Successful Blog

Have You Found a Way to Make Small Talk Work for You Yet?

by

Could We Just Get On With It?

cooltext443809602_strategy

The holidays come with their obligations. The running, the gathering, and the inevitable holiday parties. The parties with friends and families can be true memory makers, filled with traditions and great reunions. The parties with coworkers and strangers can be a little intimidating, filled with small talk and expectations.

Small talk used to make me crazy. It was painful to listen to the ritual, empty conversation that didn’t go anywhere. It felt so inauthentic — people saying things and pretending to care about them. I’d try to participate but it was energy draining. “Could we just get on with it?!!” Small talk seemed such a time waster. How could so many people spend so much time getting no where, talking about the weather?

Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything. — Mark Twain

I admit I didn’t understand. As a result, I not only wasn’t good at it, but I was disruptive.

I’d try to add humor, switch it up a little, and every attempt would fall flat. People who small talk like their small talk a certain way.

My aversion to small talk made networking events and big company meetings excruciating. An introvert with a mile wide shy streak, I could sense a small talk conversation 60 seconds before it started. I practiced defensive networking. I’d walk around, smile, and hope someone as uncomfortable as I was would discover me. My fear of babble was getting in my way. Worse, I was probably telegraphing something like disdain.

My inability to small talk wasn’t working for me. It was time for a new view: If so many people found it useful, maybe there was something to it. Maybe I should pay attention, do some observing.

What I found out is that small talk comes in more than one flavor. The second flavor might be what has left many of us with a bad taste.

Don’t Let the Small Talk You Hate Ruin the Small Talk that Makes Relationships

The first thing I noticed when I started observing is that small talk has a pattern and purpose. You’ve probably noticed it too. Small talk is used to fill silences. What I didn’t catch for quite a while is that small talk comes in two forms — one that serves people who already know each other and another for people building relationships.

The Small Talk that Builds Relationships

Small talk is a space filler and a social lubricant. People use conversation to move together over time. It’s a social bonding ritual in which people define relationships, set boundaries, find similarities and differences. Small talk enables people to learn another’s social position, validate similar interests, and establish a platform for a continuing conversation … “Oh yeah, Jesse is my movie buddy. Love talking movies with him.”

When relationships are new, small talk is how people learn each other’s boundaries.The opening remark and it’s response follow the rules of a conversational dance. It really works so easily and doesn’t have to be insincere or shallow if you know these rules.

  1. Small talk starts with an agreeable statement or question. Start a conversation by noticing something, such as “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” or “That’s a stunning necklace!” Smile and make it easy to talk to you. A simple agreeable statement or question is a way small talkers of making a positive initial connection. If you don’t feel comfortable talking about the weather, or the food, or the latest techie gadget, comment on something about the other person. Share something you’ve noticed that you’re enjoying at that every moment
  2. The response to the first question or statement usually builds on the first question or statement. Respond with a little more than was asked for … “Yes, I live for the tulips on Michigan Avenue.” or “Thank you! It attracts amazing people. Are you always so great at noticing nice things?”

    3. Accept the invitation the opening agreeable statement or question offers you. Continue the conversation by sharing something, passing the conversation back, and listening to your new acquaintance. Offer only as much detail as fits your new relationship.

Starting the conversation is actually the easier way. Notice something worth commenting on in an agreeable way.

If you’re at that holiday party with strangers and coworkers, remember this to have more success in starting a conversation. Don’t approach two people talking, they’re probably having a deeper conversation. Look for a group of people standing together. Then look at their feet. The way we stand gives away how engaged we are. The person most open to a new conversation will be the one whose feet are pointing away from the conversation.

A little practice at the agreeable opening statement or question made my experience of small talk so much more refreshing. Now I find it’s a great way to open doors to new relationships with amazing people. I highly recommend it.

If Small Talk Is So Good, Why Does Everyone Hate It?

Small talk shows up in other situations. One in particular may be what has earned small talk it’s bad name. That would be the small talk that happens before someone, particularly someone in authority, uses to find a common ground and an even relationship right before he or she delivers bad news. I call that “the three things before the but.” You may have experienced it. For the naive or new to the experience, it’s a kind of being blindsided. To those who have previously experienced it, it’s still painful because once burned it’s easy to recognize what’s next. An example might be …

You’re a fabulous writer, a charming person, and very charismatic, but … you’re fired.

The worst part of this version of ritual, warmup conversation is that it doesn’t matter how true the “three things before the but” may be, the way that they’re used to deliver the hard news renders the three compliments unbelievable. The three compliments were pulled together to manipulate the tone and smoothly move the conversation. This conversational tactic destroys trust.

Have You Found a Way to Make Small Talk Work for You Yet?

