Posts Tagged ‘effectiveness’
Communication Must Be Personalized To Be Effective
Effective leaders know that communication must be personalized to be effective. Each situation encountered in the workplace needs to be addressed at a level comfortable for everyone involved. Leaders must communicate messages and gain feedback with confidence and care. As such, in order to be effective at conveying their message, leaders must pay close attention to individual differences and situations that provide them with a specific context to communicate in.
Leaders must rely on communication to resolve issues that negatively impact the workplace environment and their leadership image. By using persuasion, consultation and empowerment, managers can effectively lead people and positively influence the work environment. In order to successfully present their thoughts and ideas to subordinates, it is important for leaders to fully utilize these three basic communication styles.
How and when leaders apply the styles depends upon the particular situation and the motivation for using them. The three styles are discussed below in more detail.
Persuasive Communication
Persuasive communication is the cornerstone of motivation and task accomplishment. Leaders who use this style are influential in fostering positive change in the workplace. Part of persuasion entails utilizing motivational comments like, “This is great. Let’s do it!” Persuasive communication is most effective in the following situations:
- Leaders often look to gain a commitment or agreement from their employees. This style works effectively for introducing new ideas, altering performance, deviating from an ineffective course of action, or adapting to various changes in the workplace. Persuasive communication focuses on influencing others in a positive and exciting way.
- Leaders may need to complete a task or assignment in a given time frame or with particular outcomes. Persuasive communication helps define the importance of a given task or situation. A leader’s effectiveness at attaining employee cooperation depends upon the excitement imbued in the message and its delivery.
- When leaders want to encourage a higher level of trust from their employees, they deliver a series of persuasive messages and actions that reinforce employee confidence, abilities and involvement.
Consultative Communication
Consultative communication is effective for building and maintaining involvement. It cements employee loyalty in the leader. This style utilizes open-ended questions like, “What do you think needs to be done here?” Such questions unearth hidden issues and personal agendas. This style helps define the direction to take related to the following circumstances:
- Sometimes there is a need to shift an employee’s thinking away from a particular idea. Consultative communication can also help redirect an employee who is doing something that is not productive.
- Employees need to know they play a key role in determining a direction, course of action, or outcome. Consultative communication is primarily used to build trust. It is also effective when defining goals, objectives, performance standards or specific expectations.
- Leaders often want to increase their employees’ participation. This style is effective for securing involvement in a task or assignment that may be intimidating because of either change or the employee’s uncertainty about the abilities or skills that they need to complete a task.
Empowering Communication
The empowering style is effective when leaders want employees to accept responsibility. Leaders utilizing this style tend to use phrases such as, “do as you see fit” and “make decisions you think need to be made” along with words such as, “effectively” and “efficiently.” This style is best used in the following situations:
- Leaders require cooperative efforts. When situations necessitate the employee work with little direction to complete a task, this style can be used to cement their confidence and help them attain self-motivation. At the same time it helps equalize employee workloads and instills the desire in people to achieve or surpass expectations.
- Leaders may need to delegate. In this situation, the empowering style is especially effective when combined with the consultative style. Used together, leaders don’t defer responsibility, but acquire commitment to their goals and tasks by fostering respect and harmony between themselves and their subordinates.
- Leaders demand improved outcomes and standards from employees. The empowered style works to motivate, amplify efforts and multiply results. It is very effective at gaining trust and respect while motivating people to perform at higher levels.
If you are seeking proven expertise and best practices on effective communication practices in the workplace to train or educate your employees to solve problems and improve their performance in this area, refer to Improving Communication in the Workplace: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series.Click here to learn more.
Related:
Focusing Your Employees on Common Goals
Eight Ways to Improve Communication
Ten Steps You Need to Take to Effectively Sell Your Ideas
Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D. | Author | Publisher | Majorium Business Press
Author of Great! What Makes Leaders Great: What They Did, How They Did It and What You Can Learn From It (Finalist – 2011 Foreword Reviews‘ Book of the Year)
Linkedin | Facebook | Twitter | Web| Blog | Catalog |800.654.4935 | 715.342.1018
Copyright © 2014 Timothy F. Bednarz, All Rights Reserved
Do These Four Common Pitfalls Undermine Your Meeting’s Effectiveness?
