TUF Workshop Blog

Here is a TUF tip when speaking to individuals or to a group of people in a meeting, especially about new projects that you are wanting to introduce. 

When someone asks a question or puts up an objection, you will have more chance that they will listen to you if you acknowledge the feeling or concern that is most likely behind that question. Be aware of their emotion, even if they don’t express it fully.

You can say things like:
“I can see that this is an important concern for you” 
“You are worried about this”
“It’s important that we do ask this kind of question and get clear answers” 

If they detect you are defensive that will make it harder for them to hear your argument. You might be tempted to think of them as a difficult internal customer, or just a difficult person. 

On the other hand if you are tuned in to them at an emotional level, acknowledging their experience and emotions as fully as you can, that will produce a stronger connection between you. 

This is not just a “feel good” suggestion. By acknowledging someone in this way you are activating their mirror neurons, essential parts of the brain which fire up in all good encounters.

A controversy in the news today concerns the publicist for the ACT Party, John Ansell, who sacked himself because the party wouldn’t use some of his copy in their advertisements. Leader Don Brash said he was tempted by some of the statements John Ansell used, but in the end toned them down. John Ansell claimed the whole party are cowards because they won’t speak ‘the truth’ about what is going on.

Without getting into the details of the controversy, here are two things we can learn about workplace communication and community dialogue from this incident.

The first is workplace communication, which includes crucial conversations, difficult conversations and conflict resolution, requires us to address the tough subjects. If we have ‘no go’ areas of conversation then we are not engaging in good communication. We do need to be courageous to enter conversations that have high emotional values connected with them. There is no place for cowards in healthy conversation. John Ansell is saying that many people don’t want to even have these conversations because they are scared.

The second is that when we do enter these conversations we need to understand the complexity of all positions. Listening to the other person’s whole story gives us a good chance of understanding them. Life is complex and the relationships between people and between groups of people is even more complex. It often takes time to understand this complexity. Reducing the arguments to one line statements, no matter how clever, only distorts communication rather than clarifies it. John Ansell’s clever and witty slogans are not 'the truth'- they are only one perspective on the issue and do little to help anyone understand the complexity of the situation. With difficult conversations in the workplace, beware of slogans or simplistic solutions.

“Why is she telling me this again, I got it the first time?” Steve thought to himself as he suppressed his annoyance with Jan and wondered how he could finish the conversation quickly. 

Steve didn’t realise that he was the one who was prolonging the conversation. He was sure he was listening to Jan. He made eye contact with her and gave her his full attention. He understood clearly what she was saying about the details of the new website and yet somehow she kept repeating herself. Perhaps she needed to go on a communication course.

Steve failed to do the most basic, yet important thing when listening to someone else. He didn’t acknowledge and respond to the feelings that were at the heart of what Jan was saying. Her conversation included a great deal of technical information as well as many of her feelings about the project.  She had struggled with a number of difficulties and overcome them to reach this point. These feelings were her experience, they were real and they were a subtle part of the conversation.

Steve could have said something like, “Jan, you have really worked hard at this and come up with a great solution. It can’t have been all plain sailing”. Jan would have known that he was really listening because he responded to her feelings before he talked about the technical details. 

Jan herself may not have been conscious that she wanted her feelings acknowledged. She might not have been able to describe what was missing in his response. She did however keep talking until she felt really heard.

Acknowledging her feelings wouldn’t have taken long either. Perhaps just a couple of interactions would have satisfied that need. In fact, the whole conversation would have been finished a lot sooner if Steve had acknowledged her feelings right at the beginning.

This is the same for customer service situations whether you are with a difficult customer or a more ordinary customer. It’s the same when people work together in teams and on projects. Workplace emotions are present in every interaction. When we acknowledge them, communication is enhanced.

See our programme TUF for Teams and TUF for Managers that will give you the skills to listen and acknowledge emotions in the workplace.
 

Last week I was given a book to read called “The No Asshole Rule:
building a civilised workplace and surviving one that isn’t” by Robert Sutton.

Reluctantly I started to read it. The author, a university professor from Stanford, has used this eye-catching title to sell over half a million copies. My worst fears were realised!

Basically he calls someone an asshole if they display a number of non-social behaviours. The very first one is personal insults. The author himself fails on the first count by wanting to insult people who, for whatever reason, have been under-socialised and act in challenging ways at work.

