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Today leadership communication has moved well beyond telling people what to do.  Great leaders process diverse opinions and engage all to understand the vision and hit the target.

Regardless of the leader, each must address three components and remember:

Vision sets the target.

Strategy maps the route.

Communication gets everyone there.

Introverted leaders, who struggle with the need for so much communication, succeed when they understand the underlying need and the benefits.

Revelations for Introverted Leaders

Think of those you lead as the feet that bear the full weight of the body during the journey. Without communication, they get lost, take unnecessary detours, walk further than necessary, and possibly miss the destination altogether.

It’s not a matter of introversion or extroversion. It’s not a competition of personality types and definitely not an exercise in being accepted for who you are.

For all leaders, it’s about stepping outside of your own view to engage your teams and lighten their load.

Communication is an essential nutrient needed for daily performance especially for those who are not making the decisions. How else will they understand the strategy, implement it through all the obstacles, and hit the target?

1. Communication delivers energy that fuels their journey. Your silence fuels your thinking yet it leaves those you lead stranded in neutral. Neutral isn’t painless. When the struggle mounts, neutral can inject more pain to the struggle.




2. Communication clarifies details, corrects the course, and prevents problems. Your silence gives you clarity of thought yet it allows confusion to swirl for all others. Relieve the stress of confusion — communicate.




3. Communication settles and calms the struggle. Your silence is calming to you; it is unsettling to those who need the leader’s insight. Being in the dark is demotivating. A tomb is a very calm settled place but hardly productive or happy.




4. Communication engages and inspires maximum contribution. Your silence inspires you; it doesn’t inspire your teams. It leaves them wondering. It disconnects them from you and disengages their spirit of contribution. Why should they give their all if they see you staying in your comfort zone?




5. Communication shows them you care about them. Your silence can unintentionally come across as detached and uncaring. Even driver leaders who aren’t introverts run this risk as they focus purely on end results.

   Take time to tell the teams how much you respect them, value their commitment and contributions, and care about their well being. Acknowledgement and recognition repeatedly show up in the top results of employee satisfaction surveys.

The one word mantra I recommend to introverted leaders is “sooner”. (For extroverted leaders, it’s “later”.) If you need time to think things through before making a decision, at least tell your teams that right away before retreating to think and decide. It keeps them engaged while you ponder strategy.

Your competence in setting vision and developing strategy builds their confidence in you; your rapport and care build their trust.

As introvert Ron Edmondson professes in this post, 5 Ways to Step Up & Communicate, you build their trust when they see that you care more about them and their success than you do your own comfort zone.


So I ask all leaders regardless of personality type and preferences, how much do you care about your teams? Enough to communicate outside of your comfort zone in ways that inspire, engage, and light the way?

The choice is yours. The rewards are many.

I am here to help. Please offer your questions and perspectives in the comments field below.

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From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

Update: I found Dan Oestreich’s comment so pertinent to this post, I feature it here for all to read. Thank you Dan. It’s a great addition.
["Instead of making this an issue of "not changing" ... the other way is to see how we all (introvert or extrovert) are naturally moving over the course of a career and a lifetime toward greater and greater versatility and personal fulfillment. In that, all styles and temperaments are incomplete; our job engages their transcendence."]

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12 Worthy Kudos to Spark Employee Engagement

©2012 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on leading change, employee engagement, teamwork, and delivering the ultimate customer service. She turns interaction obstacles into interpersonal success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.

When it comes to confidence, many leaders now realize that it is displayed in different ways between genders and in diverse cultures.  Diversity requires seeing beyond our own perspective to know the truth about others.

Yet there is one commonly overlooked element of confidence that confounds leaders into misjudging their employees.  How clear is your understanding and vision on this angle of confidence?

The overlooked element of confidence is performance goal.

The gap between the level of performance people expect of themselves and our non-communicated expectations of them affect our view of their self-confidence.

A True Short Story of Blurred Vision

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A student pursuing a masters degree was required to take a graduate statistics course as part of the degree at the university. Let’s call him Pat.

