Consider these 4 Communications Styles When Delivering your Next Presentation

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You may be presenting to a group from within the same industry or even department, but that doesn’t mean everyone in your audience has the same preferred communications style. Different people have very different ways they prefer to give and receive information. Which means that the kind of delivery that engages some people may send others in your audience scrambling for the exits.  One of the big challenges when presenting to a mixed group is correctly adapting your communication style so your whole audience stays focused on what you’re saying.

To make it easier, we distilled it down into four basic default communication styles people can fall into. These are not personality types; this deals specifically with how you like to give and get information. Here’s a brief description of each default communication style:

The Intuitive type refers to those people who are not terribly emotional, but who are quite free form. Intuitive types don’t necessarily like things to flow from A to B to C and so on. They like to cut to the chase, so it’s best to skip directly to the end: what’s the real value you are bringing this person today? If you can get the Intuitive types in your audience to buy in on the end result right away upfront, you’ve got a much better shot at getting them to listen to all the other stuff you’ve got to say.The Analytical type refers to those people who prefer things unemotional but linear. These are your “just the facts” kinds of people. They don’t want to hear a lot of warm-and-fuzzy feeling words, so don’t waste the Analytical-type communicator’s time by telling them you understand their pain; instead just give them the numbers and data they need and want.The Functional type refers to people who generally like their communication to be emotional and linear. These folks like to have control of the process so it’s always best to move in a linear fashion: from A, to B, to C and then follow through right to the end. If you try to skip around in your presentation or jump to the enticement of your “wow” finish, you risk losing the attention of the Functional-type communicator.The Personal relater is both free form and emotional. These are the folks who want the warm-and-fuzzy emotional approach.   So feel free to dive right into all the details such as: Who else is going to be involved/ how getting involved will make them “feel”/ who else they will touch by getting involved, etc.  You can’t just come in and dump a bunch of facts on personal-type communicators, even if they are startling facts. These folks are still going to need a more interpersonal connection.

Even from these brief descriptions of the four communications styles, the conundrum is obvious: they all want something different. The good news is that, by knowing what the 4 types are, you can plan your next presentation knowing you need to hit all 4 types in your delivery. And we’ll teach you how to do that in our upcoming live webinar The Secrets of Killer Presentations.  But here’s a quick little take away secret you can start using now:

When great speakers present to a new or unknown audience, they assume all four communications styles are present. And there’s a certain order they present their information, in order to communication to each style. They begin by addressing the Intuitive types, then they speak to the Analytical types, then to the Functional types and they close by speaking to the Personal types. We see this often in presidential speeches or wherever there’s a mixed audience of preferred communication styles. Working in this order, from the Intuitive to the Analytical to the Functional to the Personal addresses attention span: Intuitives have the shortest attention span, then the Analyticals, then the Functionals and the Personals have the longest attention spans.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

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How Can Leaders and Managers Make Performance Reviews More Meaningful?

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A Q&A with CEO Mark Murphy

Q: Leadership IQ’s research into the effectiveness of performance reviews produced some pretty discouraging results. What are the exact numbers?

MM: We did a study of a little over 48,000 people and only 13% of managers and employees thought their year-end reviews were effective. And by effective I don’t mean that they liked the experience, but rather only 13% said their review had a positive impact on their future performance. And just as disturbing, only 6% of CEOs thought the performance reviews their organization used were effective. That’s a lot of resources being funneled into something that is producing more or less zero benefit, and probably even creating new problems. Poorly conducted performance reviews are a big demotivator for most employees.

Q: What can leaders do?

MM: There’s actually a lot that can be done. Starting with the process side, there are factors like: What kind of content you should have in this conversation? What order the conversation should take place? What is the correct basic structure of this conversation? Leadership IQ has specific scripts we teach for talking to high and middle performers, which are really different than the low performer conversations you should be having. And then there’s the development side of a performance review, knowing the right way to plan with the employee for what comes next.

Q: What’s one of the biggest things most performance reviews miss?

MM: Attitude. I see this all the time where a manager gives somebody a 5 out 5 on a performance review and then three months later he’s calling HR saying, “Oh, hey, listen, I need to fire this person.” And HR comes back and says, “What do you mean you need to fire them?  You just gave them a 4 or 5 on their performance review, they just got glowing marks, how could you possibly need to fire them?” And the manager says, “Well, you know, it’s for attitude, it’s for reason that our system doesn’t really evaluate. So I had to give them good marks because they have great skills, but their bad attitude is just killing me and the whole department is suffering.”

