5 Elements of Pro-Active Positive Communication

• What Is your well-developed strategy to communicate your respect and appreciation for those you work with?
• What do you say to dramatically increase collaboration within the talent pool of your work teams?
• How do you actively express your passion for becoming a diversity, equity, and inclusion thought leader in your industry or profession?
• How will you quickly develop the kind of camaraderie that is needed to move into collaboration with new but powerful members of your network?
• When practicing your deep listening strategy, what winning tactics do you employ to make current and future stakeholders feel great about spending time with you?

“I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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Hillary’s Story

Hillary got her drive to succeed and flat-out smarts from her type “A” parents who insisted that she had the best training and education that money could buy. Not only did she go to all of the right schools, but she was a stellar athlete and an all-star musician. When she was winning races on the track, she was collecting medals and recognition as a lead guitar soloist which she also played in her youth church group. By tenth grade, she’d finished her girl scout gold award and was sitting on the local high council with leaders that were seniors and college freshmen.

You’d think that she’d be flying high forever but as a leader, she was a mess! Someone with as much education and exposure should be able to do so much better with people but sadly, Hillary had to admit after years of struggle that she too was a work in progress. Of her peers that came out of the management consultant training program at her job, Hillary was the only one in 5 years that hadn’t been promoted and was constantly getting low-performance reviews. This made no sense because she was the top recruit when the firm first hired her out of graduate school at MIT! She was so highly sought after because she’d won tons of awards and had the highest GPA of all of her MBA classes. Still, she hadn’t a whole lot of training or experience in basic communication and boy did it show.

When her fellow project team members had to work with her, they constantly complained about her language and negative tone. She seemed to have a hard time fitting in, no matter where her mentors and directors put her, and this was in spite of her obvious talent and capabilities. She didn’t listen or share well with others. It was almost as if she felt that she alone was the only one that had any useful or relevant ideas, and it was next to impossible to get her to shut up once she had the floor. She could never take a subtle hint about the inappropriateness of her comments or behavior without becoming angry and frustrated at herself and everyone else. After all, it was never her intention to hurt or disrupt others. The situation got so bad that she had to be put on a performance improvement plan (PIP) and given 6 months to turn her act around or move on to something else.

That’s when her boss who’d I’d worked with years earlier gave me a call just to get some advice. I agreed to meet with her and give her some assessments to see if the issues could be fixed with some quick but subtle behavioral changes which I was willing to suggest.?She and I both determined that it was her communication style that needed to change most urgently and after some deliberation about the time that we would have to work together and the cost, we got to work right away using our 100% money-back guaranteed VisionQuest90? program during which I worked with her on understanding, creating, and implementing a well-written plan to incorporate all of the elements below.

You see, before you can adequately seek a harmonious communication outcome, I’m sure that you can imagine how important it would be to understand exactly what that looks and feels like so that you’ll know when you’ve arrived. You’ll need to know how to drive communication results that leave people feeling friendly and agreeable. Every leader wants to see that people are playing well together and at a suitably high level. When teams perform at this level, their moves are congruous and well-balanced. Nothing they do or say causes waste or ineffectiveness. At no point in the process is there a contradiction, conflict, or inconsistency, if so, the strategic-minded leader recognizes this as the point of failure and knows how to make proper adjustments. All of this is super tricky and requires quite a few specific communication skills.

For instance, before you start sharing all of your thoughts and opinions with other people, you might want to ease into communication with a specific level of both patience and anticipation. The fact is, you can find ways to respect and even appreciate anyone, as long as you remain hopeful of that possibility and look for opportunities to agree and coordinate your efforts. This is a sort of superpower that we all can nurture and develop but, it helps greatly to have a common cause. It’s also good sometimes to just enjoy our differences, again when we know how to. The key is to listen with tons of intensity and to remain hopeful during every opportunity to communicate with others. When you get this right, another breakthrough will be revealed, and the depth of your relationships will expand in ways that are almost impossible to predict.

Respect & Appreciation

Let’s talk first about communicating respect and appreciation. Respect, on one hand, is indeed about having feelings of deep admiration for someone based on their abilities, qualities, or achievements, and on the other is about having due regard for their feelings, wishes, rights, and traditions. Either way, you have to know enough about them to have an appreciation or high opinion of their abilities and/or whom they represent. How many times have we endured comments about our character in the negative with sayings like “I don’t know how they did this in your old job, but we do it so much better here” or “How many times do you have to get hit on the head with this before you learn?” Comments like these, especially during the formative moments in professional relationships are not helpful at all. It’s so easy to make others feel fear, guilt, blame, or shame that it is good for leaders to be proactive and consciously fight against the tendency to use insensitive or inflammatory language.