There is something about face-to-face meetings. They continue to perform much better and provide a greater usefulness than any other means. Today’s modern web casts, video conferences, online discussions and chats etc. have continually tried to replace or surpass them in terms of generating better outcomes, but have never succeeded. If no meetings existed, work related satisfaction as well as task attachment, and certainly, company loyalty, would be extremely limited or in some cases, non-existent. That is why it becomes imperative to avoid problems that can easily ruin potentially productive meetings, and spiral them into dismal, time-wasting ones.
Designated meeting times may be the only time you, the leader, will be viewed as a guiding force, rather than a task master that is associated with “simply doing your job”. That is why it is so important to plan for smoothness of operation and flow in order to take advantage of the opportunity a meeting provides.
Selection is Key
To remedy meeting concerns before becoming real problems, it is crucial to identify potential pitfalls upfront. One key issue to consider is who should be selected to attend the meeting and addressing why the person’s attendance is essential for what the meeting is designed to achieve. To accomplish this purpose, the first step should include a careful scrutiny of potential participants. Keep in mind that any meeting tends to define a specific team, group of individuals or unit. Those who participate will belong to it. Those not invited or involved in its interaction never will become a component of its pool of shared knowledge, insight, experience, judgment and experience.
Consider the Meeting’s Collective Aim
A meeting needs to be the place where every participant learns the collective aim of the group. Its members must be able to define the way in which personal and collective work is able to contribute to outcomes that will characterize its overall success. The process needs to be used as a ‘commitment vehicle’ for the decisions being made through the group of its participants. It must also become a reinforcement tool for the objectives being pursued through it.
Newly Established Meetings Are More Challenging
An initial meeting gathering needs to be recognized and viewed as an “automatic status forum”. Initial encounters tend to evolve into an opportunity for its individual members to find out their relative standing within the group. Always expect some struggle for dominance and competition for top positioning, as well as some forceful attempts at intimidation to establish importance. Established meetings do not typically exhibit these same issues.
Focus on Maintaining Positive Discussions and Outcomes
One important function of a meeting is to become an interactive place where revisions, updates or additions take place to enhance and move forward its agenda or project etc., as well as what it knows as a group. It is necessary to allow this to take place within safe borders, well-defined standards and adhered to guidelines. Also remember that a meeting tends to establish its very own culture. This is why it is so important to give great consideration to what it is supposed to accomplish and how you want it accomplished.
Common Pitfalls:
Not Planning For the Total Process
Committee and subcommittee types of meetings including work groups, project teams and/or boards tend to constitute the greatest number of meetings taking place in today’s business environment. Distinctions other than those of size will directly affect their nature, so make it a point to include a meeting’s frequency, composition, motivation and problem solving process into your thinking and meeting development.
Not Establishing the Proper Size of a Meeting
Most meetings tend to become ineffective due to sizing problems. Positive outcomes tend to become seriously threatened when too many individuals are present at any one meeting. It is found to be best if four to seven people are assigned to attend an individual meeting. Some meetings can tolerate up to ten individuals, but then expect the number to slow the agenda and discussions down. Never expect to have a truly effective meeting with twelve or more attendees.
If numbers become a concern, there are several things you can try to get them down effectively.
Analyze Your Agenda
See if there is some way to segment the meeting time into various sections or segments. Perhaps you can arrange the agenda so that not everybody needs to be present for every item being listed on it. This may allow some individuals to leave at various points throughout the meeting, or provide a window for new ones to arrive for inclusion into certain points and topics of discussion, especially ones that are crucial for them to offer input or take away critical information.
Not Determining the Proper Number of Meetings
Determine if two or more separate but smaller meetings may be more effective in the long run than one larger span of time. Think through the agenda to notice where breaks in objectives occur. Perhaps multiple meetings may be the solution for enhancing outcomes and timetables. Most times these smaller ones tend to get more intense and as a result, get more done in a faster, meaningful way.