Q: Why do so many reviews skip evaluating attitude?

MM: There’s a big misunderstanding about what objective means and it keeps a lot of managers from realizing that attitude absolutely is measurable. Objective means verifiable and observable, it does not mean quantifiable. So just because you can’t assign a number to something, like a bad attitude, like gossip or stirring up conflict, it does not mean it is not a valid issue. Attitude leaks out in behavior, and attitude can be measured to the extent that it emerges in the form of those behaviors. And, of course, behaviors can be verified and observed. Managers may not be able to mind read, we can’t climb into people’s heads and divine what our folks are thinking, but we can observe their behaviors and determine what’s appropriate and what’s not.

Great organizations like Southwest Airlines, Ritz Carlton and Disney; they all regularly assess attitudinal issues. And it’s those attitudes that make those companies so famous and so successful. So this is one of the things you have to be crystal clear about. You don’t want your managers who are conducting reviews avoiding tackling issues related to attitude because they think attitude can’t be measured. That’s just sending low performers with bad attitudes back out there with strong validation that they are welcome to keep on exhibiting those bad attitudes. It’s just a fact that too many managers mistakenly avoid tackling attitudinal issues because their definition of objective is distorted.

Q: Employees tend to hate performance reviews as much as the managers who have to give them. What can managers do to make it easier on employees?

MM: A lot. You can start by making sure that you call in your high performers first. Let them take that walk into the review with full knowledge that they are in the first group and that defines them as a high performer. Not only is this going to make them feel great, it’s going to send a clear message to your low performers. Especially when you next call in your middle performers.

Also, if you meet with low performers first, they are going to go back out there and interact with their peers and have all kinds of negative things to say: lots of denial, blame and excuses. They’re going to be angry and they’ll want to take others down with them. You take that power away from low performers when you meet with them last, because by then you’ve already got all these high and middle performers out there who are feeling pretty good about things. They’re not going to be interested in listening to low performers gripe and bash. And that’s going to make low performers feel the sting of a poor review even more.

Q: What’s one of the biggest mistakes that happens in low performer reviews?

MM: One of the worst things you can do, and lots of managers do it, is use a compliment sandwich. And that’s a compliment followed by some corrective feedback followed by another compliment. It sounds something like this: “You know, listen, Bob, you’re just so talented.  You’re the smartest person on the team. You get nasty and caustic when we’re in these team meetings and it’s really hurting our morale. You’re just so smart. I want everybody else to see how smart you are.” So basically, if I’m Bob, what I just heard is “I’m great, I’m smart. I hear a compliment. Then I hear Charlie Brown’s teacher (“wawawa”), but, wow, then I hear another compliment, the boss just said he wants everyone to know how smart I am. Oh boy. I’m great. I am golden.” The compliment sandwich is a giant fail. No one hears the corrective feedback shoved in the middle of two compliments.  The only effective way to deliver corrective feedback is to state the facts.

Attend our webinar Taking the Pain Out of Performance Reviews and learn more specific scripts for talking to high, middle and low performers. Learn about the other mistakes managers make when reviewing employees and some simple fixes you can make to conduct more effective reviews.

A professional corporate writer with over 20-years’ experience crafting just the right words for executives to use in challenging situations, Lyn is a passionate and adept qualitative researcher. Her seasoned skills as an interviewer make her quick to identify the unique attitudes and behaviors that define an organization. Lyn’s extensive expertise in public relations and persuasive communications translates strongly in her contributions to Leadership IQ’s custom-training programs.

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Why do so many goals end up in failure?

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A Q&A with CEO Mark Murphy

Q: Why do so many goals end up in failure?

MM: Many corporations have formal goal-setting systems, like SMART Goals, to help employees develop and track their goals. But a big part of the problem as to why those goals are not being realized is that people and organizations get so hung up on making sure their goal-setting forms are filled out correctly, checking and double checking that their goals are realistic and achievable, that they neglect to answer the single most important question: Is this goal even worth it? And then, if it is ‘worth it,’ if it is a goal worthy of the challenges and opportunities we face, we next need to ask: How do we sear this goal into our minds, make it so critical to our very existence that no matter what obstacles we encounter, we will not falter in our pursuit of this goal? That’s why Leadership IQ teaches HARD Goals.

Q: Why do HARD Goals work?