People who say the “three things before the but” aren’t building relationships.
People who smile and talk about the weather while shaking hands and stealing your wristwatch aren’t building relationships.
People who smile big, talk about the weather, ask about your kids, but forget your name over and over aren’t building relationships.

They all may be using the art of talk as a social lubricant, but their using it to serve themselves not a relationship.

It’s not the small talk that’s the problem or the opportunity. It’s the motive that drives it.

Choose wisely and you’ll find that small talk can open a world of new relationships. Break the ice, invite others in, and sincere small talk can build you a network of amazing people.

Though I never think of it as small talk when I do it. I think of it as fun conversation.

Have you thought about small talk lately? Have you found a way to make it work for you?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

I’ve spent a couple of days on Twitter. Actually too many to count. My first tweet was March 16, 2007 and

Are you rejecting smart ideas?

by

by Patty Azzarello

cooltext466496263_leadership

by Patty Azzarello

Thrown Overboard

Very early in my career (I emphasize “very early” as this is not an incident I am proud of and didn’t want you to think this was last week!).

I was in a sales training session and we had to do a lifeboat exercise.

The Lifeboat…

You are probably familiar with this.

You imagine you are lost at sea in a lifeboat with others, and you have set of items in your emergency kit.
But you can’t keep them all, and you need to decide which few items to keep (while you pursue or await rescue) and which to throw overboard.  It’s stuff like a flare, a rope, a mirror, a flashlight, food, a compass, drinking water, matches, etc.

What’s supposed to happen…

The way the exercise goes is that you first create your list of must-keep items individually, and then you discuss it as a team and build a team-generated list.

This is an exercise where there are, in fact, correct answers, so you get a score on how well you did as an individual, and as a team.
The point of the exercise is to show how no individual scores come out higher than the team score, and to demonstrate the value of teamwork.

OK, So our team was pathetic.

This was an international meeting, and on our team we had 7 English-as-a-first-language people, and one French guy.  Although he spoke English, (loads better than any one of us spoke French!), the language issue was difficult and distracting to the team.

Every time he advocated for his choices we basically ignored him because it was just too slow and difficult to get what he was saying, and it didn’t sound that smart to us anyway.

You can guess the outcome here

1) Our team not only lost, but failed spectacularly, in an unprecedented way…?2) Our team score was lower than ALL of our individual scores…?3) AND the French guy not only had the highest individual score on our team, but of all the individuals, and all the teams!

OK, so what are the lessons?

He was the smartest guy in the room.  He tried to share his good ideas with us – over and over again.  We basically threw him overboard.

So for me, although miles from the lesson intended about teamwork, this provided a good slap in the face, and some real lessons about communicating.

I think about this tragically “American” moment in my career very often when I am working internationally.  And it serves as a reminder to be a better human!

1. Modify your expectations of communicating

When there is a language issue, treat is as YOUR issue.

They are speaking your language as a favor to you.  You don’t speak THEIR language.  So remember you are putting the other person in a difficult position.

If you have never tried – just try to learn another language.  Appreciate the great chasm that you would need to cross to speak as well in your colleague’s language as they do in yours.

Don’t just accept a weak meeting outcome, and blame it on the other person.

Take responsibility to get the necessary business outcome and give the person a chance to communicate on their terms.  It’s up to you to make sure you get their best thinking.

2. Don’t equate capability with ability to speak your language

I recall from one of Jack Welch’s books that even he made this mistake when he first started hiring people in Japan.  He hired the Japanese people that spoke English best because they seemed more capable to him.

He later let native Japanese leaders choose talent in Japan and got much better hires.

If something is critical, let people work in their native language and make it your problem to process and understand it.

3. Revert to writing

Writing can be much easier to understand because both parties get to communicate at their own pace.  Nothing gets lost as the conversation goes by.

I have had meetings where we literally wrote out, in sentences, our conversation, decisions and agreements on the white board.
The discussion moves slower, but the communication moves much faster.  Writing can often be much more easily understood than talking, and it is very easily translated.

Use writing in parallel with social media
I also heard a brilliant idea from a colleague who manages an international team. 

On all of their multi-country conference calls they use an additional IM window where people in each country type out the key points being made, translate any jargon, highlight questions and decisions, and clarify areas in the discussion that were moving fast, or unclear.

They also use blog updates which capture the key ideas and decisions from the conference call in writing, to re-inforce the key outcomes and have a record for later review and understanding.

This improved both productivity and relationships dramatically.  Brilliant!

How do you communicate with global teams?

Please leave your ideas in the comment box below!