Not Carefully Examining Meeting Program Points
Scrutinize your meeting points and program. See if it can be arranged and broken into several meeting components, rather than simply following one continuous meeting flow? Is it possible to give various members selective informational or decision-making points or items of importance that directly affect their particular area(s) of responsibility or work areas at least one week in advance in order to discuss and thrash out the predetermined topics or items? Follow this by perhaps allowing them to select one representative to join the actual meeting. This person becomes the total group representative, spokesperson and liaison.
Related:
7 Ways to Use Change to Increase Performance
The Four Building Blocks of Intelligent Decision-Making
Six Critical Issues To Consider When Solving Problems
Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D. | Author | Publisher | Majorium Business Press
Author of Great! What Makes Leaders Great: What They Did, How They Did It and What You Can Learn From It (Finalist – 2011 Foreword Reviews‘ Book of the Year)
Linkedin | Facebook | Twitter | Web| Blog | Catalog |800.654.4935 | 715.342.1018
Copyright © 2014 Timothy F. Bednarz, All Rights Reserved
The Roadmap to Effective Leadership
Leadership effectiveness can be thought of as “an influencing relationship process among leaders and employee followers who work collaboratively to effect real and necessary changes.” These changes tend to reflect shared purposes, goals and efforts. It is a dynamic action process focused on mutual understandings and beliefs between leaders and employees.
As there are specific rules and principles that tend to guide leadership vision and actions for effectiveness, leaders need to consider certain questions that ultimately forge their roadmap for success.
The journey toward leadership effectiveness should always begin with a question such as: “What improvement is needed within the organization, and what specific steps do I need to bring it about?” Though senior management typically passes down mandates, timelines and expected goals, it is the individual leader’s responsibility to put them into a time lined and vision-directed framework in order to generate positive results.
The roadmap for effective leadership also includes developing higher levels of self-direction, vision, planning and goal achievement, which comes from inspiring others and building cohesiveness, as well as maintaining personal accountability.
In order to begin the path for leadership effectiveness it is important to ask another question: “What’s possible here, and how does the organization and its members stand to benefit?”
A leader’s roadmap to effectiveness consists of a series of factors that motivate people to follow. There are four basic qualities that help develop a focus on individual efforts that consistently will lead all involved workplace members beyond routine thinking and performance.
Leader effectiveness is not simply defined by actions made in response to obvious or crisis situations and circumstances. In reality, true effectiveness centers around the ability to move from a “mission impossible” to a “mission outcome” stance. To move consistently forward, leaders need to rely on specific procedures and actions encompassing multiple areas of skill and direction.
Elements of management and leader effectiveness often tend to overlap. However, leadership effectiveness is defined in a completely different context. Instead of focusing on basic management principles, practices and procedures as a roadmap for success, the four elements that leaders focus on are self-direction, goal achievement, flexibility and inspiring others to attain greatness. As an integral part of focusing on these factors, leaders recognize the importance of:
Gaining the Cooperation of Others
Establishing and cultivating a cooperative spirit is one of the primary means of increasing leadership effectiveness. Leaders use it to generate and maintain personal and employee enthusiasm for task and project facilitation. This spirit drives an organization and its people to higher levels of productivity and accomplishment.
Building and establishing a cooperative spirit takes concerted effort and begins with understanding basic human needs and desires. Effective leaders use needs and personal desires to nudge employees in the right direction, while constantly detailing and emphasizing just how motivation works to everyone’s benefit.
Making emotional connections is part of the process. This implies being able to evaluate performance and results by measuring them against one’s own expectations and goals. It also means acknowledging that as a leader, one needs followers. A truly effective leader builds a sense of workplace interdependence, which is able to gain and produce more in the long term than all combined individual efforts.
The basis for establishing a cooperative spirit lies in examining and analyzing how best to initiate and excel in tasks. Leaders need to be continually identifying their weakest areas, and, in order to improve upon them, need to set specific goals to turn them into strengths. Excelling in tasks and in implementing procedures and assignments helps leaders feel more in control over work-related situations and occurrences, which tends to increase their personal job enthusiasm and stamina.
Related: Interactive Leadership is the Practice of Leadership By Example
Leaders Gain Cooperation by Understanding Their Employees
Beyond workers with a job, effective leaders know their success is inextricably tied to their employees—who like them have concerns, hopes and aspirations. As such, they take the time to converse with and ask questions of their employees. They find out what motivates as well as hinders, frustrates or concerns them. This brings information, concerns, ideas and perspectives to the forefront in order to identify problems, opportunities, and the best actions to take in regard to them.
