If one thing in your business was the ON/OFF switch of whether or not your company grows in 2022, would you want to know what it is? Every business leader I’ve talked to recently does!
They all want to win… and win big. But a lot of them aren’t. They feel like they’re treading water and they can’t seem to make any real forward progress. Wanna know why?
A recent SalesForce.com study showed that 86% of business leaders identified communication issues as the #1 reason for failure in their company. This jumped to 97% when they asked team members the same questions.
I’m sure you’ve seen the same issues in your company.
You tell people things, and they end up coming back to you multiple times asking you to repeat what you said. It feels like they aren’t listening. Or you provide some guidance on a project and it ends up going off the rails… like nobody understands what you are saying.
You scramble to put out project fires one after another, thinking all along “this could have been avoided if people had just listened to me the first time!”
After this happens several times, you start to feel like a broken record, just saying the same things over… and over… and over again.
Maybe you’ve even struggled with thoughts like “I suck at talking to people” or “I guess I’m not a natural communicator”. (It might not have been those exact words, but you started questioning your own ability to communicate with your team.) I know I’ve been there before.
When I was a 13-year-old freshman in high school (yep, that’s me in the picture), I remember this one time that I was assigned to work on a group project with three other people. The specifics and people shall remain unnamed to protect the guilty, but let’s just call them John, Jessica, and Jennifer.
I got tagged by our teacher as the group leader and had to stay after class on Friday to get the 10-minute “here’s what you have to do” speech and the group project binder. Afterward, our group sat down on the bleachers in the gym and I repeated all the instructions I had been given back to the group.
We divided up the tasks among ourselves and everyone said they understood what they were supposed to work on over the weekend. We took our stacks of papers from the binder, stuffed them into our backpacks, and bolted for the parking lot.
Fast forward to Monday morning: John came up to me at lunch and wanted me to explain what he was supposed to be working on again, because he “forgot” over the weekend and hadn’t done anything. In study hall, Jessica showed me what she had been working on and it was all wrong.
Stuff like this happened several more times over the next few weeks, leaving me frustrated and feeling like I was talking to myself when I was going over stuff with John and Jessica.
Long story short, Jennifer and I ended up doing 90% of the work on the project and carrying John and Jessica to a decent grade, because they still didn’t “get” what we were supposed to turn in at the end of it all.
If you’re like me, you’ve probably experienced something like this… multiple times!
It left me with a deep hatred of group projects and I would do anything I could to avoid them. I also got turned off to working with teams on certain types of projects, and tried to “lone wolf” it to success as much as possible.
But as I got older, I realized that one person can only accomplish so much. Love him or hate him, Tom Brady can’t win a Super Bowl (or seven) by himself regardless of whatever skill he may have as a quarterback.
It takes a team to accomplish big things – great things. If you want to win big, the solution is not avoiding group projects or teams.
I discovered that the solution is fixing the way I communicate.
So now when I lead teams, I use a communication method I developed to have “fire and forget” teams that slay their KPIs early. And here’s the best part: I don’t have to waste a bunch of time repeating myself over and over, rehashing things I already told them. I can communicate with them once and release them to go do what they need to do to ensure that our team consistently wins big.
3 Steps to Becoming a Better Communicator in 30 Days or Less
1. Understand that no one is born a natural communicator.
There is a myth floating around that some people are just born with amazing communication skills and can naturally speak and inspire people. This is completely FALSE!
Communication is a skill that everyone has to learn, just like playing the piano or dancing or doing math. Some people have just invested more time learning specific techniques and tactics for communicating more efficiently.
You can too!
In a minute, I’ll share with you the communication method I’ve used for almost 20 years to ensure my teams understand what I’m saying the first time around. It’s really simple and doesn’t require any special skills or even a background in communication to implement with amazing results.
2. Good communication is based on mutual understanding, not on how great of a speaker or listener you are.
I’ve heard people say that because you have one mouth and two ears, the secret to effective communication is talking less and listening more. That’s clever… but it’s a flawed concept.