MM: Leadership IQ research found a distinguishing characteristic in the people who set and achieve extraordinary goals. And it isn’t daily habits, or raw intellect, or how many numbers you can write on a worksheet that defines that success. It’s actually the engagement of your brain. When your brain is humming with a goal, as happens with HARD Goals, everything you need to take your goal and run with it falls into place. But when your brain is ho-hum about your goals, all the daily rituals and discipline in the world won’t help you succeed.

The way to achieve any goal (health, financial, career, business, etc.) is to seek HARD goals—so whether you set a goal to save money, lose weight, hit a sales target or invent better products, every goal you set has to meet the following criteria:

Heartfelt—you’ve got to have an emotional attachment to your goal; it has to scratch an existential itch.Animated—goals need to be motivated by a vision, picture or movie that plays over and over in your mind.Required—it needs to feel so urgently necessary that you have no other choice but to start acting on them right here, right now.Difficult—goals need to drag you out of your comfort zone, activating your senses and attention.

Q: That’s quite different from SMART Goals, generally defined as: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Limited. What do you say to someone who says, “But everyone else is using SMART Goals, why shouldn’t I?”

MM: Look, from Einstein to Bill Gates to the late, great Steve Jobs, the greatest thinkers and leaders in history saw opportunities that others didn’t see. The people who achieve the extraordinary don’t just use the same warmed-over ideas as everyone else and they don’t just do what everyone else is doing. They are bold and they do what is right for them, and part of that is in how they set and go after their goals.

Steve Jobs made a career out of doing extraordinary things that quite frequently others said couldn’t be done, and trust me, no goal he ever set would pass the Achievable and Realistic test for a SMART Goal. He had the courage to change his mind, to say “this isn’t working for me” and to try something new.

Lots of leaders and organizations say they want to take the world by storm, to create the next iPod or whatever great thing it is, but then they go right back to running things like they’ve always done. And if you do things the same way they’ve always been done, you’re going to keep getting the same results.

Too often SMART Goals act as impediments to, not enablers of, bold action, and actually encourage mediocre and poor performance. “Hold on a minute,” SMART goals seem to say. “Don’t push beyond your resources, don’t bite off more than you can chew, play it safe and stay within your limitations.” Even a factor like Specific, which sounds okay, can suck the life out of goals. For most people Specific means turn your goal into a number and jot it down (e.g. I want to lose a specific weight, like 27 pounds, or meet a specific sales target, or whatever).

But that definition of “specific” pales in comparison to the intensely-pictured Animated goals of achievers like Jobs and others. Sure they’ve got a number, but they also know what their body looks like 27 pounds from now, what clothes they’ll be wearing, even how they’ll feel when they no longer carry the weight. For them, 27 pounds isn’t an abstract concept or a number on a form; it’s a vision into the future that feels so real, it’s as if it’s already happened. And SMART Goals just don’t do that. However, there are steps you can take to make SMART Goals more powerful.

Q: As leaders and organizations head into 2013 what goal-setting advice can you offer them?

MM: It’s a truly unsettling world right now. But we all know that denial, blame, excuses and anxiety are not going to make it any better. We need to harness the energy of this moment, scary though it may be, and turn it into greatness. Whether we’re going to grow our company, lose weight, run a marathon or change the whole darn world, we’re going to have to saddle up a HARD Goal and ride that sucker at a full gallop.

Too many leaders say “I have had this training,” whether it’s SMART Goals or something else, and that’s where they stay, indefinitely, even if it falls short of inspiring themselves and their employees to be more effective and to constantly reach for better and better results. Don’t be afraid to ask, “Is what I’m doing getting the best results?” And if it’s not, if you’re not getting the results you want, or you just keep getting the same results over and over again, then dare to debunk the standard practices that aren’t working for you and try something different.

Get started on your HARD Goals by attending our webinar Beyond SMART Goals. Learn how to push yourself and your people to achieve the extraordinary, even in the toughest of times.

A professional corporate writer with over 20-years’ experience crafting just the right words for executives to use in challenging situations, Lyn is a passionate and adept qualitative researcher. Her seasoned skills as an interviewer make her quick to identify the unique attitudes and behaviors that define an organization. Lyn’s extensive expertise in public relations and persuasive communications translates strongly in her contributions to Leadership IQ’s custom-training programs.

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Overcoming Fear of Failure to Achieve Difficult Goals

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Advancing your career, starting a business, doubling sales revenue, losing weight, running a marathon, quitting smoking, going back to school, and saving more money are all challenging goals that can be pretty intimidating. It’s so intimidating that just thinking about it is enough to make most people hesitate or even back off entirely from even starting the goal. But it is possible to overcome the fear and become part of the select group of people who actually do achieve their difficult goals.