Related: Encourage Questions to Improve Open Communication
Effective Leadership is Predicated upon the Ability to Listen and Learn
Continuous learning and listening needs to become a top priority if leaders are to excel. Effective leaders never forget where they have been, and use their own as well as others’ experiences to dictate where they should go, and why. Learning from past errors in judgment prevents similar types of problems and negative consequences from occurring.
It is essential for leaders to have their ears and eyes on every person, process and situation, not in a controlling sense, but in order to listen for ideas, impending concerns, problems, successes and unhappiness. Effective leaders absorb everything and act on the knowledge they gain to prevent conflict or work slowdowns from occurring. They are watchful for opportunities to make people feel successful, competent and comfortable in the work environment.
Effective leaders further recognize they are not reactive, but proactive by nature, where good listening and learning habits set both a positive example in the workplace and the foundation for corrective action before problems can take root and sap productivity.
Effective Leaders Sacrifice Self to the Needs of Others
Acknowledging and taking the stance of self-sacrifice is what separates leaders from the rest of the pack. Good leaders set their egos aside. They are not afraid to get involved and help out in various projects or situations alongside the people under their direction. They are flexible, continually slowing down or speeding up as they assess their employee’s productivity and individual efforts.
Skilled leaders never set or rescind a rule that becomes disruptive to workplace harmony or to any individual employee. Placing employees’ needs first means keeping tasks clear, simple and obvious, which makes for a committed workforce. It means making sure employees know exactly what is expected of them and how to complete the tasks assigned. They also focus on ways to make their own assignments and projects simpler, more direct and clearly defined.
Related: Your Commitment to Others Defines You as a Leader
Success Springs from a Consistent and Positive Workplace Example
Accepting others as they are and embracing differences and unique qualities tends to generate mutual respect and open communication. Thus leaders work at building cohesiveness through cooperative efforts and hold employees and themselves accountable to achieving their goals and vision.
Positive examples can only be set when outward actions correspond with words and do not send a mixed message. Success is entirely dependent upon following through with promises and commitments without deviating from what was promised, even under stress and adversity. Therefore leaders remain inwardly and outwardly genuine, and use discretion in everything they plan, say and do.
Related: Seven Ways to Lead by Example
Excerpt: Becoming a Leader of Your Own Making: Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, 2011)
Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D. | Author | Publisher | Majorium Business Press
Author of Great! What Makes Leaders Great: What They Did, How They Did It and What You Can Learn From It (Finalist – 2011 Foreword Reviews‘ Book of the Year)
Linkedin | Facebook | Twitter | Web| Blog | Catalog |800.654.4935 | 715.342.1018
Copyright © 2012 Timothy F. Bednarz, All Rights Reserved
Communication Must Be Personalized To Be Effective
Effective leaders know that communication must be personalized to be effective. Each situation encountered in the workplace needs to be addressed at a level comfortable for everyone involved. Leaders must communicate messages and gain feedback with confidence and care. As such, in order to be effective at conveying their message, leaders must pay close attention to individual differences and situations that provide them with a specific context to communicate in.
Leaders must rely on communication to resolve issues that negatively impact the workplace environment and their leadership image. By using persuasion, consultation and empowerment, managers can effectively lead people and positively influence the work environment. In order to successfully present their thoughts and ideas to subordinates, it is important for leaders to fully utilize these three basic communication styles.
Related: Focusing Your Employees on Common Goals
How and when leaders apply the styles depends upon the particular situation and the motivation for using them. The three styles are discussed below in more detail.
Persuasive Communication
Persuasive communication is the cornerstone of motivation and task accomplishment. Leaders who use this style are influential in fostering positive change in the workplace. Part of persuasion entails utilizing motivational comments like, “This is great. Let’s do it!” Persuasive communication is most effective in the following situations:
- Leaders often look to gain a commitment or agreement from their employees. This style works effectively for introducing new ideas, altering performance, deviating from an ineffective course of action, or adapting to various changes in the workplace. Persuasive communication focuses on influencing others in a positive and exciting way.
