Are You Sending the Right Messages?

As a leader in a complex organization, you are a source of knowledge, direction, and motivation for others. You want to foster high performance and enthusiasm. Keeping top talent engaged and productive takes time and attention. 

Sometimes in a crunch you are amazed at how well people perform, and at other times breakdowns occur and you wonder if you are having an impact at all. 

If this is the case for you, your organization, or your clients, how do you make sure you are nurturing the kind of organization you want to have? Many companies use surveys and metrics to measure performance, which can provide useful feedback, though often generalized or too long after the fact. 

When you assess your own leadership influence, how can you tell if you are sending the right messages, in real time, so that you can adjust with agility? How can the way you communicate reinforce healthy interdependence rather than passivity or resistance?

Here are some places to look. 

Content and Context
Let’s say you are calling a meeting, maybe a conference call. You craft the agenda, being careful with the wording and ensuring that sufficient information is provided. It’s important to meet sooner rather than later, and there are ten people involved, so you send an invitation to the participants with the agenda and attachments. 

Meeting time comes, seven people show up, three have read the material, and you receive two "can't make it" emails and an autoresponder that the other person is out of the office. The others are trying to open the attachments and find your email. There’s some confusion as to who was supposed to be on the call. There will be more tradeoffs in the decision than you would have hoped for, due to missing people and a ticking clock. 

What happened? Even though you got the content out there, apparently it didn't get the attention you wanted. It’s not just that everyone is busy, although that’s true. If this has happened more than once, it’s clear that it’s not about what you are communicating, but about how. 

It’s time to step onto your personal observation deck and consider the context. If you accept the premise that “the meaning of your communication is the response you get or the effect it has,” then you know it’s time for learning.

Conscious Competence
It’s helpful to have a framework that accounts for all the aspects of successful influence to achieve results while building relationships. 
Using SYNTAX (see the “swirl” model), you can step through five aspects that will give you specific clues.

Being awake and on your observation deck in itself gives you many additional choices. Besides thinking through the content, you can step into the shoes of each team member and think about what’s in it for them. You can take an overview of the whole situation to see how best to make it flow, with everyone included that needs to be included.

With that assessment, you can address much more than the INFORM task, which is all you were thinking about when you wrote the agenda. Often we get deep into the matter at hand and can overlook the other dimensions of influence.

Rather than being a side trip, stepping through PLAN, LINK, BALANCE, and LEARN, in addition to INFORM, saves a lot of time and hassle. Conscious competence is an investment that pays off big time. 

 

It’s All About the Request
The swirls, or arms, of SYNTAX all connect through the center, BALANCE. Balance is about making requests and agreements that move the action forward and build trust and cooperation. 

When you step up and make a clear request, you are not just putting information out there. You are taking action, which engenders action. 

When you convey a specific time frame with your request, you make the action a lot more likely to happen. 

We often think we are making requests when we are just sending out information. Being consciously competent at making requests means you are putting your intentions into action and inviting others to respond. Crafting a good request is just one of the SYNTAX skills that gets you real-time results while modeling effective behavior.   

Common Sense
This seems like common sense. What’s missing in many leadership moments is that we overlook key factors that determine the response we will get or the effect we will have. 

As we grow our skills and influence, we develop our capacity for both focus and flexibility, which are characteristics of outstanding leaders. Balancing these means sending the right messages more of the time. 

 

We have inherited some common sense that should be re-examined in the world we inhabit today. For instance, many people have a knee-jerk reaction that negotiation means opposition, or that your influence comes from the position you hold, or that it’s up to the listener to figure out what you are asking for, i.e. they have to "sink or swim." 

These reactions send messages that you may not consciously want to send. They are often outside of your awareness or intention, and still they come across to the other person.

Modeling is the Most Powerful Form of Influence
Who you are and what you do has more influence than what you say. Are you willing to be authentic and take responsibility for the impact of your actions? If so, that is likely to show up in the people around you as well. For instance, if you were the one who was late for the last meeting you called, others’ expectations may shift accordingly. 

