Choose Your Words Carefully

Make Sure You Communicate Well

Watch your words.  Watch how you deliver your words.  Pay attention to how others hear your words.  Watch how they react to your words.  Communication is a very critical and complicated piece of important work you will be performing.  The main source of your communication will be your words.  That is why it is so important to pay close attention to what is said.  Your words carry out the messages you send.  If your messages are confusing, unorganized, disrespectful, mean-spirited, pointed, angry or even contradictory you may discover less productivity from the people you serve and lead.  The success factors your business model is trying to manage will become a lot harder to reach if your communication skills are needy.  Watch your words, they carry some very powerful results.  You want to make sure your results are positive ones.

Business success comes in many different forms.  Sometimes business success comes from being in the right place at the right time.  Sometimes business success comes from knowing the right people.  Sometimes business success comes from doing the right things long enough that the maturity of those actions finally delivers the rewards it promised.  Whatever the case, business success can come from many different angles.  In all cases, business success comes from the right kinds of communication happening to the right environment at the right times in the right ways.  Communication is king.  When your communication is flowing accurately with your staff, your customers, your business model, your accounting and your marketing  process that is when your business model is humming profitably.  Communication is a tremendous success key.

I once traveled the rounds from business family to business family.  I was doing some personal counseling with many small business owners.  In each case I discovered one thing that needed help.  The troubled models always needed better communication.  In every case where communication was broken down I also noticed some kind of communication breakdown between the spouses I was counseling.  The frustrations their business models were experiencing were partially linked to the breakdown in communication between each other.  The leaders were not communicating well so the business model was feeling the extension of the spousal communication breakdown.  Most of the business challenges these couples were facing could be directly linked to the communication breakdowns they were sharing with each other.  As an outsider, it was easy to see this effect.  To them, the creators of the breakdowns, it was not a vision that was clear to see.  I could hear the wrong stuff coming out of the words they shared.  They could not hear the same 'errors of slant' that I could hear.

Watch your words.  Your words carry out a message that sometimes even we cannot easily recognize how badly they are being delivered.  Our words become our ways.  Our ways become how we rally support.  How we rally support becomes how we convince others to go the way we ought to be going.  This is how good leadership patterns work better.  It is how the art of leadership gets defined.  Leaders who harness this kind of art are the ones who work their business models into more successful patterns.  Choose your words carefully.  When a group of leaders has their communication quotients running clear on all cylinders, that group of leaders also has a strong and successful business model.  Information is flowing accurately and solid.  Relevant issues are being addressed and managed efficiently.  In an atmosphere of high and good communication, everyone watches how they manage what they say, when they say it and how they deliver what they say.  Care is given to the tongue.  In a well-run business model...there is no such thing as 'constructive criticism.'  'Constructive criticism' is a terrible excuse for trying to lead a bundle of folks down the path of success.  Get away from that kind of silliness.  Watch your words better.  Think deeper about how you need to say what needs to be said.  Watch your words.  It is hard work to do it correctly.

A careless tongue can create some very damaging results.  What's more, most of the carelessness from the tongue goes very unnoticed by the deliverer.  The one who sends out the careless message is usually the one who does not hear the damage those words delivered.  Business success does not often hover around damaged words.  That is something I notice about broken business models.  Most broken business models are surrounded by rotten words.  Carelessness is running out of control in the troubled waters of poor communication.  No business model survives this kind of environment for very long.  Success becomes very shy when the words in an organization are carelessly strewn out with damaged edges along side of the messages those words carry.  Watch your words.  Every leader becomes the main source for how the words are managed in an organization.  If the leader has a junkie tongue, so do the followers.  Junkie tongues produce rotten atmospheres that do not improve the communication elements.  Business success is hard to produce when the atmosphere wreaks of the littered trail from the terrible words that are permitted to exist.  Watch your words.  They carry a huge weight and a monster responsibility for the kind of success your business model produces.

Choose your words carefully.  It is hard work but every leader must learn how to manage this component of success with greater care.  Words carry much of the success an organization ultimately produces.  Choose them carefully.

