Conversations Are Harder Than People Think

Conversations are hard. The cool thing about what's happening in the training and development and talent world is that leaders and organizations are finally realizing coaching is not just something we'd like to do if we had time. It is now moved into an arena of, We Must Coach Our Employees. This requires leaders to have conversational ability, the ability to ask questions, to truly listen, to actively listen, and to cooperate in a process where somebody feels like somebody is invested in them. Now, this sounds easy on the surface yet it requires practice. Think about sales people, a longstanding profession for decades. Sales people have been taught how to ask open-ended questions. Yet, if you ask a customer, what's the one thing they dislike about sales people? They typically say they talk too much. Think about that decades of training and a whole industry, still battles what leaders now have to gravitate from. Coaching is asking questions of what people can or cannot do. Ultimately. leaders facilitate participating in scheduled sessions where skill and behavioral improvement is sought. This is not easy as conversations need to be open ended with active listening and not thinking about what we want to say while somebody is talking. This is much more difficult than people think. It's okay not to be a great conversationalist. It's not okay to not practice and work on this craft.

About a year ago, I had a CEO at a conference ask me what if you don't have time to coach. I'll never forget it because I was put on the spot in front of a large audience. And I asked him, why do you not have time to coach? And he said to me that we just don't have time. We're in a major industry challenge right now. I said, well, are people leaving your organization? He said, yes and I replied, well, what do you do after people leave? He said, well, we interview and we find new people. I said, so in essence, you do have time, rather the time is being used in a very reactionary way to get new people for those people who have left. What if you could coach and invest in people and you spent 12 minutes per person weekly, wouldn't that make it tougher for the person who typically quits on you to now leave due to emotional attachment and an investment from you and wouldn't that be much more proactive and use significantly less time than interviewing and finding new people? He sat there stunned and deeply appreciative of the feedback. If we proactively have conversations where we're truly listening and we take actions to invest in our people, that leader and organization becomes much tougher to quit on.

How to Practice Conversation Tips:

1. Schedule practice sessions. If you do not schedule practice people will nit arbitrarily improve.
2. During sessions time the time the coach talked versus the person being coached.
3. During sessions practice using active listening one to two times per conversation.
4. During sessions have the leader coach count the number of new things they learned about the person they were coaching (this requires questioning & listening skills).
5. Create case studies and have leaders write out their first 3-4 questions starting with the word "what" so they can practice question development. It seems simple yet this will help prepare leaders to ask and talk much less which will lead to greater trust and understanding.

Checkout Our Next Webinar How to Develop New Managers to Become Great Leaders: June 17, 2022 11:00 AM Central Time (US and Canada) Register Here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_IDOIXX73SBGPU6VggdyTgw