Breaking The Golden Rule
Once we've come to terms with just how high the cost of poor communication can be and how any poor communication skills in our organizations add fuel to other fires that are killing our profitability, we have plenty of reason to address the lack of communication between our managers and employees. Let's be honest, though: if doing it were as simple as saying it, would there be any need to discuss it here?
We've already worked through many of the effects of poor communication in the workplace, so I won't hash them all out again now. What I will do, though, is suggest that I'm not sure I've ever met someone who wanted to communicate ineffectively with their team-or anyone else for that matter. All too often, I believe it simply boils down to not having the right tools for the job (or even knowing those tools exist)!
Most everyone I know is familiar with some variation of the Golden Rule: do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. Truthfully, our society would have much less crap going on if we all did a better job of following it. But while the Golden Rule may solve many of the issues we see in the headlines on any given day, breaking it may be just what we need to address the profitability killer of poor communication.
One evening several years ago, I received a text message from my son asking, "How do I get people to do what I tell them to do?" He was working second shift in a manufacturing facility at the time, and it was his first evening filling in as a backup lead for the assembly line he had been part of for a couple of years. I answered, "Call me tomorrow morning, because that's not something I can answer in a text."
When he called the following morning, the first thing I needed to know to have any hope of providing him with solid feedback was why he was asking: did he have team members who weren't doing what they were required to do, or did he believe they were capable of accomplishing more? He was quick to explain that the line team was great! He said they were already the most productive on the shift, but he felt like they could do even better, and he wondered how he could bring that out in them.
As a dad, I still get excited all these years later when I think back to that conversation. The fact that Matt, in his early twenties at the time, saw more potential in his team and wanted to learn how he could bring it out in them was something I just haven't seen very often. But getting the results he was hoping for from "having them do what he told them to" wouldn't be as simple as making a blanket statement to them all at the beginning of the shift. Only a few of them would have responded positively to him if he had communicated with them how he wanted to be communicated with... Like me, Matt is pretty direct and to the point. He thrives on being challenged and will go out of his way to accomplish a task, especially if someone doesn't think he can!
Matt could have taken that approach, but I'm positive the results wouldn't have been anything close to what he hoped for. Instead, we discussed how he could break the Golden Rule with each team member and do unto them as they would want rather than how he would want. Because I knew each of the folks working with him, I was able to give him specific insight that helped him achieve the goal in his initial text message. I was also able to provide him with a simple approach for doing the same thing with anyone else moving forward. He was excited to put it into practice; it was just a matter of understanding how.
Learning How Starts with Understanding Why...
A week or two after Matt and I had the hour-long conversation about how he could "get people to do what he told them to do," he called again to ask what kind of voodoo magic I had taught him... Breaking the Golden Rule in how he communicated with each of the individuals on his line team had provided him with an immediate increase in daily productivity, and, at least with regard to that specific part of the operation, it was making a dent in a significant profitability killer! But it didn't have any roots in voodoo or black magic; it was as simple as learning to act on what his team was showing him through their behavior.
Okay, so maybe that doesn't sound so simple... Terms like human behavior and emotional intelligence get a lot of attention in the scientific and academic communities, so one could easily believe that learning to recognize what any given person needs by studying their behavior is incredibly complicated and would require years of observation. Like many other things in academia, this has been made far more complex than necessary!
In chapter seven of Everyone Communicates, Few Connect, "Connectors Do the Difficult Work of Keeping it Simple," John Maxwell cites a fellow named John Beckley, former business editor of Newsweek, as saying,
The emphasis in education is rarely placed on communicating ideas simply and clearly. Instead, we're encouraged to use more complicated words and sentence structures to show off our learning and literacy... Instead of teaching us how to communicate as clearly as possible, our schooling in English teaches us how to fog things up. It even implants a fear that if we don't make our writing complicated enough, we'll be considered uneducated.
I'm convinced that Beckley's statement is a big reason organizations lose so much profitability due to misunderstandings! I'm also confident that the same applies to the true simplicity of observing human behavior. I don't make that statement as some clinician who's spent thousands of hours in a lab, watching someone through a one-way mirror. I share that from the perspective of a press operator who learned the simplicity of watching for behavioral patterns and was teaching that to his peers in similar roles across North America just a few years later.