—–
Patty Azzarello is an executive, author, speaker and CEO-advisor. She works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. Patty has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello. Also, check out her new book Rise…

Successful-Blog is proud affiliate of

third-tribe-marketing

7 Solid Business Outcomes of Comradeship, Cause, Communication, and Compassion.

by

All Leaders Motivate People

insideout logo

The day before SOBCon 2011, Jackie Mitchell, (@Your_MsSunshine) of the Red Cross Chicago, stopped by the event site. I was explaining to Terry St. Marie, (@Starbucker) my business partner, that Jackie is that rare person who hires to a team — meaning that she interviews people to find individuals whose skill sets will add up to a stronger single unit simply by the act of teaming them together. During that conversation, Jackie mentioned how stunning it was to her to realize that the majority of the people who work for her (80% ?) don’t get paid cash for the hours they work.

Volunteers are motivated by a currency other than money.

Paid employees aren’t motivated by money either. Peter Drucker proved that money is a disincentive … rather than moving us to work more — money has the most powerful effect when it’s missing or too small.

Leaders understand that more powerful currencies attract, engage, and motivate people.

7 Solid Business Outcomes of of Comradeship, Cause, Communication, and Compassion.

If you’re looking to build a team of employees as volunteers or volunteers as employees place your investment in offering comradeship, cause, communication, and compassion. These deeper currencies will draw other leaders to build something they can’t build alone. The call of a community quest to build something strong, lasting, and meaningful is a powerful payoff in itself.

Thinking minds perform amazing feats when we are dedicated to purpose they believe in and love. We rise to our better selves when we find a group willing to invest in us and each other for a quest bigger than any one of us alone.

When an organization offers meaningful engagement of head, heart, and purpose, it reaps seven deeply solid business outcomes.

  1. Self-Awareness — Remembering. The unique value is the person, his or her skills, talents, experience, and wisdom, not the job.

    Employees who see themselves as people who do a job, rather than people who are a job offer perspective, humanity, maturity, and balance that people filling a role have lost. The faster paced the situation, the more we need time for reflection, to check in, to ensure that we don’t leave behind the learnings of our failures AND our successes. We can’t remember, reenergize, and reignite what we’ve forgotten, devalued, or not taken time to realize, claim and internalize.

  2. Meaning — value and values. Meaning — the “why” we work — it is the values inside our value proposition.

    Money can’t buy love … or loyalty. To invest our best in a common vision, we have to know what we offer and how our contribution has meaning. Meaning allows us to express our value and attracts other who have value to offer. Meaning gives us a reason to show up to become a part of something bigger than ourselves – the ultimate share the risk, share the benefit of a common cause, building a business that no one person can build alone.

  3. Peak performance — productivity. Loving you do is a simple shift to seeing that doing good work is less stressful, more fun, more fulfilling, and more profitable.

    People who love their work bring more, invest more, do more, go further for the company and the customer.
    They’re constantly seeking faster, more efficient, better answers. They get satisfaction from satisfying coworkers and customers in ways that makes the company grow. They recognize and protect the company where that’s going on. Peak performers attract other peak performers who love

  4. Communication — Value-Based Leadership. Employees who love their job find ways to communicate their values and their level of commitment in clear ways that other people can understand and trust.

    We value what we earn and what we love. As employees undercover their core values, they learn how to communicate what those values are and what they are not. That values base line helps them sort their own stories. Employees begin to see how their values build as confidence, clarity, competence, integrity, respect, and more predictable behavior, the hallmarks of leadership. That leadership inspires and attracts the other leaders who hold the same values.

  5. Focus — Balanced View. Employees who view their role as integral to the business zoom out to see the customer (values) and the company (value proposition) and back in to focus their best balanced thinking to deliver for both.

    The people who conceive, design, build, and share with customers what we sell have always know what works best and delivers value. Whether the job is building a product, answering a phone, responding on Twitter, closing a deal, or moving a box in the warehouse, a meaningful view toward serving both customers and company is within every employee’s grasp. Thoughtful decisions happen where they make sense, at the right moment, and by the person at the right level. Time is saved. Costs decrease. Quality goes up.

  6. Teamwork — Problem-Solving. Employees doing what they love have more patience, time, and energy for problem solving and for each other.

    Invested employees see the value of teaching newcomers the culture and helping those learning new skills. They align their goals to protect the environment which benefits them, the community in which they work, the business that is growing, and the customers they serve. The essence of teamwork is the idea of building something no one can build alone.

  7. Influence – Benefits of Relationships. Leaders who love their jobs understand the value of aligning their goals to build lasting relationships.
    They reach out to coworkers, vendors, partners, customers, clients, stockholders and families and make them a part of building the business. They live collaboration without fearing mutation, knowing that their values and value proposition will guide the big decisions. They talk benefits and focus on others when they build and handle the product, when they tell the company story to the customers, and in how they talk about the company as a value in serving others. The respect of a loyal community shows in everything it does.

