Communication Overview

The speaker advises using the Defining Coach Strategy to break down communication into specific areas such as email, social, and group communication. They share an example of a company struggling with communication and emphasize the importance of being specific and digging deep to identify issues and opportunities. They suggest listing attributes and actions for great communication, involving team members in defining them, and co-authoring change. Now, when it comes to communication, you're not going to be able to just coach to the generic concept of communication. I would strongly encourage you to use our Defining Coach Strategy, but break it down to the specific areas of communication. So for example, proper email communication is by doing what? Social communication is by doing what? Successful group communication is by doing what? So again, our formula for defining coach is communication is fill in the blank by doing what and then you list out the attributes and actions. Communication is a huge topic. I cannot tell you through the years how many times we hear people make these global generalizations. Let me tell you a very quick story. We had an organization where they kept saying, well, you know, it's just he doesn't communicate well. It's all about communication. I go, what does that mean? Well, he just doesn't, he just doesn't, he doesn't communicate well. I said, what would you like him to do that he's currently not doing? Well, communicate. I just answered you. I mean, they could not answer the question. So I continued to ask my great coaching questions and what came out of it was that people were too opinionated and that people were communicating with a harsh tone and people weren't listening to each other. It took me almost 20 minutes to get there. Now I'm not criticizing this company. What I'm sharing is when you dig deep, that's where the specificity and opportunity exist. So think about communication. Think about four or five bullet points of what great communication would be. It could be active listening, professionally written emails, thoughtful response times, eye contact, positive body language, whatever that is as it relates to your area of work. Great communication is by filling in, by doing what? Then fill in the blank. Now with that being said, when you list the attributes and actions, it could be things like active listening, open body language, friendly eye contact, and you might say friendly eye contact is when you get the idea. You can even dig deeper with the attributes and actions. So again, the formula, great communication is fill in the blank by doing what? List the attributes and actions. You may want to further define the attributes and actions. Now here's the cool thing. Communication is a big topic. I would encourage you to also have your team members help you define these things. Because again, what they've also then inevitably have done has co-authored their own change.