We thought we’d dig into it a little deeper this month with both blogs and our newsletter. It occurred to us that the inability to have crucial conversation may have its roots in an infestation of BEPPUMOIDs.

If you’ve been in class with us, you remember the BEPPUMOID, that little creature that crawls in your ear and prevents you from hearing anything anyone has to say. You can’t see it; your only clue is the symptoms.

There are nine symptoms of a BEPPUMOID infestation; you can have one or several. Your clue to your condition is experiencing of any of these states:

• Bored
• Emotional
• Physically tired
• Preoccupied
• Uninterested
• Mentally tired
• Organizing your thoughts (for your reply)
• Interrupting
• Distracted

The reason we think that the BEPPUMOID is getting in the way of those crucial conversations is because the infestation prevents you from listening.

You can’t engage in any kind of conversation (let alone a crucial one where the stakes are high) if you can’t listen.

So if you’re not listening, what are you leaving on the table? What are the issues that no one is handling that are costing your organization money, time, results, and good people?

Having the crucial conversations that will move your organization forward begins with one important step: handle your symptoms.

So just what is a crucial conversation? In their bestselling book by the same title, Patterson, et al, define a crucial conversation as a discussion between two or more people where the stakes are high, opinions vary and emotions run strong.

What happens in those situations? We’ve noticed three kinds of behaviors:

1. People avoid the conversations, wanting to “play nice, not hard.”
2. People resort to emotion, usually anger.
3. People engage in the crucial conversation and handle it well.

Interestingly enough, the frequency of these three actions tends to be in the same order.

Lots of people value their personal relationships so highly that they’re afraid to risk a crucial conversation. Unfortunately, this behavior puts important relationships at great risk and causes you to miss out on many opportunities to achieve the business results you want.

Some people respond with emotion because they don’t know how to use other strategies. This makes it more difficult to have those crucial conversations, putting the relationship at even greater risk and further jeopardizing those business results.

A few people know exactly how to have those conversations and use effective strategies to handle what needs to be handled.

The first step of any journey is awareness, so…how about you?

Can you talk honestly with anybody about almost anything? Does your team play nice, or are you willing to play hard? Can you play hard and maintain the trust, commitment, accountability and attention to results that you need?

What do you think?

1. Two people have two different perceptions of a situation. Each one believes that he or she is right about it, all for the right reasons.
2. Instead of having a conversation with each other, they begin to email.
3. The situation deteriorates – rapidly.

You know what happens next:

• misunderstandings
• hurt feelings
• political game-playing
• people taking sides
• the situation escalating  out of control
• video on youtube

This situation is a perfect example of the effect of “noise” on the ability of the receiver to hear what’s being sent.

The obvious answer to solve this problem is to stop all emailing. That might be nice, although it’s just not that useful.

So what’s the real issue here?

The challenge with email only emerges when you mix it with emotion. Email is the perfect vehicle for sending details and facts. As soon as those details and facts intersect with opinion or emotion, it’s time to pick up the phone or have a face-to-face conversation.

Next week…more communication strategies in our newsletter.

The importance of effective communication is not news to you ~ or anyone else.

So what’s the problem? In the conversations we’ve had over the years in our classes, it’s clear that one of the most widespread causes of communication breakdowns is that both people get stuck.

When we say stuck, we mean you can only see your own perspective; you only have your own beliefs, values, opinions and experiences and they are the truth for you. The bad news is that all these elements of your perspective prevent dialogue.

The good news is that if you are willing to consider the other person’s beliefs, values, opinions and experiences, then you can get unstuck. You do this by asking yourself, “What could possibly be true about this person’s perspective that makes him or her behave this way?”

Just by considering another perspective as a potential truth you can shift into dialogue. You will get a breakthrough instead of continuing the breakdown.

How can you tell if you’ve shifted?

The true indication that you’ve shifted is the response of the other person. You will see it immediately. A positive response from the other person means that you have replaced judgment (I know I’m right!) with curiosity (What else could be true? How could they be right too?).

Next week…another kind of breakdown and what you can do about it.

What do you need to do to engage your employees?

Many people who supervise others give away their control of–and responsibility for–employee engagement. They think that keeping good employees is all about money, benefits and “perks” and they know they have no influence over these things.

Everything we teach points to the fact that you can influence employee engagement in a very big way. We’re not the only ones who think so.

According to Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans in their book, Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em, “In addition to fair pay, people want

• challenging, meaningful work,
• a chance to grow and learn,
• great co-workers,
• recognition and respect, and
• a good boss.”

Of course, senior leadership and organizational policies matter; employees, too, have to take responsibility for their own satisfaction. However, your role is crucial.

So what can you do?

Here are five things you can get started on right away:

1. Know your people and provide them with opportunities to play to their strengths.
2. Define the desired performance for your employee with the particulars of how well and how often the task needs to be done. Be clear with him or her about how you will assess the performance.
3. Give clear instructions so your employee knows exactly what to do and what procedures to follow.
4. Tell your employee that she or he has done a good job and what they did that made it a good job.
5. Reward your employee for doing a good job.

Next month…it’s all about relationships!

Last week we talked about Barb and the exceptional care she took of us in the office supply store. This week we encountered a culture of excellent customer care at our bank; we thought this experience was a perfect follow up to illustrate the impact that culture has on customer care.

We define culture as “the way we do things around here,” in other words, the behaviors of people. So here is what happened:

We went to the bank to get some documents notarized; one of the services we get at our bank is that they will notarize our documents without charging a fee.