So, Are You Sending the Right Messages?
The only feedback you really have is the results you are getting. As you succeed and see the people around you contributing with enthusiasm or at least good cheer, apparently you are sending the right messages. 

 

You can observe how all aspects of SYNTAX are present in that outcome. This strengthens conscious competence for the other times.

When, as will happen, you encounter obvious or hidden roadblocks, engage your curiosity. Get on the observation deck and LEARN by trying out new choices. Take the context into account and build multiple dimensions of influence. You will be enhancing the conscious competence of those around you as you do so yourself.  SYNTAX is a roadmap that makes this process tangible. 
 
The ideal goal of of SYNTAX is for every workplace - or community - to be a place where people are fully able to contribute their talents. As you embody the messages you send to create the outcomes you want, you are creating that kind of community. Bless you. 

Change the Game

Mahatma Gandhi's message, "Be the change you want to see in the world," sounds simple. It's a profound reminder that we need to consider how our choices express our values.

In everyday situations, it can be easier to see what needs to be changed than to get it done. Anyone who has worked in a complex organization has dealt with people and systems that seem to block solutions.

 

Mature workers (of any age) have learned to work with, through, and around these people and systems, and that is generally a good thing.

 

Sometimes, this ability is a liability. The status quo has a tendency to perpetuate itself, blocking innovation and needed changes. People who are keeping it going are often blind to the part they play. 

 

When Eric Berne wrote the book Games People Play fifty years ago, he used the term "game" to refer to repetitive series of interactions that result in a predictable, negative, outcome. This type of game is mostly played outside of awareness, so it can take a little digging to discover how you could be contributing to a situation you don't like.

 

The ethic of self-reliance has a side effect of keeping such self-reinforcing routines going. Bringing up an issue or complaint can be risky. That's when it's tempting to collude by keeping your mouth closed.

 

When, despite the workarounds, not solving the problem enables a negative situation to continue, true leaders step up and find a way to intervene.

 

The distinguishing characteristic of game-changers is that they consciously design their way out of negative routines. It can be messy, as people who followed Steve Jobs' professional life can testify. Or it can be conscious and elegant as you bring influence skills into play. 

 

When you are in a nonproductive or repetitive situation, three skills and three steps can give you traction while maintaining diplomacy.

 

 

The three crucial skills are:

1. Describing the facts

2. Developing a full representation of your desired outcome

3. Getting on the other person's map.

 

We will walk through these and then share the three powerful game-changing actions you can take to move any situation forward - especially those in which you feel stuck. 

 

The first step, which is to tell the truth about what is going on, is very helpful to me when I find myself struggling. The hardest and most rewarding part of that is to take ownership of my own reactions.

 

As long as I am focusing just on what other people ought to change, I won't be part of the solution.

 

If there's something that's been bugging you, find a quiet moment and observe your feelings and thoughts about the matter. Do you notice anything familiar about your responses? Have you been here before? That's a good sign that you may be playing into the problem while intending not to. 

 

Join us tomorrow for our 45-minute teleseminar where we will explore the three skills, go over the three steps that change the game, and end with the one quality that will help you do it. 

 

 

 

If you cannot attend and would like to listen to the recording, please email syntaxoffice@syntx.com and we will send you the link, which will be up for the coming week. 

Desperately Seeking The Healthy Organization

In writing an article on Co-Creating the OK Organization, I have asked people working in a whole range of organizations - from high tech to social work, from manufacturing to software, finance to education - it's hard to find stories of people who love their organizations. Yes, they may love their work, or the people with whom they work. Some are proud to work for their companies even if they find it frustrating.

The good supervisor or manager goes a long way to deflect negativity. On the other hand, needing to stay in a job for health insurance or fear of unemployment doesn't help at all. People suffering at work is an old story, despite the efforts of management(when they do care, which is not always apparent) and sophisticated consultants since the middle of the last century.

Whoever has a story about a healthy organization, or one of which they are proud, please tell me all about it. It would be great to learn what that's like and how it's done. For me and everyone who goes to work each day. Let's make organizations reflect the best of what's possible. And more to come on this topic as I work through the research process.