On the first night of class, the professor (Dr. Thick) said, “The adjunct professor for this class backed out and they have just dumped this on me to teach. I already have a full load. So I’ve decided that each of you will take one chapter, learn it, and teach it to the rest of the class.”

After the first student presentation, Pat realized that he was not going to learn statistics from the other students at the level he expected and needed in order to do his research thesis the following year. Pat spoke with Dr. Thick privately and highlighted that he would like the value of his high level of knowledge. Dr. Thick’s response was: “Evidently, you don’t have very much self-confidence.”

Pat dropped the class and took a graduate statistics course during the summer from another professor to be adequately tooled for his research work the following year.

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Confidence was not Pat’s issue. The element that confounded Dr. Thick was performance level.

If he had explored more deeply he would have seen that Pat’s goal went beyond just passing the course. He wanted to learn graduate statistics at a level that would empower him to do a great research thesis the following year. Learning it from other students who knew no more than he did and were struggling with presentation skills did not meet Pat’s expectations.

Leaders, See & Communicate Clearly on Confidence

• What level of performance do employees expect of themselves? The more we get to know employees the more clearly we can see their expectations of themselves. If the level of expectation is very high, we might incorrectly judge a confident person to be weak. Communicate with them to reset expectations and see the truth more clearly.




• What personality type are they? If an employee is an analytic and thinks through everything before speaking, leaders often mistake this behavior as lack of confidence. It isn’t. It’s personality type.
  Related post by MaryJo Asmus: Don’t Underestimate The Quiet Ones




• What did their previous boss expect of them? If their previous boss was a perfectionist with ridiculous expectations, it’s possible that the employees’ expectations reset to that unrealistic level. We then see them as non-confident. When we look more deeply, we discover true confidence has simply been masked by previous experience.




• Do We Confuse Questions as Lack of Confidence? Driver type leaders who crave end results have a tendency to mislabel curious or thorough people as weak. Curiosity and/or thoroughness appear as questions. How we as leaders interpret this behavior comes from our own skew. If too many questions are annoying, it’s much better to clearly communicate the behavior we prefer rather than incorrectly branding employees with the label of no confidence.




• How is fear blurring our vision? The more concerned we are about an outcome, the more likely our fear will blur our vision. The positive side to fear is that we may select a highly experienced employee for a critical project. The negative side is that our fears may lead us to overlook talent that could handle the project. The result is we don’t develop employees’ experience for the future and the organization’s performance suffers in the long run.

We engage employees when we explore, see, and communicate clearly. We demoralize the entire team when we misjudge, label, and brand their efforts through a skewed lens.

What else can skew our vision of confidence and lead the teams astray? I welcome your views and discussion in the comments section below.

From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

Related Posts:
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Leaders, For Employee Engagement Learning is Better Than Proving

©2012 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on leading change, employee engagement, teamwork, and delivering the ultimate customer service. She turns interaction obstacles into interpersonal success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.

For decades, leaders have heard the same outcry from customer service, call center, and technical support teams: “We have to treat the customers well even when they are yelling at us. Why do they get treated better than they treat us?”

Service and support leaders, managers, and team leads ask me: “Kate, how do we counter that?  Beyond our efforts to treat team members well, what’s the answer to this endless outcry?”

It depends on what you think the team members seek. If you hear it as an outcry for equality and fairness, you might be tempted to say “because they are the customers” or the old standard “the customer is always right.” Your reply affirms that it is not an equal relationship.

Well fairness and equality may be part of what customer service and tech support teams want. Everyone deserves to be treated with basic human respect and most organizations do not tolerate true verbal abuse on either side.

Nonetheless, the outcry continues.


I can affirm, after 23 years of training these wonderful teams, that the other part of the outcry is envy. 

It’s understandable how agents, reps, analysts, and associates could envy the customers’ privilege of:

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1. Showing anger and dissatisfaction; they can’t.
2. Receiving help; they give it and often don’t get help from other teams.
3. Participating in industry conferences; they rarely see the light of day.
4. Attending training for professional growth; they have limited access.
5. Having time to work projects completely; they are expected to perform well while simultaneously clearing the queue.
6. Working a regular schedule with holidays and weekends off; they often work shifts or are on-call.
7. Being respected and valued; few top leaders recognize service and support as vital to the organization.

