Talk to your people
Planning can’t just consist of you issuing directives and strategies about how you want things to be done. You need to get feedback from your people on what they think about what’s going on.
“The first tip we all learn is that it’s a lot easier to get other people talking about themselves,” Martin says. “For a person that is a little bit more uncomfortable doing that, I think going in with a couple of good open-ended questions takes the pressure off. Go to an employee and say, ‘Tell me what’s going on in your life. How have you been? How’s work been going?’
“If you just shut up and listen, it takes a lot of that connectivity pressure and communication pressure off yourself. It puts you in a little bit better position when you are put on the response podium to communicate and deliver back to them. That holds true in the context of a business organization or a social setting.”
You also need to take some time to think about who you’re speaking to, in whatever setting you encounter them.
“Always try to think, ‘OK, who is my audience? What’s important to them today? What is it that they want to hear about?’” Martin says. “There are a lot of things that I think are important on my agenda that I want to get communicated, but if it’s coming off as me-centric or organization-centric, it’s not as relevant to the particular audience I’m talking to. I have to tweak it and figure out how I can accomplish the things that still need to be communicated, but do it in the setting of what’s important to the listening audience.”
Just as you plan for your company’s future and you plan when you have a problem, you need to plan when you’re going to speak to your employees.
“It’s always a helpful exercise to do your prep work about what it is you want to talk about,” Martin says. “Then back up and think, ‘OK, let’s think about the listener. What is it that they want to hear?’”
This is where your ability to stay true to yourself becomes vital. It’s a lot easier to speak with integrity and honesty when you’re talking about something you truly believe in and feel passionately about.
“You’ll come off as knowledgeable as opposed to you’re asked to speak on a topic you know nothing about and you have to go research it and it’s more likely you’ll have to operate off some kind of script because it’s not about something you’re inherently part of,” Martin says. “We try to authenticate the way we communicate. We try to use relative examples that the listening audience can relate to and put it into concepts they can relate to.”
If it seems like you’re having a problem getting employees to believe what you’re telling them when you speak to them in a group setting, maybe it’s because you don’t talk to them on a regular basis.
“You have a plan, you communicate it to your troops, you revisit that on a periodic basis,” Martin says. “That keeps you in the habit of doing it. If you never do it and then you wake up one day and say, ‘I’ve never sat up here as a business leader and communicated what we’re about,’ it’s going to be a pretty awkward presentation. Everybody is going to go, ‘Why is he doing this? We never do this.’ And you’ll be rusty at doing it. Like a lot of things, practice and frequency make you better at doing it.”