Rather than see the other person as the problem, using the TUF principles, we can see them as having needs that they don’t know how express clearly. Difficult customers or difficult colleagues are first and foremost people who have a need. If you label them as ‘assholes’ you are depersonalising them and making it hard to respond to them in a constructive way.

While there is some useful information in this book on the cost to businesses of having difficult people working for them, and a number of suggestions about what to do with difficult people, the foundation of the book is flawed.

For conflict resolution, dealing with difficult customers, managing emotions in the workplace and holding crucial conversations it is always best to start with heart, treat the other person as a person, not as a fundamental orifice or any other disparaging body part.

I have just returned from Christchurch where I presented a free seminar for businesses and organisations on dealing with angry people in post earthquake Christchurch.

Participants from many sectors recognised the same stresses in their staff and customers.

They see increased levels of anger, irritation, frustrations, depression, and despair. They were keen to learn how to respond when people were feeling this way.

We focused on:
·          developing empathy
·          making their response to an angry or upset person effective in the first few words
·          recognising and naming what the other person is feeling, is very powerful

While the session was only two hours long, many of those attending grasped this point. It is only with practice they will make it their own.

House where I once lived in Manchester Street.

Here’s what some participants said afterwards:

“Excellent, practical methods, ideas for everyday!”

“Great advice to help you recognise situations and to diffuse and solve issues to get a better outcome.”

“Very helpful. Was interesting to learn how to be more empathetic, and to listen before speaking.”

“A new way of dealing with people who are aggressive and may be very helpful in any line of work.”

We look forward to our next opportunity of working with people in Christchurch.

In their book Authentic Conversations, Jamie Showkeir , Maren Showkeir and Margaret J Wheatley focus on the way workplace relationships set up a Parent–Child dynamic. The manager or supervisor is cast in the position of the parent — taking responsibility for everything that happens, including employee happiness, security, and success.

The employee is cast in the position of the child — dependant on the manager for approval, for security, and for happiness at work. In their lives outside of work, these same people own and manage properties, raise families, run clubs and otherwise take full responsibility for themselves, but at work that doesn’t seem to count for much. 

This relationship system is deeply rooted in our working life and has it’s origins in the industrial revolution where the worker was seen as an extension of the machinery in the factory which needed to be looked after and manipulated.

The challenge today is that we create work places where managers, staff, and customers relate to one another on an Adult–Adult basis. All of us have power and all can engage with one another authentically. Do you see this dynamic in your work place? Share your story.

My nephew Scott Garvie, a Wellington plumber (see Scotty’s Potties), volunteered to work for a week in earthquake-stricken Christchurch. He discovered that people needed to talk even more than they needed their plumbing fixed — and listening became harder than fixing their toilets! My own experience of talking on the phone with friends from Christchurch confirms this. People who have gone through severe shocks, like the earthquake, desperately want to talk about their experiences.

This makes being a good listener so important.

What qualities do you think make a good listener? We would love your thoughts.

When I rang my friend in Christchurch the other night, his 13 year old son answered the phone. “You must have got quite a shake up by the earthquake” I said. “Nah, not really, it was nothing”, he shot back offhandedly. I was taken aback but didn’t pursue the conversation at the time. 

Later his father told me that he had stopped his son making inappropriate jokes about the earthquake. At that point I saw clearly how this was the boy’s way of dealing with the scary shake.

It’s not unusual for a 13 year old boy to pretend his is not scared. He certainly wouldn’t want to cry so telling jokes is a good way to avoid that. 

There are many reasons why people can’t say directly what is affecting them. They express their emotions ‘sideways’ which can be off-putting if you are on the receiving end. Be patient, keep accepting the other person no matter what, don’t push them to tell you how they are feeling and when they are ready they may share what is really worrying them.

A story in the Wellington Weekend paper told of a participant from the TV show New Zealand’s Next Top Model who spoke openly about other contestants. She became very unpopular with the other models because of the way she delivered her forthright opinions of them. (She was popular with the TV network because she provided the drama to make their programme interesting.)

She said she was only saying to people’s faces what everyone else was saying behind their backs.

Her excuse assumes there are only two choices – silence or violence. Either you don’t say any thing at all to other people about their problem behaviour (silence) or you blast them with both barrels (violence). 

There are a number of other options that would come under the heading of ‘crucial conversations’, that is how to speak with people about important topics without damaging the relationship. Learning how to have a crucial conversation is a real skill.