Leaders, The Impact of Envy in Customer Service
The risk and impact of this envy is worthy of your attention.

• It stops teams from consistently delivering the ultimate in customer service. If their heads and hearts don’t love being in service, they won’t.
• Unchecked envy emphasizes the feelings of unworthiness and diverts valuable focus from service to the imbalance.
• It impacts the teamwork critical to delivering outstanding service.
• Unaddressed envy can fuel high staff turnover. Some turnover is healthy for service teams. High levels are a warning sign of a service organization in trouble.

Understanding this has given many leaders and me the chance to cultivate a non-envy culture that inspires and delivers service greatness.

Through workshops, we have helped the front line managers, supervisors, team leads, and staff to replace envy of customers’ privileges with pride in:

• Breadth of knowledge
• Continuous learning through experience
• Great ease and style in working with people — valuable and not everyone has this prowess
• Multi-tasking and ability to work under pressure
• Professional skill of being empathetic and objective — many doctors don’t even have this
• Inspiring yourself and others to excellence

To build and sustain a non-envy service culture, it is necessary to help service team members discover a sense of fulfillment. I rarely hear the cry of envy from service team members who are fulfilled in other ways.

Fulfillment squelches envy whether it comes from their family life, years of work experience, inner peace, gratitude for having a job, comparison to previous jobs, or a tremendous high from reaching results in the face of adversity.

Leaders, showing appreciation and recognition for service team’s work and helping them build a positive service team identity feeds fulfillment. Working with your peer leaders of non-customer facing teams to build the cross teamwork necessary for mutual success feeds fulfillment.

Declare your vision to your teams and ask them for their insight on how to achieve it. Telling does not engage excellence; asking does.

Offer training to develop their professional skills. Budget for temps to cover service demands while service team members present a case study of their achievements at an industry conference.


Face team problems, like envy, stress, and morale, and your teams will achieve success.

I look forward to helping you take your customer service and tech support teams from inspiration to action.

From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

Related Posts:
Leaders, 12 Worthy Kudos to Spark Employee Engagement
The Ultimate Customer Experience – Challenge of Excellence (video with sound)

©2012 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please first email info@katenasser.com for terms of use. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on customer service, customer experience, teamwork, and leading change. For 23 years, she has turned interaction obstacles into business success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer testimonials and results.

Leaders have leaders reporting to them. If you are a top leader, do you know if your direct reports are fueling growth, change, and success?

Or are your direct reports a wart on the arm of progress — blocking change despite what they are telling you?

5 signs that your leaders are a wart on progress:

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1. They demoralize teams by speaking about the past instead of the future. Example: Why didn’t you or we should have. No matter how this is spoken, it doesn’t fuel commitment to change. It fuels resentment, fear, and guarded behavior. Progress flourishes with learning and confident exploration.




2. They say they will lead change while claiming there is not yet enough data, time, or resources to make a decision. Their wart may be the fear of failure or inability to see ahead from the current picture. Effective leaders know that progress materializes from incremental steps not a complete roadmap.
   
   

3. They seem like star performers yet can’t rally others to star performance. Their wart may be an unwillingness to stand back for others to shine. They are so headstrong, they listen to nobody and block team input. Teams need to have a voice else they sense progress is outside their grasp. Related Post: Is Our Knowedge Too Noisy to Listen?




4. They crush others with the demand for perfection. Their wart is perfectionism. The quest for excellence breeds progress; perfectionism kills it like the disease it is.




5. They are a lid that fits any pot. Their wart is lack of identity. Teams rarely trust them for they feel clueless. Flexible leaders inspire contribution and progress; nondescript leaders leave teams bewildered without a vision. Without vision, progress falters.

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If your organization is not progressing toward the vision, look at the leaders reporting to you.

Are they inspiring teams, communicating, and breeding excellence? Or do they suffer from any of the 5 warts noted above?


Your mentoring or guidance from a professional coach can remove the warts and get the organization, once again, on the road to progress.