In 1998, at just twenty-two years old and with only a few college credits to my name, I learned a simple approach that had proven to be effective worldwide for observing how someone worked for just fifteen minutes and being able to, with a high degree of accuracy, identify the potential they had for experiencing an injury. Since the framework of this behavior-based safety process tied in so well with John Maxwell's suggestion of "keeping the cookies on the bottom shelf" (so they're easier to reach), it was something that made sense to me immediately. Not only did it make sense, but I could practice it right away after learning what to watch for!
I didn't realize it at the time, but the simplicity of that framework was really in providing a foundation for understanding why we behave the way we do. Once I had that in my head, though, learning how to recognize behaviors through a set of patterns proved to be really simple. When it comes to things that have been made to appear so complicated, like ascending to an almost mystical plane of emotional intelligence or by proving that soft skills like leadership and communication are indeed VERY tangible, recognizing what our team members need by watching their behaviors shouldn't be like the cookies that are on the top shelf and can't be reached without a stool. The simple approach I taught Matt in less than an hour on the phone was based on a pattern we can all follow in every situation where communication matters. So let's look at how to follow the Platinum Rule and why it's so essential.
Following a Simple Pattern
With just a basic understanding of why people do what they do, Matt was about to intentionally break the Golden Rule with his team and avoid so many of the costs of poor communication! Following a simple pattern, he could add fuel to a different fire. Instead of the fire responsible for killing his assembly line's productivity (and profitability), the fire he was adding fuel to gave each team member what they needed and yielded a level of buy-in and commitment that produced great results! What was that simple pattern? I'm so glad you asked...
The pattern Matt began following after our conversation consisted of a minor twist on that Golden Rule so many of us grew up hearing over and over. When it comes to how we communicate with others, our results are so much better when we treat them like THEY want to be treated instead of how WE want to be treated. This idea of the Platinum Rule was something a friend mapped out for me close to a decade ago. Not only has it helped me in nearly every interaction I've had since, but it's proven to be a game-changer for helping leaders minimize the profit they're losing in their organizations due to misunderstandings.
Learning to observe and address behaviors that contribute to workplace injuries had a significant impact on reducing injury rates and worker's compensation costs because it was based on understanding a pattern. And eliminating (or at least minimizing) confusion in the message we send our teams is truly as simple as providing the message the way each individual can best receive it. While that may sound like a steep hill to climb, it boils down to looking for the answers to two simple questions and tailoring our message based on what we see.
Before I give you those questions, I want you to picture someone whose pace in approaching a task is drastically different from yours. Maybe that's someone who's all in, all the time, and they overwhelm you. Or perhaps it's someone who is much slower to take action, but they're very intentional about each thing they do. Whether we need to speed up to hang with them or slow down to ensure we're providing them with the time they need to process the details, communicating with someone with such a different pace from us requires a lot of energy! But when we invest the energy necessary to match our pace to theirs, we're communicating with them in a way that they're much more likely to receive, AND we're knocking a dent into the poor communication profitability killer!
Adapting our pace to be in line with someone else is something we can learn to do pretty quickly because we can see whether they're faster- or slower-paced than we are almost immediately. I'm not suggesting it's always easy to do, just that it is easy to see... The second question we'll need to answer to effectively follow that pattern (and follow the Platinum Rule) takes a bit more focus. We need to determine whether the individual we're communicating with is more focused on the task at hand or the people involved in that task with them. Providing you with a complete framework for doing this quickly every single time is more involved than I can get into here. Still, it's something Cindy and I have helped dozens of organizations and hundreds of individuals become great at. That said, there's a cheat code! Two-thirds of everyone we'll ever interact with tends to focus more on the people they're involved with than the task at hand. So our best course of action is to begin by showing we value that individual before we dive into what we need to get accomplished. The more task-focused folks may sometimes get impatient, wanting to get things done. Still, that impatience is usually visible and serves as a cue to move things along.
Working through that for each individual on Matt's team took about an hour, and knowing each of them for years was a big part of why I could offer that level of detail. But once he understood the pattern, he was able to apply it in almost every interaction afterward: with the new folks who started working on his line, the customers he interacts with daily now, and even the people he's in line with at the grocery store! This simple pattern certainly helps address the poor communication profitability killer, but it also plays a crucial role in keeping every other profitability killer we'll look at moving forward from taking a toll on our businesses.
