Success with Difficult Conversations

Every day there is a chance you could be involved in a difficult conversation. Easily triggered –it can feel as if it came out of nowhere or maybe it’s something that’s been simmering for a long time and boils over.

Whatever the cause- how you respond when you find yourself engaged in that conversation is important. The goal is to avoid behavior that makes the situation worse rather than better.

Some people may react by aggressively confronting the source of the difficult conversation; others, by rushing to smooth things over as if nothing happened. You may even find that you bounce back and forth between those “fight or flight” behaviors, with neither resulting in real resolution.

You are more vulnerable to reacting poorly when the conversation takes a direction that is opposite of what you need to stay motivated. That triggers your stress behavior and could cause you to make ‘mistakes’ that would push you further away from what you want – a solution you are both happy with.

The key to any tough talk is to always keep your goal in sight. What do you really want your working relationship with your counterpart to be and what are the obstacles to getting there? Make sure that you respond in a way you can later be proud of. This will prevent you from being thrown off course if your counterpart is being openly hostile.

If you are the type of person who needs time to think, ask to schedule a follow up conversation. You can prepare be making sure you understand what the problem really is. Ask yourself if your counterpart would see the problem the same way you do. How do you resolve the issues and get a good outcome? Ask you counterpart to prepare the same way.

Another way to prepare is with imapMyTeam.com. There are several reports that can help you. The Resolving Disagreements report is specifically designed to help you understand why difficult conversations may be hard for you and what you can do to resolve them.

Don’t let a difficult conversation get in the way of your individual or team success!

Checking the Plan; Responding to Reality

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results”
                                                                                     ~Sir Winston Churchill.

The business climate today is demanding, unforgiving and sometimes brutal. Customers expect you to do more with less and do it right; the first time. Proactively checking your plans and responding to reality is an essential skill on the road to successful execution.

This week we encourage you to emulate Churchill and check the results of your plan, and as you ready yourself to respond to where you stand- consider the strengths of green and yellow usual behavior.

Using the imapMyTeam information we often describe the strength of the ‘greens’ [diamond symbol] as those who are flexible and externally oriented. They are good at making sure we understand the impact on others outside the immediate group including the customer.’ The opposite complimentary strength is the ‘yellows’ [diamond symbol]. They bring focus to the team and utilize ‘established guidelines and procedures’ (infrastructure) to make sure we move forward in an organized way.

For any game-plan to be successful we need people on the team who are able to be flexible and focused.  Most people are stronger in one characteristic than the other and some roles on teams are clearly defined to be one or another.

In the center pane pull down menu of www.imapmyteam.com ® there is a report titled: Team Player Strengths. This report is a set of adjectives that will describe many of your specific strengths.  As you read this list, do the descriptions suggest your strengths are to be more flexible or focused?  Which does your job require?

To personalize this exercise take into account how your strengths enable you to proactively respond to the realities of your work day.

 

If your strengths suggest flexibility, identify where you might need to apply some focus so you ensure that you complete your tasks.  If your strengths suggest focus, identify where in your work day you need to exercise more flexibility. 

Check your plan. Check your strengths. Do you need more flexibility or focus to deal with the realities of your work day?

Managing Meetings - A new imapMyTeam report

In last weeks Tuesday Tip we discussed ‘meeting madness’ and how truly difficult it is to run a universally well received meeting when there are so many competing motivational needs at play.

This week we are introducing a new report called ‘Managing Meetings’

Managing Meetings describes various strengths you have and where those strengths are helpful to getting results in meetings. The report then takes you another step.  It suggests ways in which you will need to modify that strength when what you are doing isn’t getting the results you want.

In fact, the Managing Meetings report also reinforces what we discussed last week. It lets you know in advance how overuse of your strength may cause “meeting madness” if you continue to force your way down that path oblivious to others reactions to your behavior.

Questions that you might ask yourself to determine when you need to make the adjustment:

-          Are people reacting the way I expected them to?

-          Are people engaged?

-          Is the person behaving the same in meeting as they do out of meeting? If not why?

-          Are we getting something accomplished in the meeting? If not, what is preventing that?

If the answer is ‘no’ to most of these questions you’re probably experiencing a lack of traction in the meeting; you likely have a mismatch between your strength and their need.

Get the meeting back on track by implementing the appropriate adjustment suggested in your Managing Meetings report.

Login to imapMyTeam.com and go to the center pane. Click the drop down report menu and select the report titles ‘Managing Meetings’ to see your personal report.

A new imapMyTeam report has been added to the database. Managing Meetings.

Use this report to see how your strengths help you get results in meetings.
Also learn how those strengths overused, or used with the wrong audience will not work - and how to adjust your behavior to course correct and save the meeting.

www.imapmyteam.com

Meeting Madness

Meetings generally have a bad reputation.  In part that rap is deserved and, in part, undeserved.

It is not the meeting itself, or the sheer number of meetings you attend that you are really objecting to – it is HOW the meeting unfolds that ultimately colors your impression of it and then you characterize it as – ‘good,’  ‘bad’ or maybe worse.

Running a meeting that is universally hailed as a ‘good meeting’ is a lot harder than following all of the established guidelines for making meetings effective.  You could follow all of those guidelines perfectly and still have a meeting that someone perceives as flawed.

That occurs because in every meeting you will have participants with motivational needs from each of the four, imapMyteam quadrants. Your meeting is simultaneously being evaluated –at a minimum – in four distinctively different ways.

Go to the My Teams report and select the needs tab.  Here you will see which quadrant your colleagues reside in.  Red and blue needs are opposite of each other as are yellow and green needs.  That means if you are managing the meeting according to what a Red needs person expects, you are probably annoying  all of the participants with Blue needs. The Reds judge it a great meeting and the blues are frustrated because they haven’t been heard. 

If you stick to a defined meeting agenda, those with Yellow needs are pleased as it satisfies their desire for order.  However, those with Green needs would feel that the meeting lacked the flexibility to adapt the agenda in order to address unexpected, but important, topics.  They may think the meeting was ‘too rigid’.  You can see that it would be easy to polarize the team simply by the way the meeting was structured.

To help you expand your thinking on how to avoid “Meeting Madness”, please review the attachment to this email titled ‘Meeting the Needs of the Meeting’ to get some ideas on how to structure a meeting to meet everyone’s expectations.

 If you are not in charge of running meetings you can still influence what happens in the meeting. Start by making sure you understand your own needs first. Communicate those needs to whoever runs the meetings you attend so they understand what contributes to your effectiveness.

The payoff is you’ll get more value from the meeting and you won’t derail the meeting by slipping into behaviors that slow things down.