The teller who is the notary was on the phone with another customer, so we were offered a cup of coffee and asked to have a (very comfortable) seat to wait for her. Look, there’s the culture!

As we waited, we couldn’t help but overhear the call. Apparently the customer was having a very hard time understanding the statement and our teller was doing everything she could to explain over the phone something that would have been much easier handled face-to-face.

As over 20 minutes passed, the teller continued to work every angle possible to explain the statement to a customer who seemed agitated; not once did she raise her voice or speed up her conversation. She showed no signs of frustration, although she must have felt some. Look, there’s the culture!

Once she got off the call, she looked up at us with a smile and said, “I can take you right over here at my desk.” The woman didn’t miss a beat – she acted as if she had nothing else to do that day but take care of us. Look, there’s the culture!

As you can imagine, we were mightily impressed. It’s been our experience that this is a regular occurrence at this bank ~ we bank here because of that.  We can tell by our past experiences that what matters most to the employees at this branch is how the customer is treated.

Intrigued? Check out our February newsletter for more on the value of excellent customer care.

We didn’t tell you that it was a trick question, although it was. The question might even have caught you off-guard, because isn’t the job of customer service  to take care of the customer after the sales department has generated the revenue?

When you think that the only job of customer service is to answer the phone and deal with questions and problems, it forces you into a silo that ultimately won’t get you the results you need.

Customer service is not just about solving problems, even though that’s a big part of it. It’s also about creating opportunities that benefit the clients, and ultimately, the company. That’s what most people “leave on the table.”

Here’s how this played out today.

We were at the office supply store, getting workbook binders for our next two classes. We needed more binders than the store had on the shelf; Maia went in search of help and was lucky enough to find Barb.

Barb walked all the way back across the store with her. She  checked to see if there were any binders on the top shelf where we couldn’t reach. Then she checked the back, found no binders and called the order desk on her headset to get the ones we needed ordered immediately.

To take it completely over the top, Barb found a box for the binders we had, when we had already been told that there were no boxes.

As she walked us up to the register to check out, she asked if we needed an item that was on sale. Although we weren’t planning on buying anything else, her exceptional care of us made us receptive to checking it out. As a result, we made the purchase.

It was a textbook case of Taking Care of Your Customers.

The wrap-up this week is simple; there are three things we want to leave you with about our conversation this month on the Discovery Process.

1.  Using it will give you a quick snapshot of any situation; you can identify the gap between what you have right now and what you want instead.

2. In the four categories of information you get by asking the questions, you can break it down even further. You can identify what you need to do to maintain the positive status quo (maintain what currently works and avoid what will not). You can also recognize what you need to do to address the issues that will move you forward (problems to solve and opportunities to capitalize upon.)

3. You can see how we used the Discovery Process itself to solve the problem of how we could describe it to you over the last month.

We solved our three problems. We spread the information over three blogs and the newsletter; we broke down the information into manageable bites that each  addressed a different angle; and we used ourselves as the example.

We capitalized on the opportunity to share this process with you and we hope you will take it and run with it!

Next time…Is your customer service department generating revenue?

This week we will show you how the plot thickens when you map out the answers to the four questions in a particular way. This model will help you understand the underlying need(s) in any situation.

The four elements of this model are

• Have
• Don’t Have
• Want
• Don’t Want

Putting the Have/Don’t Have against the Want/Don’t Want elements is enlightening. Let’s take a look.

When you look at your answers to question number one, you see those fall in the Have/Want category. These are the things that you enjoy, use and protect. This is a “maintenance” box.

When you look at your answers to question number two, you see those fall in the Have/Don’t Want category. These are the things that you work to solve, fix or make go away.  Sometimes you might choose to ignore them ~ usually that can only last a short time. This is a “problem” box.

When you look at your answers to question number three, you see those fall in the Don’t Have/Want category. These are the things that you work to borrow, buy or create. This is an “opportunity” box.

When you look at your answers to question number four, you see those fall in the Don’t Have/Don’t Want category. These are the things that you work to avoid, prevent or deny. This is an “avoidance” box.

If you want to see this visually, check out our January newsletter – coming next week.

Until then, we invite you to keep at this – it only looks like a simple set of questions. In fact, it’s a multi-layered process that allows you to uncover the underlying needs that are not readily apparent. It allows you to dig right to the roots of any situation.

Knowing about the Discovery Process is like having the latest technology to take a snapshot of any current and desired situation.  It is a handy tool that will help you illuminate the gaps in any situation so you can easily see what actions will move you forward.

A friend of ours used it to decide how to move forward in a personal relationship; Maia just used it in a coaching conversation to help her client gain clarity on her problems and opportunities; and Darla just used it to explain the sales process in a buyer’s market in our new class.

The Discovery Process is a series of questions. These questions can apply to a very specific situation or a general inquiry. It is critical that you go through the questions in the following order, whether you are asking yourself or someone else.

1. What is going well? What do you like the most?

2. On the other hand, what is not going as well as you would like? What do you like the least? What is the cost of this?

3. Just suppose you could create anything you wanted. What would that be—what would you hope for?

4. Knowing what you know now, is there anything you want to avoid?

Once you complete all four questions, you can go back and add more information on any one question if you need to.

The answers to these questions allow you to identify your current situation, your desired situation and the gap between the two. It is the gap between the two that will help you identify the actions you need to take in order to claim your life.

We invite you to play with this for the next week. See what you discover.

Next week: The Plot Thickens…