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Talk About It: Start That Tough Conversation

Is there something on your mind that you are not talking about? Do you need a conversation with someone but keep avoiding it? It's tough, isn't it? The conversations that feel like the toughest only get tougher the longer they are delayed. Talk about it. Talk about it now. -- doug smith

Work Through The Fear

Are there conversations that scare you? It's easy to quote Eleanor Roosevelt and say "face into your fears" but the reality is that there are some conversations that freeze us. Some discussions that put us off, so we put them off. I know that I have missed some vital conversational opportunities. I expect that to change. If we want better conversations, we need to initiate them when the opportunity emerges (not when we feel like it, right then and there). Let's keep the conversation going. Let's talk when we need to talk. Let's build our relationships, our teams, and our organizations using much more effective communication. It takes hard work, it takes courage, but as I have recently discovered in many startling ways, how you communicate is who you are. Who you are to yourself, who you are to other people, the who of you that you create. It's big. It's scary. It's critically important. I'm willing to work through the fear of a tough conv

Leave Blame Behind

"It wasn't my fault." "I wasn't even there." "I think it happened on the other shift." "They are always messing things up." Who's to blame? When things go wrong, when a customer gets angry, when a supplier raises prices, when things don't go as you planned. Who's to blame? Will it even help if you could pin that down to one person? Will pouring guilt or punishment on a person solve your problem? Probably not. But people do it all the time. It becomes part of the conversation before we even realize it.  Blaming others is so easy that many people don't even know they are doing it. What if we stopped blaming others? What if instead, we worked together to find solutions, better ways of doing things, and ways to avoid what caused our problem to begin with? It's OK to find constructive suggestions to offer to people who need it. But they need more. And problems need more in order to solve. To arrive at ou