Kind of like respect, appreciation adds both recognition and enjoyment of the same qualities mentioned above. When you give credit or show gratitude for the contributions made by fellow teammates you not only affirm their gifts and talents, but you begin to establish the kind of rapport that strong relationships have at their core. Feelings of guilt, blame, or shame can easily turn to those of identification and distinction. Done well, your friends and associates can enjoy immense pleasure and satisfaction, knowing that their efforts were not just appreciated, they were highly praised and admired. Because of you, they’ll not feel the sting of criticism and condemnation, not today!

So, when you recognize and enjoy feelings of deep admiration for a client, referral source, or stakeholder, you have a few choices to make. You could choose to keep your thoughts about your feelings to yourself or you can find a way to communicate them adequately. And this my friend is where so many of us have a hard time moving forward with building positive collaborative relationships with others. I can’t tell you how many times the leaders that I have worked with seem frustrated at their seeming lack of influence over their direct reports. When I asked them, how they show their admiration and high regard for them, they usually hang their heads in shame before admitting that they simply don’t.

Take a look at the man and the boy above. Do you get the sense from this photograph that either is unhappy or otherwise feeling pressured by the other? Of course not!!?They are too busy enjoying each other’s company in the peaceful serene atmosphere of this beautiful lake. This photo demonstrates how we’ve got to do what we need to do to get to know each other to the point of genuine mutual admiration! As far as I am concerned, every time I meet a potential investor, mentor, or supporter, the race toward mutual admiration begins. While attempting to display my competence, talent, and skill, I’m constantly communicating with them to discover theirs. I want to know how they know what they know and where they see things going in the future. Because of this genuine interest, we get to have the best conversations as we explore and share the special gifts that we’ve been endowed with.

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Talent Projection & Collaboration

Next, let’s share a few ideas on how to find hope in the talents and abilities of others. As I teach my clients regularly it’s vitally important for leaders to point out the talent trajectories in the people they work with, especially those that have recently joined the team.?During exploratory interviews, I try to get to know people well enough to see where their gifts and talents could take them if they had all of the appropriate resources and relationships. After they agree that I have a full understanding, I introduce them to the team as the future director or leader in the space. Now before you get excited and start reintroducing teams, I want you to be careful. When you are forecasting someone’s potential, your thoughts and ideas here can cause stress if you can’t or won’t support their rise, so come ready to show your support for not just who they are today, but for who they could be tomorrow. Pledging your commitment to helping get them started and to see their way forward is how you win friends for life!! I’m sure you can see how difficult it could be to attempt to win friends without demonstrating any real knowledge of them or by making what may seem to them, false and or empty promises, so I say again, be careful. This is not something to be faked.

I have found that sharing a vision that I might have for a friend or associate based on his or her well-understood talents, not only invokes their thankfulness but it invites their sense of reciprocity. In this way, I serve others purposefully with exceptional quality in a more proactive way and they feel for me the same or sometimes even deeper levels of affection. Oh, by the way, I’ve also gotten rid of the feeling that people might run all over me or that it’s impossible to serve those that are wealthier or smarter than I. Besides, if I can’t look up to you, how can I learn from you?

Another thing I like to do, once I’ve found and communicated someone’s talent trajectory as I see it, I begin immediately to look for a project that we both could work on collaboratively. Nothing builds trust more than going after a goal together. When we collaborate well, we flood our brains with all of the feel-good hormones like dopamine, serotonin, and my favorite oxytocin (the love drug)! But you don’t have to wait to start building a powerful bond.

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The Gift of Commonality

How good are you at identifying, sharing, and celebrating common attributes that you find in others? Studies show that our need for connecting is neurobiological and when we are good at creating a sense of intimacy and understanding, both of which require specific communication skills, the sooner we can build winning relationships. Communications expert Shadé Zahrai suggests some amazing techniques that can help anyone increase the halo effect; the tendency for positive impressions to be found in one area of commonality to another area without any evidence of the latter. These impressions can be used to create familiarity and a sense of connection and camaraderie with people. This is why it’s important to find ways to have fun and share memorable events with your teammates. It bonds you and helps create trust. The bottom line is that people should enjoy meeting you upfront and look forward to meeting with you over and over again.

Finding commonality avoids all of the pitfalls that are associated with conflict and strife, and helps teams move toward greater collaboration. Getting in front of this with agreed-upon commitments and shared aims will go a long way toward building the most meaningful connections with stakeholders, referral sources, and major clients. In fact the best business development people do this with alacrity. They look forward to and are genuinely excited about the opportunity to meet and share with others. They love getting to know people better.