- Leaders may need to complete a task or assignment in a given time frame or with particular outcomes. Persuasive communication helps define the importance of a given task or situation. A leader’s effectiveness at attaining employee cooperation depends upon the excitement imbued in the message and its delivery.
- When leaders want to encourage a higher level of trust from their employees, they deliver a series of persuasive messages and actions that reinforce employee confidence, abilities and involvement.
Related: Ten Steps You Need to Take to Effectively Sell Your Ideas
Consultative Communication
Consultative communication is effective for building and maintaining involvement. It cements employee loyalty in the leader. This style utilizes open-ended questions like, “What do you think needs to be done here?” Such questions unearth hidden issues and personal agendas. This style helps define the direction to take related to the following circumstances:
- Sometimes there is a need to shift an employee’s thinking away from a particular idea. Consultative communication can also help redirect an employee who is doing something that is not productive.
- Employees need to know they play a key role in determining a direction, course of action, or outcome. Consultative communication is primarily used to build trust. It is also effective when defining goals, objectives, performance standards or specific expectations.
- Leaders often want to increase their employees’ participation. This style is effective for securing involvement in a task or assignment that may be intimidating because of either change or the employee’s uncertainty about the abilities or skills that they need to complete a task.
Related: Eight Ways to Improve Communication
Empowering Communication
The empowering style is effective when leaders want employees to accept responsibility. Leaders utilizing this style tend to use phrases such as, “do as you see fit” and “make decisions you think need to be made” along with words such as, “effectively” and “efficiently.” This style is best used in the following situations:
- Leaders require cooperative efforts. When situations necessitate the employee work with little direction to complete a task, this style can be used to cement their confidence and help them attain self-motivation. At the same time it helps equalize employee workloads and instills the desire in people to achieve or surpass expectations.
- Leaders may need to delegate. In this situation, the empowering style is especially effective when combined with the consultative style. Used together, leaders don’t defer responsibility, but acquire commitment to their goals and tasks by fostering respect and harmony between themselves and their subordinates.
- Leaders demand improved outcomes and standards from employees. The empowered style works to motivate, amplify efforts and multiply results. It is very effective at gaining trust and respect while motivating people to perform at higher levels.
If you are seeking proven expertise and best practices on effective communication practices in the workplace to train or educate your employees to solve problems and improve their performance in this area, refer to Improving Communication in the Workplace: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series.Click here to learn more.
________________________________________________________________________
Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D. | Author | Publisher | Majorium Business Press
Author of Great! What Makes Leaders Great: What They Did, How They Did It and What You Can Learn From It (Finalist – 2011 Foreward Reviews‘ Book of the Year)
Linkedin | Facebook | Twitter | Web | Blog | Catalog |800.654.4935 | 715.342.1018
Copyright © 2012 Timothy F. Bednarz, All Rights Reserved
Do These Four Common Pitfalls Undermine Your Meeting’s Effectiveness?
There is something about face-to-face meetings. They continue to perform much better and provide a greater usefulness than any other means. Today’s modern web casts, video conferences, online discussions and chats etc. have continually tried to replace or surpass them in terms of generating better outcomes, but have never succeeded. If no meetings existed, work related satisfaction as well as task attachment, and certainly, company loyalty, would be extremely limited or in some cases, non-existent. That is why it becomes imperative to avoid problems that can easily ruin potentially productive meetings, and spiral them into dismal, time-wasting ones.
Designated meeting times may be the only time you, the leader, will be viewed as a guiding force, rather than a task master that is associated with “simply doing your job”. That is why it is so important to plan for smoothness of operation and flow in order to take advantage of the opportunity a meeting provides.
Selection is Key
To remedy meeting concerns before becoming real problems, it is crucial to identify potential pitfalls upfront. One key issue to consider is who should be selected to attend the meeting and addressing why the person’s attendance is essential for what the meeting is designed to achieve. To accomplish this purpose, the first step should include a careful scrutiny of potential participants. Keep in mind that any meeting tends to define a specific team, group of individuals or unit. Those who participate will belong to it. Those not invited or involved in its interaction never will become a component of its pool of shared knowledge, insight, experience, judgment and experience.