People need to be heard. The protests in Egypt show that if people are not acknowledged they will keep on expressing themselves until they are heard.

President Mubarak has not been listening. He comes up with all kinds of excuses as to why he shouldn’t step down as President of Egypt. Because he isn’t listening the people shout louder and more of them join the protest.

The same can happen with customers and colleagues. If you acknowledge what they are saying when they complain or criticise you, even if you don’t agree with what they are saying, you have a better chance of developing a workable relationship with them. Once you have established a workable relationship then you can discuss what you agree or disagree with. This is the essence of good customer relations and of positive team building.

I was staying in a hotel recently and rang down to the restaurant to order a meal which I said I would come down to eat immediately as I was going out shortly.

I ended up waiting nearly 30 minutes for my meal. The staff, who I see regularly, were all very friendly and nice but they somehow didn’t take me seriously that I wanted my meal in a hurry.

When I asked one of them where my meal was up to she said with a cheery smile that the order was on the rack and shouldn’t be long and that she didn’t know what the hold up might be.

There was no acknowledgement on her part that I wasn’t getting what I asked for and neither did she appear to do anything to hurry the meal up.

The staff at this restaurant are obviously not trained in excellent communication. She was not able to change her approach from friendly and nice to professional and concerned. She, and her colleagues had only one mode of customer service.

This was illustrated when I expressed my disappointment at the delay. None of them knew how to respond to me in a clear and calm way. When I made this rather mild complaint they looked flustered and embarrassed.

Great customer service means that no matter what the customer says the staff member can tune in to their needs and respond with appropriate words and actions.  

People buy on emotion. Relationships are based on emotion. What do you do when someone is really emotional? It might be a customer, staff member or spouse who gets upset. You want to calm them down so you can deal with the business issues at hand. Many people think that by being reasonable they can communicate best. However, the other person is not rational in this moment, they are emotional. When someone is emotional they are feeling a great deal and they are expressing this to you. They want to be acknowledged, seen, and heard in this moment of distress. If you make your first response to them an acknowledgement of their feelings you will go a long way to building a strong business relationship. This acknowledgment may be as simple as “Oh dear, I’m sorry that XYZ has happened” or “This has been a real nuisance for you, hasn’t it” or “Wow, I am sorry, I didn’t realise how much it has affected you” or even “Bugger!” (said in a caring kind of way). Don’t rush on with more words, pause to let what you have said sink in and give time for them to respond before going for the ‘fix it’ part of your response.

Alan did the first day of the TUF workshop and was sceptical about trying the idea of responding to the emotion when someone is upset. On the weekend between sessions he had parked his car across the driveway of the business next door to where he went shopping. When he came out the owner of the business was trying to get his vehicle in the driveway, past Alan’s car. He started shouting and swearing. Alan was taken aback at first. And then he remembered. Respond to the emotion. “I guess it must be pretty frustrating having people do this all the time. I’m really sorry.” He said to the irate business owner.

Alan was really surprised how quickly the guy cooled down. “It was almost instant,” he told me when we met for the second session. “I didn’t really believe it when you told us this last week but I can see that it really does work”.

The court case is continuing against Eric Smail, of Christchurch who murdered the tetraplegic friend he had been caring for over a number of years. Their relationship had become strained and Eric wasn’t coping.

A short time before the murder he was in the pub with some friends and had tried to tell them he was having difficulties with his friend. They just laughed it off and didn’t hear his distress. This made him feel worse and he murdered his friend that night.

While this is no excuse for murdering someone and I don’t condone what he did in the least, I am aware that things may have turned out differently if his friends had listened to him and taken him seriously, even for a few minutes.

In every single one of the terrible shootings in high schools in the United States the gunman had, in the weeks leading up to the shooting, expressed similar distress to someone in that community and they had not been listened to. 

The best thing to do when someone says they are unhappy or upset about something is to stop, give them your serious attention and listen to them. Eventually they may need to talk with a professional counsellor rather than you, but right now, you are the one they are telling, so take them seriously!

A little snippet in the paper yesterday said Russell Crow had been excluded from a pub somewhere in England because he caused too much trouble. Russell caused difficulties once before when he threw a phone at the concierge in a New York hotel. At the time he said this is how we settle things where I come from (NZ). He has to have been misquoted, surely!

What can you do when people like Russell Crow nut-off and get upset. Sometimes there's not a lot you can do but hold your own dignity. It is worth acknowledging that you see they are upset. It can be helpful to apologise that they have been put out, or the service hasn't met their expectation. This is not accepting blame for what has happened. It is letting them know they are not alone with their feelings and distress.