From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™


©2011 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers consulting, training, DVDs, and keynotes on customer service experience, teamwork, and leading change. She turns interaction obstacles into business success in tough times of change. See this site for workshop outlines and customer results.

Leaders, are you conflicted when your best performer is change resistant? As I highlight a change resistor to leaders who engage my consulting and training, many have said to me “but this person is our best performer!”


Behind that short reply from leaders is great risk to the success that lies ahead. Because of this, I ask leaders, can a change resistor get you to Oz? No and neither can denial.

Leading to Oz

1. Leaders, your shock and disappointment are normal. Your denial, deadly. Any employee can be a change resistor. Occupational performance does not guarantee change-ability.




2. Be ready for a show down in the evil forest. Some top performers believe they are indispensable and can resist the change. Before initiating significant change, know what internal and external resources you have to keep everything moving ahead. It also helps the resistors see they are not indispensable.




3. Replace your fear of performance loss with courage and belief in your vision. Most team members will buy into and even contribute to organizational change if they see that it is not debatable and understand what the vision means for them.




4. Redefine performance to include change-ability. Long term success means adapting to change. Discuss this with your team members and let them know that their skill is valuable if they apply it to a changing vision.




5. Top performers and high achievers sometimes want an extremely clear picture of the change before they buy into it because they want to be seen as a high achiever throughout the process. That is not always available. Other high achievers trust in their ability to succeed even in ambiguity.

   Let everyone know that you trust in their ability and know their will be ups and downs throughout the change. Commitment and focus is the key — not perfection.

Lead change with vision, courage, and communication.

What other factors contribute to a top performer resisting change instead of helping to lead change?

From my experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

©2011-2012 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers consulting, training, DVDs, and keynotes that turn interaction obstacles into business success especially in tough times. Leading change, employee engagement, customer service experience, and teamwork. See this site for workshops outlines and customer results.

On more than one occasion as an organizational consultant, I have detected hidden workplace change resistance long before the leaders and managers. They asked me later, how did you know?

It got me thinking about how I spot change resistance lurking in the cubicles.

I detect clues much like Sam Spade.
I spot …

1. Words that are contradicted by actions or inaction.
2. Words or actions that seem forward focused while anchoring everyone in the status quo.
3. Questions that are actually saying no. These are resistance statements in disguise.
4. What doesn’t fit or make sense given incentives, choices, and conditions.

How can you become the Sam Spade of change resistance?

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Give yourself permission. It’s both OK and essential that you see the reality. Sharpening your sight doesn’t make you a tyrant or a cynic.

Be ever present and conversational. Your conversations, formal and informal, will produce more clues. Presentations where you ask for questions are only a small piece of the picture. To see a more detailed picture, get a closer view.

Trust your ability to handle change resistance else you might overlook a clue that’s right in front of you.

Overcome any fear of conflict otherwise you may block from your mind what you find undesirable. As leaders, your inner strength will guide you through discomfort and give your teams a beam of support during the change.

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Your detective skills help all involved in the change. They unearth obstacles, concerns, and energy drains that everyone can address once out in the open.

Contrarily, overlooking resistance, avoiding conflict, being distant during the angst and stress, tells your teams you don’t believe in the change. If you don’t believe in it, why should they?

Lead change with vision far and near. Like a detective you will unearth both obstacles and success — with and for your teams.

From my experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach


How have you detected hidden change resistance? What specific clues got your attention and how did you handle them?

©2011 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, delivers workshops, keynotes, and consultations that turn interaction obstacles into organizational success. Leaders have been booking Kate for 21 years to fill the gaps of diversity with action and teamwork. See this site for customer results and book Kate now.

I wrote a post in 2009 asking if Leaders Are Wearing Corrective Lenses. Since your vision impacts and often determines the ultimate outcome, it’s important that it be sharp at every turn or corrected.

Well isn’t that the purpose of those that work with and for you? To provide knowledge, experience, insight, and accurate updates to clarify and develop the vision? In truth leaders, diverse collaborators are your corrective lenses.

Leader’s Dilemma.
What happens to the vision when you have collaborators with personality types quite different from yours? Highly experienced people with diverse knowledge come in different personality types. Can they still be your corrective lenses if they interact very differently than you do? Consider the following challenges.