Related: The Four Building Blocks of Intelligent Decision-Making
Consider the Meeting’s Collective Aim
A meeting needs to be the place where every participant learns the collective aim of the group. Its members must be able to define the way in which personal and collective work is able to contribute to outcomes that will characterize its overall success. The process needs to be used as a ‘commitment vehicle’ for the decisions being made through the group of its participants. It must also become a reinforcement tool for the objectives being pursued through it.
Newly Established Meetings Are More Challenging
An initial meeting gathering needs to be recognized and viewed as an “automatic status forum”. Initial encounters tend to evolve into an opportunity for its individual members to find out their relative standing within the group. Always expect some struggle for dominance and competition for top positioning, as well as some forceful attempts at intimidation to establish importance. Established meetings do not typically exhibit these same issues.
Focus on Maintaining Positive Discussions and Outcomes
One important function of a meeting is to become an interactive place where revisions, updates or additions take place to enhance and move forward its agenda or project etc., as well as what it knows as a group. It is necessary to allow this to take place within safe borders, well-defined standards and adhered to guidelines. Also remember that a meeting tends to establish its very own culture. This is why it is so important to give great consideration to what it is supposed to accomplish and how you want it accomplished.
Related: Six Critical Issues To Consider When Solving Problems
Common Pitfalls:
Not Planning For the Total Process
Committee and subcommittee types of meetings including work groups, project teams and/or boards tend to constitute the greatest number of meetings taking place in today’s business environment. Distinctions other than those of size will directly affect their nature, so make it a point to include a meeting’s frequency, composition, motivation and problem solving process into your thinking and meeting development.
Not Establishing the Proper Size of a Meeting
Most meetings tend to become ineffective due to sizing problems. Positive outcomes tend to become seriously threatened when too many individuals are present at any one meeting. It is found to be best if four to seven people are assigned to attend an individual meeting. Some meetings can tolerate up to ten individuals, but then expect the number to slow the agenda and discussions down. Never expect to have a truly effective meeting with twelve or more attendees.
If numbers become a concern, there are several things you can try to get them down effectively.
Analyze Your Agenda
See if there is some way to segment the meeting time into various sections or segments. Perhaps you can arrange the agenda so that not everybody needs to be present for every item being listed on it. This may allow some individuals to leave at various points throughout the meeting, or provide a window for new ones to arrive for inclusion into certain points and topics of discussion, especially ones that are crucial for them to offer input or take away critical information.
Not Determining the Proper Number of Meetings
Determine if two or more separate but smaller meetings may be more effective in the long run than one larger span of time. Think through the agenda to notice where breaks in objectives occur. Perhaps multiple meetings may be the solution for enhancing outcomes and timetables. Most times these smaller ones tend to get more intense and as a result, get more done in a faster, meaningful way.
Not Carefully Examining Meeting Program Points
Scrutinize your meeting points and program. See if it can be arranged and broken into several meeting components, rather than simply following one continuous meeting flow? Is it possible to give various members selective informational or decision-making points or items of importance that directly affect their particular area(s) of responsibility or work areas at least one week in advance in order to discuss and thrash out the predetermined topics or items? Follow this by perhaps allowing them to select one representative to join the actual meeting. This person becomes the total group representative, spokesperson and liaison.
Related: 7 Ways to Use Change to Increase Performance
Author: Shirley Bednarz, Ph.D., Senior Editor and Chief Researcher at Majorium Business Press.
If you would like to learn more about effective meeting techniques, refer to Effective Meetings: Pinpoint Management Skill Development Training Series. This training skill-pack features eight key interrelated concepts, each with their own discussion points and training activity. It is ideal as an informal training tool for coaching or personal development. It can also be used as a handbook and guide for group training discussions. Click here to learn more, orbrowse our entire catalog to view over 100 training titles
________________________________________________________________________
Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D. | Author | Publisher | Majorium Business Press
Author of Great! What Makes Leaders Great: What They Did, How They Did It and What You Can Learn From It (Finalist – 2011 Foreward Reviews‘ Book of the Year)
Linkedin | Facebook | Twitter | Web | Blog | Catalog |800.654.4935 | 715.342.1018
Copyright © 2012 Timothy F. Bednarz, All Rights Reserved