A big issue here is the common misbelief that the more difficult your goal becomes, the higher the possibility that you could fail. When the truth is, the more difficult your goal, the better your performance is likely to be. That’s because difficult goals give you a jolt; they stimulate your brain, push you out of your comfort zone and excite you emotionally all culminating in you delivering your best performance. But all that notwithstanding, a sizeable group of folks are still fundamentally afraid that if they attempt a difficult goal they might fail.

“What happens to me if I fail at this goal?”

Getting past the trepidation requires rewiring the way we think, and it starts with the simple question: “What happens to me if I fail at this goal?” A simple question, but not an easy one, and truthfully answering it requires a deep look into some of your inner mental processes. When I ask this question to the individuals and organizations Leadership IQ works with, I generally hear responses like:

“People will think I’m weak and couldn’t hack it.”

“I’ll be exposed as someone who talks a good game but can’t deliver.”

“People will be disappointed in me.”

“No one will ever believe in me again, and I sure won’t believe in myself again.”

 “I’ll die from embarrassment.”

“If I can’t do this, it means I’ll never be able to do anything.”

“It’ll mean that I’m not as smart/talented/skilled as I like to think I am.”

The obvious problem here is that all these responses use serious and highly-charged words like “never”, “always”, “only” and “die”. And, when we assess the actual facts, we find these words tend to be overstatements that fall into the categories of interpretations, assumptions, emotionally-charged extrapolations, castastrophizing, irrational beliefs, or whatever else you want to call them. The thing they typically are not, are proven facts.

Fear can be healthy, you just have to disprove the negative statements that got you there

Now, all of this is not to say all fear is unhealthy. Certainly, from an evolutionary perspective, a fear of sabre-tooth tigers kept us alive. But there are times in this modern world where our fear reactions get pointed to something quite abstract, and perhaps even imagined. If you fail in your goal to escape a sabre-tooth tiger, you will almost certainly be dead minutes later. But if you fail in your goal to increase your savings this month, you’ve got at least a decent chance of still being alive 30 minutes later. The fact is, most of the repercussions we face if we fail in achieving our goals are not going to kill us. And, not only will we not actually die of embarrassment, we might not even have cause for any embarrassment.

However, we are human beings, not computers, so we can’t just flip a switch and say, “Feeling like I’ll die of embarrassment is irrational, so I’ll just stop feeling that way.”  Instead, we’ve got to debunk these thoughts in our head, just like if we were an attorney cross-examining a witness. So we’re going to take each of these fear statements, or whatever your personal fears are, and, one by one, ask ourselves if we can find any examples that might provide evidence to the contrary of what we said.

Let’s take the example: “If I fail to achieve my goal, I’ll die from embarrassment.”  Can you find any examples in your life (or even someone else’s life) where you failed to achieve a goal but didn’t die? And to take it a step further, can you find any examples where any embarrassment you felt was far less than what you were expecting? Now, by virtue of your being alive and reading this right now, I’m guessing you found at least one example that refutes the belief that “I’ll die of embarrassment”. And the same can be done with each of the responses listed above.

Once you’ve finished that exercise, it’s time to rewrite those fear statements. You’ve debunked them so now turn them around into something a lot more encouraging. For example:

“If I fail at this goal, people won’t think I’m weak. In fact, they may even rally to my defense.”

“If I fail at this goal, people will still believe in me.”

“If I can’t do this specific goal, it has no bearing on my ability to tackle other difficult goals.”

You’ve disproven the negative statements you started with, so it’s just a question of closing the loop and cementing this logically-sound bit of encouragement in your consciousness. It’s simple, but it really does work.

Overwhelmingly, we have little or nothing to fear from attempting (and even failing) at a difficult goal. Because it’s only by attempting difficult goals that we hone our ability to successfully achieve them. And remember, we’ll have absolutely no control over our lives and destinies if we allow ourselves to remain paralyzed by the fear of the mostly imagined consequences of failing at a difficult goal.

Get more tips on overcoming the fear of achieving difficult goals by attending our webinar Beyond SMART Goals.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

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One Thing Leaders Can Do to Be Better Listeners

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One thing we as leaders can do to be better listeners is to acknowledge that there are certain emotions that, when we feel them, we shut down and stop listening.