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The Joy in DEI

Having the ability to have an open honest dialogue with individuals that belong to a well-diversified group where everyone feels safe, will do you well, especially around issues related to equity. It's so easy to talk the talk and say, “we believe in fairness for everyone!” but how do you practice it? Can you speak to how you make everyone you work with feel valued and appreciated for who they are and for their contribution? Equity is about more than treating everyone with dignity and respect, it’s about making sure that they know that their voices matter and their ideas are respected. In fact, Forbes recently pointed out five compelling reasons for DEI, and they are: 1. Diversity fosters innovation and inspires creativity. 2. Diversity creates more understanding of the consumer. 3. Diversity unlocks a wide range of skills. 4. Diversity fosters employee satisfaction. 5. Diversity enables higher revenue. Case closed. What’s most important to remember here is that happiness drives success, and not the other way around. So, anything that leaders can do to drive joy and harmony home for everyone will to a very large extent influence every measure of success.

It was the quintessential American manufacturer Henry Ford that said “coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress.?Working together is success.”?He understood the joy of unity and how important it is to work together to become one strong unit.?In this, we find harmony, agreement, and understanding.?Without this feeling of connection, people fall into confusion and disorder.?It’s easy to become panicked and fearful.

If you haven’t experienced the complete happiness of working with a championship-level team, you don’t know what you are missing.?The sense of wonder and belonging is so palpable that people often feel overwhelmed by the feeling of passion of just being able to see and do more than they could personally imagine.??For these reasons and many others, we realize that dependence is, in fact, essential to our very existence.?It becomes not only good for us but vital to our ability to thrive in any environment. It’s how we capitalize on our potential and change the world.

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Deep Down Listening

It’s so easy to suffer delusion or fallacy about something that was said to you because so much more goes into communication than merely the words that we use. I can’t tell you how many times I have had to apologize to people that I care deeply about for a misperception due to an invariable number of subtle details. The devil is most definitely, in the details! Sometimes, it helps to be aware of what’s going on with others, and sometimes, it is no help at all. At the root of many of our communication foibles are the assumptions that we make and the stories that we tell ourselves. No matter the best intentions of those we communicate with, it’s so easy for bias to set in and I can see why some people just stay away from others for fear of making a false impression. I mean why try when someone has already made up their mind about you, right?

Communication is always extremely complicated, and many are tempted to just give up, but that’s not always in the cards and it’s not always the smartest play. When you refrain from communicating with others, not only do you abandon the many benefits that can be received by everyone as described earlier but, you circumvent the possibilities that others may have something significant to contribute to whatever it is that you are doing or whatever it is that you care about. So try to stay open-minded and proactive about listening to any and every stakeholder well before major decisions are made and shared internally or externally.

Conclusion

Ultimately Hillary learned to take a deep breath and think about the impressions she might be leaving before she approached or responded to her teammates or leaders. Now, she always remembers to inquire about them and their thoughts while listening attentively. She gives the best feedback and positive praise and always finds a way to make others feel comfortable working with her. She got so good at sharing her positive attention that not only did things turn around for her at work, but her personal life started to take on a positive shift that she could have never expected in her wildest dreams. Today Hillary is a VP in her company, she helps to mentor and develop several young professionals and is working on kid number three with her spouse of more than six years. All of this is because she now has the best go-to communication strategies and techniques to keep everything running along smoothly. Hateful Hillary is long gone!!

Exercises to create Pro-Active Harmony

1.??????Make your intentions clear up front with whomever you are speaking with as to the reasons you are talking and what you hope to gain from the conversation.

2.??????Care enough to explore what a mutually successful connection might look like from everyone that you work with and be willing to be flexible as to how you might contribute to the effort. It’s important to be overtly appreciative to the chosen few who might be willing to play with you here. TrueVOICE? is an amazing tool for this.

3.??????Practice looking for the real talent that the people around you display regularly. Ask them if they can recall how they developed such expertise as well as what support they may need to further develop their gifts. Even if you can’t take it on at this time you never know who you might come across or who you may already have in your network to support them. Even if you come up short, it was good that you tried and that you cared enough to listen and appreciate them so don’t be afraid to inquire.

4.??????Find ways to embrace your board of advisors and stakeholders where they are and stay in touch regularly. Everyone loves to collaborate with those that have their best interest at heart but sometimes to get the most from others, you’ve got to be willing to commit some of your time, talent, and treasure first. So do a talent assessment on yourself and share what you can with the right people. When the reciprocity kicks in, you’ll be compensated in ever-increasing ways.

5.??????Be open to building relationships with those that don’t look or think as you do. It turns out that the happiest people find greatness in everyone. Because they first value people, they can break down barriers and build bridges of opportunities for entirely different communities.

6.??????Practice listening with the intent to master making people feel good about sharing even the deepest most personal information with you. Remember if you don’t go deep, you’ll end up with superficial professional relationships that can be easily crushed.