and even harder still to retain. This commercial reality in a world trying to live with Covid-19 adds an additional layer of complexity to engaging our team to deliver, and my time this past month has been spent with a fashion brand that is a global powerhouse in the industry, who is wrestling with such a challenge.

Specifically, the focus of my discussions with senior leaders who need to take the performance of their team to the next level has been consistent: how to ensure that we empower our teams to deliver, rather than enable bad behaviour? What’s the bad behaviour specifically I hear you wonder? ‘I don’t know’, ‘I haven’t got time’, ‘I don’t know where to get that’, ‘I tried that and it didn’t work’ type responses to dealing with issues, requests, challenges. Have you come across it at all, I wonder?

The difficulty for leaders everywhere is that in the race to be supportive, empathic, helpful and motivating, we can fall prey to the sin of allowing our team to ‘do a YP’. My first ever boss described a ‘YP’ as ‘your problem’. So, when our teams do have an issue, challenge or difficulty, they want to share it with you in order for you to ‘fix’ it. That’s ‘doing a YP’. Now their problem is your problem. And they look forward to hearing from you when you’ve resolved it.

But, isn’t that our job? Aren’t we there to do precisely that? Make their lives easier? Sort problems, resolve issues, galvanize and motivate our team to step up, rather than have them wasting time on issues which you can easily sort?

Beware. Yes, we need to be flexible, dependent on the ability and willingness of our teams to complete the task (we’ve all come across situational leadership), however, engaging our teams is all about enabling them to become more confident and confident to resolve such issues themselves.

Our communication - if it is to be effective - means getting the balance right between ‘tell’ and ‘ask’. Being able to ask brilliant, crisp questions that explore what they’ve learned, scrutinize what they’ve done, explore their ideas are to address the challenge, identify who can help them, brainstorm options, ground them in metrics of success and agree a date by which we’ll catch up on what they’ve done to gauge progress.

Whoever is asking the questions is controlling the conversation. Pure coaching is the secret sauce of leadership communication…woven into the discussion seamlessly, effortlessly. All of us are much more invested in making our ideas work, rather than trying someone else’s, and that’s how we ensure that we empower our teams, rather than enable bad behaviour.

What’s The Problem We’re Trying To Solve?

I’ve been working with three global brands this month, talking about the concept of selling ideas, leading change and delivering a different result.

There are so many skills and strategies which sit behind taking an idea, convincing a business to invest in it, and then driving lasting adoption over time… there’s a lot of ground to cover and a lot of communication skills to master.

The focus of our discussions has been right at the beginning of leading this change, and the first place things tend to fall over is right at the start. Why? Because whilst the good news is that whilst we have an idea to address an issue, the bad news is that it can drive down the scrutiny with which we identify what exactly our idea will help address. We’re so excited and enthusiastic about what we propose, that we quickly, readily, repeatedly revert to talking about how marvellous our idea is; because that’s what will persuade, right?

Wrong. Unfortunately.

In my experience, no matter how brilliant our idea may be, the chances are that someone, somewhere in our business has - or is currently - trying to address the issue. The challenge, or should I say the necessity, is to demonstrate absolute rigour.

What’s the problem we’re trying to solve? The simplicity of this question betrays the power of it. Are we talking symptoms or root cause? What’s changed? What’s the value to our customers? To our business? What’s the return on investment as a result? Why is this a problem? Why now? Who is it a problem for? What’s the scope of this problem? Does it exist everywhere or only in some places? Who’s tried to fix it before? What have we learned as a result?

These are questions which we need to ask repeatedly to stakeholders in the business in order to shape our thinking around the problem which our idea will solve, and we definitely need to adapt, improvise and amend our thinking around the problem which our idea will solve.

Problems are never what they appear… and never what they become in relation to garnering support from others to invest in idea.

Selling ideas starts with defining the problem you want to solve… so in terms of rigour and scrutiny, remember to ask ‘what’s the problem we’re trying to solve?’ Repeatedly.

Do You Talk Too Much?

