Leadership Stroke 1:Communication

Early in my own career, I was given a technique for helping with all forms of communication but especially face to face. In fact it was so useful I had the model printed onto the back of my business card for a number of years. The technique had four steps – Opening, Clarifying, Generating and Closing – not a particularly good acronym but the diagram helps! • Opening communication is about purpose of the communication and importance; • Clarifying is about the seeking and giving of information and summarising the information; • Generating is about adding to the communication by seeking ideas and suggestions as well as making and developing suggestions; • Closing is about summarising the outcomes and agreeing the next steps and follow up. Underpinning these four stages and running across all of them is the need to check understanding, acknowledge the people, concerns and situations and be prepared for openness and honesty (disclosure). This sequence of steps goes to the heart of what makes people open up and truly work together effectively. It systematically gets them involved in solving a problem, instead of getting stuck in the usual conversational dead-ends. Here are a number of situations (to help expand your thinking) in which it can and should be used: • Group meetings • Handling complaints and blowups • Giving feedback, whether negative or positive. • Restoring broken trust and confidence. • Overcoming personal style differences • Virtually any interpersonal or problem solving situation. Dealing With Different Personality Styles Most leadership seminars include some sort of grid showing the different types of personalities. Some of you are undoubtedly familiar with these. Maybe you have even been analyzed as to your own personality type and where you fall on the grid. Most commonly, these grids classify people into one of the following four primary personality styles: • Analyticals—whose primary style is to analyze. • Drivers—whose primary style is to drive forward to action. • Amiables—whose primary emphasis is on liking each other and working together. • Expressives—whose primary emphasis is on feelings and expressing those feelings The key to leadership success is not what personality style you are—great leaders come from all styles—but rather how good you are at relating to people who are different from you. For example, an analytical person who can only relate to other analyticals is not going to be a very effective leader compared to an analytical who understands and embraces the fact that people are different. Part of great leadership is being able to work well with people of all personality styles. Believe it or not, this concept is embodied in the above communication model. You find that people tend to get stuck in whatever part of the model most suits their style. Each style has its own strengths & its own limitations. • Analyticals are great at figuring things out, but they tend to go straight to generating and get stuck there. They tend to be not so good at clarifying and taking action. Your job is often to guide them into understanding other people’s feelings and taking action. • Drivers often seem to want to go straight to taking action, skipping everything else—the importance, the clarifying, the generating. Often your job as a leader is to slow them down and force them through the other steps of O-C-G-C, so they make sure they are driving toward the right thing. • Amiables are really good at listening and clarifying, but you often have to gently push them ahead into generating and closing. • Expressives derive their strength from their emotions, and their natural style tells them that’s how problems are solved—by getting everyone’s feelings out on the table. You need to accept and acknowledge all their emotions, learn what you can from them together, then channel those emotions into O-C-G-C. Your job as a leader is two-fold. You need to understand a person’s natural style, and even cater to it to a certain extent when working with him/her—for example, by spending more time clarifying when talking to an analytical. But then you need to guide a person to extend beyond his/her natural style into the other elements of the communication model if you want to accomplish great things together. Leadership Stroke 2: Creative Problem Solving....next time