If you are a driver personality, you may miss what is right in front of you. Caring primarily about the end-result, you often see the distance better than anyone yet your near vision is blurred. Analytic collaborators have great near vision for all the details. Are you patient enough to work with them?

If you are an analytic personality type, your vision of details is superb yet you may miss the ultimate destination because you aren’t looking far enough ahead. Driver type collaborators can correct this skew. How do you react to them? Do you delay drivers’ input or embrace their drive to the end-result?

If you are an amiable personality type, your desire for harmony creates great bonds yet a team of amiables may falter in the completion of tasks. Your vision can benefit from a more diverse team including analytic, expressive and driver type collaborators. The question is are you put off by their personality types?

If you are an expressive, your collaborators will know exactly what you want yet you may not truly listen to their questions or input. If you can’t hear it, how can it correct your vision?

Solution.
You can balance out your dominant trait to allow these diverse collaborators to be your corrective lenses. They do sharpen your leadership vision and correct your blind spots. Is that enough to justify your effort to learn how to work with their personality types?

If yes, here is a resource for you: GPS Your Brain to Work With Any Personality Type.

What success have you had in working with diverse collaborators of different personality types? How did you do it and what was the value?

©2011 Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, Founder & President, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or re-publish the content of this post, please email info@katenasser.com for permission.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, delivers keynotes, workshops, consultations, and DVDs to turn interaction obstacles into interpersonal success in business, teamwork, customer relations, and leading change.

As a leader, your vision and focus affect, perhaps even determine, the ultimate outcome.  How is your vision of the organization?  Is it a perfect 20/20?  Well I hope you are wearing multi-focal corrective lenses to sharpen your daily vision because many things can cloud the picture.

Personality type. 

If you are a driver personality, you may miss seeing the potential in people if it isn’t straight at you.  Caring primarily about the end-result, you often see the distance better than anyone yet your close vision is blurred.

If you are an analytic personality type, your vision of details is superb yet you may miss the ultimate destination because you aren’t looking far enough ahead to steer others to success. 

If you are an amiable personality type, your desire for harmony seeds great bonding yet your team may falter in the completion of tasks.

If you are an expressive, your team will know what you want yet you may not necessarily hear their questions or input.

If you are wearing corrective lenses, you can balance out your dominant trait with focus on these other important aspects.

Economic Conditions.  Do you make the same wise decisions in tough economic times as you do in good times?  Or is your vision blurred by the pressure of financial impact?  The corrective lenses to wear in this case – a checklist of the questions that have guided you to wise decisions in the past.  Update the list and use it!

A New Team Given to You.  Picture it – you have accepted a leadership position of an existing team you did not previously know.  As you do a quick assessment you sense they are not the right people for these jobs.  If you are thinking, “I would never have hired these people”, your thinking will block your vision for success.  The corrective lenses to wear in this situation are discussions with each person to truly understand what they have to offer.  It is very possible that conditions have buried their talents.  If it isn’t true, your vision for success will still be clearer than had you not worn these corrective lenses.

You Get a New Boss.  There is a shake-up above and a new leader is over your organization.  What is your reaction after you hear her/him say that there will be big changes in how things are done?  Do you sub-consciously or consciously think “Oh s_ _ _ !”   Get those corrective lenses on your thinking quickly and go into creative exploration mode.  You and your teams will enjoy the journey through the changes and your new boss will have an exponentially better view of your value!

Your Customers’ Business Changes.  They say that businesses fail when the market changes and businesses don’t.  Are you in touch with where your customers’ businesses are going?  Are their markets changing?  As a leader, you need to be wearing multi-focal lenses to see far ahead so you have time to re-focus your teams.  For example, if your customers are scientific researchers and their results take them in a completely different direction – it can have far reaching affects on your organization as a supplier or service provider.  Keep your corrective lenses focused on your customers to stay current with their needs.

Remember, multi-focal corrective lenses sharpen your leadership vision and remove the clouds that can block your success.  Is it any wonder that these lenses are known as progressives?

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach