Business Tips
We Have to Talk
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- Parent Category: Business Tips
- Category: Leadership
In today's rapidly changing landscape, global communication fluency is a must have leadership skill.
Business owners, executives and professionals from all positions in the workplace need to continually assess and re-tool their strategy for ongoing success and career development by learning the latest strategies.
How to have ‘courageous conversations’.
Consider this; you have to tell one of your most productive employees that she dresses inappropriately and unprofessionally. Worse, her personal hygiene is sometimes less than desirable. How do you handle this difficult conversation?
Is it so hard to tell that same person that their ten-kilos-too-small and twenty-years-too-young shirt is wildly inappropriate for the office?
Courageous conversations cause most of us some level of anxiety. Discussing sensitive topics or delivering bad news is something most leaders dread. Often leaders have to fight the natural impulse to avoid confronting difficult issues.
Confronting another person is difficult. Perhaps, it's because these skills are rarely taught at home or school. And even people with excellent communication skills sometimes retreat when faced with stressful or sensitive communication issues. Yet, when you avoid communication, the vacuum gets filled with negative assumptions and ill will.
If you want to maintain your relationship with the other party, the goal is to encourage a change in behaviour, and that means you need to deliver bad news thoughtfully, tactfully and respectfully.
When preparing for acourageous conversation, it's critically important to think about the emotional and intellectual perspective of the other person.
Compassion helps you to be open to the other person's perspective. Compassion is what reminds us that the other person is just doing the best they can with what they've got.
To manage a courageous conversation successfully, it's important to understand your own conflict management style as well as that of your conversation partner.
Reference: “Smart Talk: The Public Speakers Guide to Success in Every Situation, by Lisa B. Marshall