In the end, if they persist in raving on and on, it is best to look after yourself by not taking it personally. It is their emotion, not yours. Keep breathing and think 'I'm OK, you're OK'.

How to give good feedback

Many of the TUF principles that front line staff use are for quick customer interactions where the customer will leave after a few minutes. Mostly you can't ask them to change their behaviour. You just need to work out ways to live with it and be able to respond to them.

But what about the difficult internal customer? How do you ask them to change their unwanted behaviour when they are going to be with you every day?

Transactional Analysis has a method they call the 'stroke sandwich'. That is positive negative positive.

Positive
Say something positive about the person, what you appreciate about their work, them or their ability.

Negative
Tell them what part of their behaviour is unacceptable to you

Positive
Reaffirm you desire to work well with them, mention something positive you can truthfully say about them.

The saga with JetStar, the new budget airline operating in New Zealand continues. Over the weekend a number of passengers were turned away from the check-in counter because they arrived less the 30 minutes before take-off. Some who were shut out said they arrived earlier but the queues were too slow. 

JetStar want to set their rules very clearly. They want people to know that this 30 minute cut-off time is absolute. This is their right and it’s probably a good way to run a budget airline.   

The customer service point they seem to have missed from the reports I have read is that they have shown very little empathy for the passengers who missed out. Even if they were going to exclude someone from the flight they could still say ‘Sorry about that, it is hard isn’t it’ or something that lets the disgruntled passenger see that their feelings have been noticed. 

The cynic in me says that all this publicity has generated heaps of newspaper coverage that informs the whole country that this airline is now operating.

Jetstar, the budget airline has begun operating in New Zealand with budget style customer service. The DomPost reported that when passengers turned up one minute late for the 30 minute check-in they were not allowed to board the plane. Fair enough except the staff did not know how to break the bad news to their customers. "They were so unhelpful - the man who took my ticket just said, 'Yeah, we've shut it'. I wouldn't have minded if they were apologetic". And that is the rub. Even when you have to deliver bad news to your customers, if you are at least apologetic the damage won't be so bad. By being apologetic you recognise that the customer is having a hard time with your decision and that helps keep the relationship positive to some degree.

The Book

If you wonder why there are not many postings to the blog over the past year then wonder no more.

I've been working on the book Thriving Under Fire. This 150 page work tells the story of Sophie and her team at Sophie's Cafe & Bar. She makes great coffee and cake but has such difficulty with customer service, especially with those difficult customers who regularly bother her.

Meet Rose, Angus and Lily who work for Sophie and go on a journey of discovering that they don't have to be beaten down by all the difficult customers they come across.

In fact they learn to respond very well to those situations and really make things hum in the Cafe. I won't tell you the whole story otherwise that would spoil it.

The book went to the printer yesterday and will be available from 26th June. The book launch will be on Friday 3rd July in Wellington. Contact us if you want to come to the launch.

You can buy the book by clicking on this link

What would Alan Duff say about this. 

Northland MP, John Carter was also pulled up by the police.  When asked if his vehicle was registered he got angry and swore at the police.  This incident found it's way into the New Zealand Herald and other national newspapers.

The leader of the National Party, John Key, was quick to go on television and to the papers and say that such behaviour is 'totally unacceptable'.  John Carter had to apologise to the police.

Now I don't encourage people to get angry and swear at the police or anyone else when they are upset.  However we do get two different pictures here.  The judge in Taupo last week said the right to express yourself only in a restrained way is no right at all.

The real challenge is how to respond to someone who is angry like this.  If you focus on how 'bad' they are you will only make it worse.  Better to recognise that they are upset for whatever reason and acknowledge that. 

The process of changing our life position begins in earnest during adolescence when we develop competence and confidence in many things. With loving support and encouragement of mentors and peers, we gradually develop a sense of ‘OKness’.   We need to be able to admit that at times we feel ‘not OK’. We need to be able to live with that discomfort and trust we can also change. 

If you still hold the life position of I’m not Ok, you’re OK, you can begin changing today. Acknowledge the discomfort. Consciously change your script and begin living as if it were true. 

Alan Duff does a “rant”. He claims to the judge in the Taupo court that this is not aggressive. It is just a rant. The policewoman involved in issuing him the speeding ticket certainly thought he was aggressive.