Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lorraine Bosse-Smith is President of Concept One, Inc., a corporate training and consulting firm.

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Leveraging Your Communication Style

Abingdon Press

Chapter One

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place, but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment. Dorothy Nevill

Winston Churchill is one of the best known speakers in our time, and he had a great impact both as a communicator and as a listener. One time, a rather boring speaker of Parliament was rambling on and on, and Churchill was sitting with his eyes closed. The speaker noticed that Churchill's eyes were closed and asked, "Mr. Churchill, must you sleep while I am talking?" Churchill's response was, with his eyes still closed, "No, it is purely voluntary." Another time, a female member of Parliament was quite upset with him and said, "Mr. Churchill, you make me so mad; if you were my husband, I would put poison in your tea." Churchill's response was "Madam, if you were my wife, I would drink it." Churchill certainly had a way with words!

How we communicate—that is, how we talk, listen, understand, and interact with others on our team—determines the influence we have in our relational world. If Lorraine and I have a consistent belief in our previous book, Leveraging Your Leadership Style, and this book, Leveraging Your Communication Style, it is this: life is about relationships! We think your relationships with God, your spouse, your family, your coworkers, your neighbors, and your friends are the core of life. Communication stands at the center of each of these relationships. This book will help you become a better communicator by equipping you to discover how you can best speak and how you can become a better listener. In the next few pages, you will be introduced to the various aspects of speaking. Then, in the chapters that follow, Lorraine and I will help you (1) discover your own communication style and (2) learn, as both a speaker and a listener, how to interact with others who have different styles of communication.

It Is about Give and Take

It may surprise you to hear that most of us need much more help learning how to listen than we do learning how to speak. You probably picked up this book looking for some tools and techniques that will help you become a better speaker, but we would be irresponsible not to also help you become a better listener. The Bible tells us this truth in James 1:19-20: "My dear brothers, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, for man's anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires"(NIV). I can't tell you how many times over the course of my life that I have wished I were slow to speak and quick to listen!

So, what is communication all about? At the heart, communication is telling my story and listening to your story. If I am in the workplace and you are telling me about the sales project, but when you do, a part of you is involved in the story. When I am telling you about what I did last weekend, I am telling you something about me. When we communicate, we are sharing our stories. Artists understand this particularly well because when they sing, paint, write, or dance, they are expressing part of their soul—the deepest part of themselves. When you talk, remember that you are sharing part of yourself with others, and when others are speaking, they are sharing part of themselves with you.

How important is communication in the workplace? It is a big issue, and getting bigger! For instance, in a 2002 survey of 1,104 employees around the country, 86 percent of the respondents said that their bosses seem to consider themselves great communicators, but only 17 percent said their bosses actually communicate effectively. "We thought there was a communication gap, but it turned out we were totally wrong. It's not a gap; it's a chasm," says Boyd Clarke and Ron Crossland, who include the survey in their book The Leader's Voice: How Your Communication Can Inspire Action and Get Results!

Bridging that communication chasm is what this book is all about. Regardless of whether you are communicating with one person, with a small group, or with a large audience, you will need to understand the mechanics of basic communication. The remainder of this chapter will help you understand the basics of effective spoken communication.

Three Keys to Communication

Since we believe that all communication is ultimately about relationship, we urge each person to think of communication in light of facts, feelings, and figures. Facts are the data and details that we are trying either to share or to get agreement on with our audience. Feelings are the emotions we are either experiencing or want our audience to experience. Figures are the symbols or images that help us connect with our audience. We have all experienced speeches or presentations where the speaker appeared to have some level of mastery of the material and seemed genuinely to believe the material had some importance to the speaker and to us. However, we left the presentation feeling frustrated and bored because the presenter never connected with us. I believe that an effective communicator must address three primary engagement targets: the mind (the thinking place), the heart (the feeling place), and the feet (the action place). If the speaker does not do this, then he or she has missed the mark.

Years ago, I (John) was fortunate to have a fantastic experience in a college communications class. I loved the experience so much that I ended up taking two more classes from the same professor. That professor often trained corporate presenters, and I will forever be in debt to him for his excellent training. He was always clear about the importance of connecting at the cognitive (head), affective (heart), and behavioral (feet) levels with the audience. Based on the professor's advice and the advice in Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I always try to "begin with the end in mind." In other words, what do I want this person to do, or what difference should this conversation make? By starting from that perspective, I can arrange the three elements (facts, feelings, figures) and the three points of engagement (head, heart, feet) as I outline my presentation.

Facts

Facts are the tangible part of your presentation; they are where you try to connect with the mind of the people in the audience. People are interested in your facts (your information or expertise) if you show that you understand the relationship between your facts and their circumstances. In essence, you are connecting the dots. When you are presenting in a one-on-one conversation or in any group of fewer than ten people, it is very important not to have the facts be the primary driver of the communication. When you can see the "whites of their eyes," the primary driver of the communication must come from the heart. People need to know that you care about them and are speaking to them, not assaulting them with a series of facts that may or may not connect with the issues that they are concerned about.

On the other hand, when you are in a larger audience, facts often help to establish credibility. A tried and true framework for speaking...