Your Words Define Your Truthful Actions

One of the interesting things about poor communication is that outsiders can see when it is really bad.  The people who are performing the poor communication usually are not the ones who can see how poorly performed their communication has become.  In fact, we need to choose our words doubly careful with those who are performing their communication skills poorly.  Poor communicators are usually the ones who need to be more carefully addressed.  When a poor communicator is pulled to the side and asked to improve their communication skills, how amenable will they react to that kind of discussion?  My experience with that effort has not been very good.  Poor communicators are usually the ones who take the worst offense when asked to improve their communication skills.  They usually speak poorly because they hear poorly.  We can only put out of the mind what we place into it.  If it is flowing out wrongly, then it most likely is going in wrongly.  Check it out.  I cannot speak Chinese until I place it in.  Chinese does not come to my mind 'naturally.'  So is the same for a bad tongue.  It is not 'natural.'  It is placed inside first.  Then it comes out.  Simple.  A bad tongue is related to a bad listening.  When the outflow is sour, the inflow is sour.   

I have mentioned in the past how I prefer to hire people with integrity long before I hire people with great talent.  One of the first things I look for in a new hire is their ability to communicate well.  I like to discover to see how honest they are about knowing who they are.  Once they know who they are, they usually have some pretty good communication skills.  It is amazing how these two patterns run parallel to one another.

Good communicators are usually the ones who are the most careful about what they take in.  They are better listeners than they are talkers.  Good communicators are more careful about how they listen to what is being said.  They are tuned into the information that is flowing around where they are moving about.  These are the people built to respect others with the most integrity.  Integrity learns the art of listening well.  This is one of the key clues I use when I am searching to add some personnel to my staff.  I pay closer attention to how well someone listens.  I watch what they take in and I pay closer attention to how they screen the value of what they take in.  People with high integrity will often be caught screening the inflow of information before they allow it to carelessly enter into their minds.  Relevant stuff works.  Irrelevant stuff is carefully discarded. This is exactly how they protect their tongues.  People with integrity usually have more taken in that is relevant and worthwhile than those who do not pay this kind of attention to what they allow in.  The old rule; garbage in, garbage out is very true.  Those who practice higher levels of integrity respect this process more than those with lower integrity.  It is not rocket science.  As a result, I prefer to hire those with integrity long before talent.  They are usually better communicators.

If I want to improve my business model performance I find that I need to go to work more on improving the communication factors.  The models that produce higher levels of better communication are the ones that also produce the most success.  When I am asked to help 'fix' a problem business model, communication improvements are high on my list of repair.  I do not need to perform some fancy analysis.  If a business model is breaking down and in need of some serious repair, it is always broken in the areas of communication.  This fact is a given.  One of my first steps is to open up the doors of communication.

For example.  A few years ago I was hired to save a business model from its near death as it moved closer to bankruptcy.  The size of the debt it was managing was 65% of its gross annual sales.  Most of that debt was short term notes and supplier 'favors.'  Their future was teetering on the edge of complete collapse.  I had no allies when I walked in.  Everyone was an enemy, including the current working staff.  All of the signs, the messages and the words were filled with massive tones of negative energy.  No tongue was safe.  On my second day, a twenty-year employee handed me his resignation.  On my sixth day, a sixteen-year veteran employee came to my office to 'set me straight' on a few things.  He made it clear to me that he was not going to change a few things he said was clear to him that I was planning to change.  I like this story.

That sixteen-year veteran employee marched into my office and closed my door.  He sat down in a chair across from my desk.  He started immediately with a sour and direct tongue about how he was not going to do some of the things he could see I was going to change.  I paused for a moment.  I asked him to get back up and please open the door to my office.  He was surprised.  He said he had a few serious and private issues he wanted to discuss with me and preferred we keep the door closed.  My response, "Please open the door.  There will be nothing discussed here about this business that should be kept a secret from the others who work hard here.  Furthermore, anything that is so private about what we should be sharing with each other has no place being a part of this business repair process.  Anything that private ought not to be discussed here.  Open the door, please, or we are done talking.  I did not come to this job to work on your private issues.  I came to this employment to fix a broken business model.  You will either help me get that done or you will kindly get out of the way.  Are we clear about why I am here?"  He quit six months later.

I chose my words carefully because I recognized I needed someone aboard who had more integrity.  The guy I replaced him with came to that organization with a ton more integrity.  We dug that business model out of its bankruptcy hole in forty four months.  We successfully sold it to another organization for three times its assessed value, during this current recession.  Your words matter.  If you noticed it, I do not mean 'be nice.' Be honest.  Be clear.  Be efficient.  Be filled with an open door policy about how you say anything to everyone.  When that 'bully' left my office that day the rest of the crew employed by that dying business model became very interested in my style of approach.  They recognized a new leader had set foot on the ship.  Things were going to change.  They developed a new hope for their future.  They began to think differently.  Maybe success is in fact, possible.

Until next time...choose your words carefully...