Just listening more doesn’t make you a better communicator. Most people only listen to respond instead of listening to understand.
Think about the last three conversations you’ve had today. When the other person was talking to you, did you:
Option A) get distracted part way through them talking because you started thinking about what you were going to say in response… OR…
Option B) focus on understanding the “why behind the what”: Why are they talking to me about this? Why is this important to them? Why are they using the language and tone they are? What does their body language and speaking style indicate about their emotional connection to what they’re saying? Do I actually understand what they are talking about?
Chances are (if you’re like most people), you reluctantly picked Option A. We’ve all done it and continue to do it. So what’s the solution?
If you use my method for increasing mutual understanding the first time you talk to your team, then how much you talk or listen doesn’t really matter. (I’ll share that with you in a sec.)
3. You have already communicated effectively in the past but just didn’t recognize it.
Have you ever smiled at someone and they smiled back at you? Or reached out your arm for a handshake and the other person grabbed your hand in response? Have you ever thrown a ball to someone and they reached out to catch it?
I could keep going, but these are just a few examples of when you’ve communicated effectively in the past.
The other person understood the meaning behind your non-verbal communication and responded to that understanding.
It’s no different when it comes to using verbal communication. Don’t get hung up on using the right words. It’s better to say things right, than it is to say the right things.
What you say isn’t as important as making sure there is a mutual understanding of what you mean by what you said. But words themselves do not have meanings.
Words have definitions. We give words meanings based on our life experiences. A word’s meaning represents the emotions and memories that we have associated with it.
If you use the word “dog”, it will have a very different meaning to someone who was attacked by a dog versus someone who snuggles with their “fur baby” every night to fall asleep. One definition – multiple meanings.
The “Secret” to Effective Communication
So here’s the secret I’ve been using for almost 20 years to communicate so effectively with my teams. I use the POISE Communication Method that I developed and refined over the last two decades.
The catalyst for the POISE Communication Method came with my first real speaking gig back in 1993 (I was 12 years old, for those of you doing the math). You wanna talk about being nervous: I was asked to do a 3-5 minute talk in front of more than two thousand 7-10 year olds – multiple times over the summer of ‘93.
As I transitioned to high school, I had multiple group project horror stories (one of which you heard about earlier). Because of these, I continued to study new ways to become better at communicating and this is where my POISE Communication Method started to take shape.
All through high school and into college, I was an Honors and AP English teaching assistant and tutor, and worked with people who wanted to communicate more effectively through their writing. (Not the same as effective copywriting I recently discovered… lol)
During my early twenties while I was working as a nightclub promoter, I shifted my focus to verbal and non-verbal communication as a dating and communication coach for young men who wanted to learn how to present themselves so effectively that they were magnetic to everyone in their life.
I continued to refine my communications skills working as a small business owner for almost a decade, leading multiple teams and communicating with countless clients in the construction industry across Texas.
And over the 8+ years I served in the U.S. Army, I worked as a leadership and communication trainer for multiple teams. I developed a reputation as a creator of solutions and was specifically assigned to teams to uplevel their performance.
A few years ago, I was brought into to work with a team that had been consistently underperforming compared to 5 other divisions in the organization on 7 critical KPIs. Using my POISE Communication Method, the team that I worked with became #1 in the organization within 6 months and continued to stay at the #1 spot for more than a year after I was no longer directly working with the team.
To this day, I’m still crazy proud of the work my team put in and the amazing growth they had, both personally and professionally! (If you’re reading this, you know who you are…)
Here’s the WIIFM… What’s In It For Me?
If you are a business leader who wants to flip the ON switch and fix the one thing that is keeping your business from growing, drop a reaction on this post and comment “POISE” below. I’ll reach out to get you the FREE PDF download of the POISE Communication Method guide.
Remember, everyone deserves exceptional leadership, and you can be that leader!