We need to be aware of these patterns in our own behavior so that when we experience the triggers that set us off, we can anticipate that we’re probably going to have some bad reactions and circumvent that from happening. At the core of all this, of course, is that when we have those bad emotions, we need to figure out what caused us to feel that way so we can avoid having it happen again in the future. 

This is the essence of listening

If you know that when you hear somebody talk about something in a particular way that causes you to feel something negative, and as a result of that negative feeling, you react badly and it shuts down your ability to listen, you’ve just established an emotional chain that you need to break. Because once you know there are certain things that when you hear them, they set you off and cause bad reactions, you are prepared to recognize it coming and say “Oh wow, this is going to spark an emotion I want to avoid.” This allows you to handle that emotion differently so you stay plugged in and listening to what’s being said instead of wandering off into a negative emotional reaction.

It is fascinating and amazingly reinforcing that when you start to become more aware of an emotion, you become more aware of yourself. And the more self-aware you are, and the more aware you are of others, the more control you have. So, try to anticipate the situations that are going to set you off so you can put yourself in the right frame of mind to be able to compartmentalize your own emotions, bracket them, and key into what other people are saying. This way, you do hear that critical nugget of information that you absolutely need to hear.

For more tips on great listening, including how to stop yourself from making snap judgments and learning to dissect every conversation in order to ensure you hear the message that’s truly being delivered, attend our webinar Lead by Listening.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

View the original article here

A Listening Exercise to do Next Time you Watch a Movie

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Leading by listening requires developing two kinds of awareness. There’s self-awareness, which involves getting a handle on personal triggers so you know what sets you off, what makes you pay attention, etc. And then there’s awareness of others, what we like to call “other-awareness” where we learn to observe and interpret the emotions of others so we can wipe out any wrongful assumptions we might otherwise make and just stay focused on the facts.

There are two parts to developing other-awareness. The first is developing our observational skills, which is all about focusing and paying attention, and the second part is interpreting those signals. Now, I’m aware this all sounds amazingly easy: we just pay attention and that gives us more other-awareness… piece of cake, right? The problem is we observe all day long, but we typically don’t pay that much attention to what we’re seeing. Consider, for example, a dime. You’ve handled dimes plenty of times in your life, and you’ve had ample opportunity for observation. But can you really describe a dime? “It’s silver and ridged on the edges,” most of us will say. Fewer will know it’s Franklin D. Roosevelt’s face on a dime. And even fewer will be able to correctly say which direction his profile faces, or what’s written on the back of a dime. This is where other-awareness comes in; it’s keying in and really paying attention and more accurately processing everything that’s going on.

Build other-awareness with this fun exercise 

To build other-awareness, there’s an exercise you can do the next time you watch a movie. The movie just needs to be on DVD or on-demand, any format that allows you to pause and repeat a scene a few times.

Here’s how the exercise works. First, pick a movie (it can be one you’ve seen before, but it’s more fun with a film you’ve never seen) that includes a scene with two or three people interacting. Avoid big action movies, as we’re looking for strong dialogue between human beings. You’re going to watch this scene where people are interacting twice: once with the sound off, and then a second time with the sound on.

The first viewing, with the sound off, you just want to observe. What are the people on screen doing? Without any sound to help you out, try and key into what is happening with these characters. Check out their facial expressions: are they smiling, staring, frowning, eyebrows raised, blinking rapidly? Are they breaking eye contact or are they holding eye contact? What’s happening to the color of their faces? Is one person’s face suddenly getting red? Who has tight lips or relaxed lips? Is someone wetting their lips?

Next look at gestures: maybe someone is nodding, or shaking, or covering their mouth or eyes, scratching their face. Where are everyone’s hands? Maybe a character is cracking his knuckles.  What about their bodies? What are the angles of everyone’s heads? Are the characters close to each other or far apart? Are they slumping? Are they leaning forward? Are they shrugging? Doing this without sound removes all other distractions and just lets you observe. Then, with the sound still off, start to make some interpretations. Assess which emotions you think are present just by watching body language, facial expressions, etc.

Now watch the same scene with the sound on. And again, you want to key into the gestures, facial expressions, etc. while now also listening to the words and assessing what emotions you think are present. How do your silent observations compare to the observations you made when you had audio cues to help? How observant are you?

Now take this exercise back to the workplace

Meetings are a great place to do this, so the next meeting you are in, observe all the facial expressions, the gestures and the body display, and start to mentally note what emotions you think are present. What’s neat about doing this at work is you can test some of your hypotheses.