When was the last time someone started talking… and as you listened, you wished they would just stop? I’ve been working with both clients and colleagues this month and I am reminded about the need to be clear, precise and concise. Very recently, I have partnered with a colleague in my industry who simply talks far too much in their answers. They talk about topics which don’t relate to the question, they repeat everything, quickly and they just keep on talking… it’s actually painful and frustrating to experience. Too. Much. Information. TMI. Poor listening. Lack of curiosity. Really poor skills.

The research from the world of behaviour economics supports a different approach, and we absolutely have to dial up our skills in this area - especially in a remote working environment that is here to stay. Harvard Business Review published fascinating research in 2016 that I use regularly with my clients to encourage talking less. The first twenty seconds of speaking typically means we have the ear of our audience. As pack animals, we actually like talking and during this period, we can get comfortable and start to relax into our point. Isn’t that great? Well, beware. If we keep talking for a further twenty seconds, there is a very real danger that our audience will think that we’re talking too much. Beyond forty seconds? Then steady on; it’s highly likely that we’ve lost the room.

Being better means:

1. Gathering your thoughts before starting to speak.
2. Organizing your message into three parts.
3. Pacing your delivery so that the audience can understand what is being said.
4. Knowing when to stop.

I’ll take my cue, right there.

Getting Your Audience’s Attention

How long does it take before you stop listening to others at work?

Data published in the past two years suggests that our ability to get (and then keep) the audience’s attention when we’re trying to influence them has never been harder. Two years of working remotely has made our ability to ‘switch off’ listening commonplace – and it is brutal. Seconds have become mere moments… sentences have become a few words, before we stop engaging with the person speaking because we simply don’t relate to any relevance in what they’re saying.

My conversations with clients this month focused on answering the ‘why should I care?’ question fast and right up front. If we don’t get this right; then everything we say afterwards doesn’t matter…..because our audience is no longer listening.

Common mistakes include demonstrating the validity of our work by explaining the rigour of our process or providing an overly lengthy description of the background to our project or our idea, demonstrate our credibility by a too long introduction, or get overly excited by our propositions (because they’re fabulous).

We’re social animals and we’re pack animals, and we like to talk. So, we think this helps. Without making context clear and relevant, then it just does not work.

There’s a reason why Simon Sinek’s ‘Start with Why’ – How Great Leaders Inspire Action TED talk is one of the most watched of all time. He says, “people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it”. If our audience doesn’t immediately understand the answer to the ‘why should I care?’ question, then we will lose them. Everything after that doesn’t matter.

So how can you get their attention right at the start? Rhetorical questions, relevant statistics, compelling facts, metaphor, analogy, voice of the customer, soundbites all work. But they must relate to what your audience cares about and, what you’re trying to achieve through the conversation.

What do you need to dial up in order to get your audience’s attention today?

It's Time To Talk To Our Team

As the two year anniversary approaches of this global pandemic - which remains far from over - my time so far this year has been absorbed with loss….not only loss associated with the generation defining experience of Covid-19, but also loss of good people: from our teams, our company, our industry. ‘The Great Resignation’ appears to be well under way and organisations everywhere seem to be focused on finding, hiring, developing and keeping their best people. Added to that is the challenge of wanting to encourage people back into the office (dependent on where we are in the world), and there is a wide variety of views regarding employees’ level of excitement at this prospect.

The beginning of year represents new beginnings, reflections, hopes, dreams and aspirations… and now – as we charge through March – it feels as it always does – that being that the year is starting to speed up very quickly.

So, what does this means for leaders everywhere who are responsible for engaging their teams to deliver, in spite of everything that has happened?

Well, if we haven’t already; it’s time to talk. Really talk with our people about what they want, need, aspire to and dream about achieving as we move through 2022. In this fast paced, distraction filled world in which we all operate, as leaders we may think that we do this well, often and usefully… the challenge here is genuinely a reflective one: do we?

We live and work in a highly distracted environment. We kid ourselves that we can ‘multi-task’ (no such thing by the way; we simply task switch). As leaders, we’re in the business of relationships… so how to do this well?

Questions on which to base a meaningful, useful, connected discussion include:

How are you? (And mean it).
What are you enjoying at the moment?
What aren’t you enjoying?
How do you feel about the prospect of returning to the office?
What would make that prospect work for you?
What’s next for you in terms of your career?
How can I help?
What do you need from me?

We join companies but leave managers; the point is to start talking. Really talking. Now.