For Effective Meetings, Match your Personality to this Clock

Posted: August 19, 2017 | Author: Brian Suyat | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Communication, Organizational Behaviors, Personality | Leave a comment

Set-up successful meetings by transitioning your communication style

I recently talked about Communicating to Personalities, where it is advisable to understand your audience. A meeting transitions through a few phases: Welcome & Connect, Discover & Dream, Decide, Attend (see Let’s Stop Meeting Like This). Your ability to communicate in each of the phases is a reflection of your personality and commitment to the goals of the meeting.

The Game is to match your style to the task at hand.

Communication Style Clock Let’s say that your meeting starts at the top of the hour, the minute hand is on the 12. This is the Welcome & Connect phase. You will want to turn up your Influence style. Talk with the people at the meeting about their topics. Inject your own experiences. The goal is to build a relationship on common ground.

About 10-15 minutes in, the meeting turns to the Discover & Dream phase. You will want to transition to Steadiness. This style focuses on the team’s perceptions. “How do we feel about the results?” “What do we need?” This is where we talk about the past and our vision for the future.

Close to the bottom of the hour, the meeting shifts to the future, Decide phase. You will need more Conscientiousness. These are the rational, technical discussions. You need to present facts and data as part of the persuasive argument. The data of the past will predict the future. This phase is likely to last until someone forces the end of a meeting.

At less than 10 minutes to go, the meeting is in the Attend phase, whether the participants like it or not. You must turn on your Dominance by asking for a final review of WHO does WHAT by WHEN.

You can win by helping the meeting organizer (or yourself) through these phases.

I structure my agendas around this premise because I am Conscientious. I like a consistent format, and it makes it easy to prepare an agenda ahead of time.

Recently, I was explaining both meeting structure and the communication styles. Before then, I had not put these two concepts together. However, since then, I have used this very effectively in teleconferences — where body language is non-existent and you must have some verbal cues.

Welcome & Connect: “How are you today? How was your weekend?“
Discover & Dream: “What is going well for us? Where are we having issues? What should we do about it?“
Decide: “How can we make that happen? When have we been successful at this?“
Attend: “Who is doing What by When?“

Rule book

Communicating to Personality, How-to know your audience’s style and to modify yours.
Let’s Stop meeting Like This, How-to be a good meeting participant.
Color Wheel and DISC graphics, PowerPoint by Brian Suyat

See this and more posts at What’s The Game, whatsthegame.wordpress.com.

Use “The 4 Disciplines of Execution” to Defend Against the Whirlwind of Distractions.

Posted: August 12, 2017 | Author: Brian Suyat | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Book, Daily Accountability, Lean, Organizational Behaviors | Leave a comment

Set Up your Storm Shelter.

I received this book from a manager who does not like to read books. He said, “I am too busy to read this. Let me know if there is anything good in there.” This turns out to be my Go-To book for Project Management. I believe the theme of this book can be defined as, “Defend yourself from the Whirlwind of activity.” Read the rest of this entry »

Communicating to Personality

Posted: July 22, 2017 | Author: Brian Suyat | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Game, Organizational Behaviors, Personality | Leave a comment

Set-Up relationships by knowing your communication style

There is a personality test available that allows you to understand the things that others see in your communication style. Knowing this about yourself and others is important to having effective communications. When people are really listening — because you are speaking in a way that they like to hear — your message more often translates to a stronger inter-personal relationship and immediate action.

I use the Color Wheel designations, but you can also use the DISC method. As you will see from the game below, you don’t need to know the model to start trying this out.

The Game is to build relationships by knowing your audience’s communication style.

When meeting someone new, have you ever really, “hit it off” from the start? Your communication style is very compatible, which makes for an enjoyable conversation. Alternately, are there those people that you must interact with that you find tedious and difficult? In this case, you may need to make some more effort in order to be understood.

This game is not to mirror or mimic your conversational partner, it is more to align with them, like two boats navigating to come along side each other.

See the behavior graphic below. When you observe a specific “tell” put a mental mark on that side of the color wheel. The quadrant with the most marks is the color you are dealing with.

For example:

I speak in technical terms (numbers, tasks, thinking). That is the LEFT side.
I modulate my tone (slower, softer, pauses). That is the BOTTOM
I have big arm movements (TOP), and I smile reactively (RIGHT), but I don’t make eye contact too much (LEFT).

As you can see from my marks, I tend to Conscientious or Blue (BOTTOM, LEFT).

How can I win friends with this?

I try to understand my audience. I watch them, and try to determine what personality they are in today — sometimes it is different. Then, I try to play to their behaviors.

When talking to Dominance personalities, I stop before I finish explaining, giving them an opening to interrupt with questions they want to ask.
When talking with Influence or Steadiness personalities, I try more social conventions. I may talk about the people involved or how I can help.

The best way for me to win is to work out what I am going to say and put it in the right order. See this e-mail example, but this also works if you are going to talk to a small group about an idea that you really want to do.

Rule Books

Presentation (These Graphics)	Brian Suyat, Color Wheel / DISC Behaviors
Tool	Manager Tools, DISC Profile
Tool	Insights Discovery, Color Wheel

The Effective Executive

Posted: July 16, 2017 | Author: Brian Suyat | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Book, Management, Organizational Behaviors | Leave a comment

Set Up

Peter Drucker may be the most quoted business writer of all time. Every business class, research article, or management book I have read somehow references his wisdom. Over fifty years ago, Mr. Drucker established the basic behaviors of successful executive managers, and we continue to learn them over in our day and age. The Manager-Tools podcast recommends reading this book at least once per year.

Game Rules

In his 2004 article (he died in 2005 at the age of 96) in Harvard Business Review, What Makes an Effective Executive?, Drucker continues to refine his original concepts. The three that I look to most often are:

Do what is best for the organization

Drucker looks to people’s strengths and how those strengths could be turned to best benefit the organization. He focuses on the contributions of team members that deliver the organization’s desired results. In the Prezi, you see that the only weakness that matters is, “Would I let me son or daughter work with this person?” Every other weakness is acceptable because we must accept those in order to get the strengths that are important to the organization. Our opinions of people are secondary to their results.

Make Decisions, develop Action Plans

Drucker wants effective decisions. He would often create disagreement to his ideas in order to listen to opposing viewpoints. He did not like team leaders to say, “Yes, sir.” Having disagreement provides options, and options ensure that there is a best decision as well as an alternate, Plan B, if necessary.

Run productive meetings

The best example of Drucker running meetings is his ability to focus on one thing at a time. If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. His ideal meeting discusses one topic at a time, makes a decision and an action plan, then determines a time to check on progress.
A deeper resource for meetings is Let’s Stop Meeting Like This by Dick Axelrod.

See George Ambler, in his blog Helping Leaders Grow, 5 Habits of Effective Executives, for another summary on Drucker’s ideas.

Winning Strategy

When I teach Drucker, it is usually in the context of making decisions and following-up on progress. In my mind, this is the one skill upon which all other management techniques rely.

• Before you Make Decisions in a meeting, encourage disagreement and respectful debate.

• When you Make Decisions, do so for the benefit of the organization.

• When you Make Decisions, immediately make an Action Plan to execute the decision.