So after you’ve made your observations and started to figure out the emotions you think are present; come up with three possible explanations for those observed behaviors; three hypotheses. Maybe hypothesis #1 is: I’m watching Jane and maybe she’s feeling sick, and #2 is: Maybe Jane’s upset because we’re talking about her new assignment and she’s confused by the directions, and hypothesis #3 is: Maybe Jane’s tired. What we want to do is come up with various hypotheses for the behaviors we see because when we develop alternative and multiple hypotheses, it prevents us from getting fixated on just one type of solution. Once we get fixated, it’s very hard to keep an open mind about anything. But when we have multiple hypotheses for things, that is, by definition, having a much more open mind, it automatically amps up our listening abilities.

Next consider the likelihood of each of your three hypotheses by observing some more. See if you can find additional evidence, for example, in the “Jane is tired” hypothesis, you might observe: “Jane has two cups of coffee on her desk and she doesn’t usually drink coffee. She has been working late the last few nights, maybe she is tired.” If possible, you can even go to the person and say, “Listen, just curious, but I noticed you’re staring off in the sky, your arms were closed off, etc. Since we’re friends here, I wonder if I can ask you what’s going through your mind, what were you feeling right then?” That way you can find out which of your hypotheses were correct.

The goal of this exercise is to teach you how to be a more effective observer of human behavior and more effective at correlating those observations to your assessment of what emotions other people are feeling. This allows you to develop a more effective sense of the causality of those behaviors and those emotions. Because the more aware of yourself and others you become, the more effective you will be at distilling everything you hear so you can get right to the nugget of the information you need.

For more tips on improving your listening skills, including a 7-part checklist that tests whether you’ve truly heard all the information you need, attend our webinar Lead by Listening.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

View the original article here

Motivate Employees at Review Time by Asking “What Are Your Proudest Moments?”

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Employee performance reviews are notoriously painful, but they don’t have to be. Reviews can actually be useful, productive, meaningful conversations that do what they’re intended to do: improve employee performance. Some of the changes leaders need to make to have more effective reviews are pretty easy, like knowing which to talk about first: performance, goals or money. (It’s money). Another key tip is to start every review by asking “What are your proudest moments?”

Some of you may be wondering: how does asking for their proudest moments differ from a self-appraisal? When you ask for a self-appraisal you ask for the proudest moments, but you also ask for the biggest failures. And while it might not be a bad thing for your low performers to have to bring you an honest evaluation of their biggest failures, it’s actually quite harmful to your top performers.

Psychological dynamic different for high and low performers

There’s a different psychological dynamic that happens when high and low performers experience failure. Low performers might not know about the failure, they might not care, or they may have even intended for the failure to happen. High performers, on the other hand, have a high degree of critical self-awareness. This is wonderful, because most of the time these valuable employees already know they messed up—even before you tell them. And they get right to work on fixing the problem and making self-corrections so they never mess up like that again. However, most high performers are also prone to beating themselves up pretty hard when they mess up. And that can quickly turn the focus of the review back onto stuff they’ve already corrected and moved past. Plus you might get swayed listening to a high performer beat himself up and give lower marks than are deserved.

Proudest moments also ensures you don’t miss the greatest thing your employees did that year

Keeping things focused and balanced for high performers is only one reason to ask about proudest moments. Starting reviews with this simple question also helps leaders avoid the biggest employee de-motivator: missing the greatest things your people did that year. What you learn by asking this question gives you great information to work from during the review. Let’s face it, it’s nearly impossible to remember what every one of your employees did 12 months ago, so have your people make the list and tell you their proudest moments. It makes a big difference to them if the two great things they did get remembered and talked about a bit.

Another benefit is that by asking about proudest moments, you get clued in to the kind of meeting you’re in for. If an employee tells you, “I am just so proud of myself because I made it on time for work 70% of the time this past year which is a huge improvement over the 50% I managed the year before,” it tells you what kind of conversation you’re in for.

So before your next performance review period starts, simply ask your people to make a list of their proudest moments. If your organization conducts 12-month reviews, ask employees for their proudest moments from the past year. Or if you do six-month reviews, have them look back on the past six months and answer the question in writing. And just like self-appraisals, always do your own evaluation of the employee before you read their proudest moments. This allows you to avoid neurological biases that can skew your evaluation and make the review less objective.

Learn more about how to make employee reviews less painful including why talking about money should be done in a separate conversation by attending our webinar Taking the Pain Out of Performance Reviews.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

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