Forget cleaning out your closets or cleaning up your diet.
Make 2018 the year you clean up your communication.
Ditch the clichés and buzzwords. Put meaning and credibility back into what you say – and what you write. You’re sure to get better results if you do.
Here are 11 all-too-popular workplace words and phrases that have seen their day come and go – and why you really do want to make a point of putting them to rest this year.
It seems we find ourselves in meetings all day long. Some are pretty productive, but I bet you find yourself in a lot more meetings that just seem to be a waste of time.
And you end up asking, “Is this meeting REALLY necessary?”
The cost of bad meetings is staggering: $37 billion dollars are wasted every year in the U.S. on useless meetings.
Well, this great infographic/flowchart from our friends at fundera can help you decide whether you should hold that meeting at all. So next time you think about calling a meeting, walk through this flowchart first.
Successful managers get to the top by knowing how and when to effectively delegate. Being able to use your human resources wisely makes both you and your team better.
But when the time comes to delegate, you might find yourself doing a delicate dance. It’s your job to delegate work, but it might not be obvious what tasks should go to which employee.
One option is to fake it: Gather your team together, outline the project tasks to be done, and let your employees choose what they want to be responsible for.
It might be easier, but it’s less effective. Why? Because employees respond better when they feel they’ve been chosen for a particular task, rather than having to volunteer for it.
“I feel like I’m not getting through to them.”
“Don’t they hear what I’m saying?”
“They just don’t listen to me!”
Any time we try to teach and can’t get employees to catch on, it’s frustrating.
We pride ourselves on being good coaches. So, when we can’t seem to get employees on the same page, it saps even the most patient manager.
But before pinning the blame on the employee, consider that the problem could be coming from you.
A crucial part of coaching is to play to the person’s strengths.
It’s useless to coach a 350-pound lineman to be a fleet-footed wide receiver. It helps to think of your employees the same way.
“Coach employees to their strongest abilities and the lessons will pay off,” says David Lee, founder of HumanNature@work.
Chemistry, synergy, in-synch, call it what you will: The most critical ingredient every team needs to consistently turn out good results is balance.
So how can you tell if your team is out of sorts?
Teamwork balance is hard to define, but once you lose it, you’ll know. When a team is out of balance, it affects everyone’s performance levels, even when they’re working on their own.
Team imbalance can sneak up on even the most careful and observant managers. To work well together, team members need to recognize each other’s strengths and weaknesses and must trust each other to do his or her job and do it well.
It’s up to managers to pay attention to how employees adapt and work with others on the team, especially if you’ve had an influx of new hires or changes among your veterans.
Ken Jennings says knowledge isn’t trivial.
As the winningest Jeopardy! contestant of all time (74 matches in a row), Jennings knows something about knowledge and trivia.
Like this factoid: “Trivia” is the only word you’re not supposed to say on air as a Jeopardy! contestant (as in, “I was always good at trivia”).
Why? Because trivia equals trivial, and Jeopardy! isn’t trivial. (Jennings’ payday of $3.4 million certainly wasn’t.)
But in this age of being able to ask Google or Siri for a piece of information, is knowing stuff still important to managers and supervisors for anything besides winning on TV game shows?
Jennings, who calls himself a “nerdy guy” who “knows a lot of weird stuff” argues it does. And it applies to leaders and managers, too. Here’s why:
When you see an employee do something wrong, your instinct most likely is to call it out and show how to do it better.
And unless the employee has done something egregiously offensive, pointing out the mistake can turn into a good coaching opportunity.
But if it’s not done right, it can demoralize the employee and usually won’t lead to a better outcome. Worse, it could work against you.
So deftly correcting employees requires a little bit of subtlety.
Here are six tips on how successful managers pull it off:
So, you’ve decided to call an employee in to talk about his performance. Maybe you’ve noticed the employee seems disinterested about taking on new tasks. Or that his work is regularly late when it used to be prompt.
Regardless, you know you have to have “the talk.”
How you approach the performance chat will affect the response you’ll get – and the turnaround you’re hoping for.
But even though your main goal is to improve the employee’s performance, your chat might backfire if you have an underlying motive going in.
“Just be honest with me.”
Have you caught yourself in one of these conversations with an employee?
Whenever a manager feels the need to cajole an employee into being honest, there’s a larger problem at hand aside from guilty fibs or little white lies.
It might be that members of your team are afraid to be totally honest with you. Why? The hidden reason could be coming from your company culture – or even directly from you!
Some leaders don’t want to hear honest-to-goodness assessments because they might also have to hear some bad news. In some cases, opening themselves up to honest assessments from employees is as welcome as a root canal.
And employees almost always pick up on the sense that the unfiltered truth may be less than welcome with certain bosses, managers or other colleagues, especially when there are critical decisions on the line.
They create a “don’t go there!” rule in their minds and self-censor when being honest means a critical or negative response.
It happened again: You started a useful discussion with an employee, and before you knew what happened, your “talk” spiraled quickly into bona fide argument territory.
And you only asked one question!
So how did it get there? It might be because you didn’t put the brakes on once you felt the speed pick up.
Communicating what we really want to say is everything. The minute we start padding, ducking and buffering our way through a discussion, it’s easy to slide into argument quicksand.
Communications consultant Marlene Chism calls these arguments “verbal ping-pong,” and says that people often get trapped into playing unexpectedly.
Managers know it’s a huge time-waster to argue endlessly in a back-and-forth when two people want to win and keep coming back for a rematch.
