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Every time my firm conducts communication skills
training, we know someone is going to object.
“That doesn't work. Everybody's heard of active
listening. You can't use that stuff anymore.”
And we have to admit, there's a lot of truth in that.
Everyone has heard of active listening. And it doesn't
work for many people much of the time.
But communication skills can work for your staff.
The problem usually isn't the skills. It's the way
people are trained to use them. Learn to use communication
skills effectively, and they can create happy customers
and higher income.
There are two components to good communication skills:
(a) the skills themselves, and (b) what you're trying to
do (your intention) when you use them. Many employees
learn communication skills from manuals. And many manuals
emphasize either skills, or intention but not both. And
so, much of what we think of as communication skills
training fails.
Here are a couple of examples:
Example 1: How active listening gets a black eye: using
good skills, but with the intention to fix or change a
customer
I was coaching a hospital social worker through a
confrontation with a mother who was terribly frightened.
The social worker was doing his best to demonstrate active
listening.
“OK, I get that you're upset. And you want to get out
of here. And I want to help you. But you've got to go
through this process before you can take your daughter
home.”
The mother didn't react at all the way he'd hoped. “I
don't want to hear all this institutional talk,” she
said. “You leave me alone. I'll sue if I have to!”
This appears to be a failure of active listening. And
it is, but the problem goes deeper than that. When I
paused the encounter and asked the social worker how he
thought the mother was feeling and what she needed, he
said, “I don't really know. I was busy trying to get her
to do what I wanted and think it was her idea.”
Active listening skills are useful, but they're only
tools. They serve the intentions of the person using them.
And if you don't teach trainees useful intentions, most
will fall back on trying to fix people or change them. So
you'll be training your staff to be very effective at
letting your customers know they need to be fixed or
changed. And your customers will let you know how
unpleasant an experience that is.
Example 2: How “understand before you are
understood” fails: having a useful intention but lacking
the skills to communicate it
I paused a training scenario just after an angry man
blew up at a nurse. I was coaching the nurse through an
encounter with a father who felt the staff was trying to
hustle him and his son out of the hospital.
He told her that he worked all day and came into the
hospital all night. And where did she think he was going
to get the time to go through training before he took his
son home?
When I asked her how she thought the man was feeling
and what he needed, she suggested that he seemed
overwhelmed and afraid, and that he might need some
support.
When I suggested she might ask the man if that's what
he was experiencing, she turned to him and said, "You
need an appointment with a social worker. I'll set
something up for you."
This is a classic failure that comes from understanding
your customer, but lacking the skills to communicate it.
The nurse could describe the source of the man's anger
clearly to me. She had real empathy for him. But she
couldn't put her words together in a way he recognized as
compassionate.
We'd taught her the words, of course. But like most
people who learn new skills, she lacked the confidence to
use them. So she, like the trainee above, fell back on
trying to fix the customer. And he let her know how much
he disliked being treated that way.
It don't mean a thing if you ain't practicing
Both of the examples above underscore a third important
component of communication skills training, namely, the
practice.
The trainee in the first example was a compassionate
man with a degree in social work. I'm sure he'd had ample
exposure to good communication skills. It had never gelled
for him before.
Once we put him in a scenario, coached him through the
skills, and alerted him to the fact that he was struggling
because he was trying to fix his customer instead of
connecting with her (that's the intention we teach), he
developed skills rapidly. He even returned to training
weeks later to report that he'd created a real difference
in his life using the skills at home. He quickly became a
valued mentor to others in his work group.
Communication skills are deceptively challenging. It
takes no great intellect or dexterity to utter the words.
What is terribly demanding is all the processing: keeping
your focus on the other person despite your own
discomfort, listening for the needs beneath complaints and
accusations, drumming up the nerve to suggest to an
outraged man that he might value some support.
What gets you through tough interactions is your
confidence in your own intention and skills. And you learn
confidence through practice.
In my experience, those are the keys to effective
communication skills:
1. holding a useful intention like understanding the
other person or connecting with them,
2. employing skills that communicate your intention,
and
3. practicing the skills and intentions so you have
them at hand, even when interactions get intense,
especially when they do.
Find training that will provide you all three, and
you'll have communication skills that will please your
customers and increase your income.
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