    They build a barn, not a coliseum, inviting everyone who picks up a tool to help them. They are mission critical to their coworkers’ and customers’ missions. That loyalty becomes its own barrier to entry. No competitor can that knock that off.

And those seven outcomes result in powerfully persuasive ROI — Market Share, Market Differentiation, and Market Value. Rolling all seven into one, nothing beats the 360 degree investment of brains, heart, energy, resources, goals, and dreams all in the same direction. Any financial firm worth its salt looks for that combination when funding a business.

So when we look to engaging a great team for our business — large or small. Focus first on finding leaders who want to build something they can’t build alone. Focus fast on finding ways to bring them fully into the experience. And fund them and their work the best you are able, knowing that money can’t buy love.

How might you build more comradeship, cause, communication, and compassion into every role you offer the people who work with you?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

How Do Get You People to Stop Listening to Words and Start Hearing Ideas?

by

Semantics Isn’t Conversation

In any conversation, a simple word I choose may have an unexpected effect on you. I have no way of knowing when you have “history” with ordinary words I regularly use.

A word such as curiosity, or money, or gorgeous might trigger a specific and negative response. I’ll have no clue that I’ve touched off feelings, negative feelings. I won’t suspect that one word has changed the tone of my presentation from neutral to negative.

It’s an accident because of something or someone in the past.

Looking for the Wrong Words

What folks encounter negative words it’s easy for them to have negative thoughts. They transfer their experience to the the person who said them, even when the words said aren’t thought of as hurtful, negative, or mean to most people. Communication breaks. Those listeners get distracted in that way.

It’s confusing when folks flinch at something we think is innocuous. We often feel misunderstood and try to explain that we meant no harm. It’s a defensive posture that rarely works. Rather than getting caught in explanation, looking for the tripwire word can be most helpful. If we ask about the message received, we avoid the risk putting our focus on our own intentions, but on the hearing the person who feels something wrong was said.

Here are some ways to bring the focus back to listening — when it seems that we’re getting distracted by words, and not hearing ideas.

  • Know what you want the outcome to be That means listening to the people — their tone, their pauses, their enthusiasm level — not just the words they’re saying.
  • The fear of negative comments — in person and on our blogs — is over-blown. Allowing people to play with language and to enjoy the conversation can be a conceptual collaboration.
  • Giving up the need for control — making room for tangents — can reap great benefits in involvement.
  • Look at faces when the eye contact is too intense.
  • Notice how your conversation partner sits and moves. Lean into the conversation, literally and figuratively.
  • Ask questions about points that interest you. Find many of them.

In other words, let the person talking know you value what he or she is saying. Signal everyone around that person’s importance to all who might be around. Listen actively. In other words, pay attention with the expectation that you will be asked to solve a problem with the very next question.

Conversations sometimes derail over words that we think about differently. When that happens how do you get people to stop listening to words and start hearing ideas?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Connecting with New People

by

People talking
People talking

Here are some simple to follow steps toward developing your people skills and enhancing your network:

1. Be nice, and everything else will fall into place.

Our friend and mentor Liz Strauss has a motto for SOBCon, “Be nice.” How hard is that? How many people do it? Being nice creates likability and trust. People do business with other people that they like and people they trust. Ask yourself “How friendly are you?”

2. Project yourself in a way that creates a positive attitude in others.

Your handshake is an indicator of your self-image. So is your wardrobe. Everything from your hair to your shoes is an expression of who you are and what your style may be, or not be. Is your image acceptable to those you seek to connect with? Do you make them feel comfortable in your presence. Reach out with your personality in a positive way and help the people that you meet be positive too.

3. Make eye contact.

Making eye contact is a display of confidence and a display of respect for the other person. Do you find it easy to make eye contact? Do you feel suspicious when others do not make eye contact with you?

What are some other things that you can do to meet new people and grow your network?

The Building Blocks of Successful Interaction

by

I just wanted to share this with you:

Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware, writing at The Future of Work, share some thought on the building blocks of interpersonal interaction:

In our experience effective communication is made up of three basic qualities: trust, connectedness; and relatedness.

Trust is the most basic quality.

Trust is an emotional thing. It comes when we share values with others and we can therefore expect them to behave in predictable ways. We trust people when we believe they will act in our best interests even though we aren’t there. And without trust true interaction and communication just isn’t possible. Trusting relationships are not based on power, or on status or one-up-manship.

Connectedness and Relatedness

Connectedness is a necessary but not sufficient condition of interaction. Simply put, it means there is a common basis for communication. Both parties are concerned about, interested in, or attracted to a similar issue, which then provides a basis for communicating. However, they must also relate to that issue. That is, they share a common belief, or a value around that issue. Note the difference. Take politics for example (or not take it, whatever). You can be connected with someone because you are both interested in the outcome of an election—but at the same time not be emotionally related (or even opposed to each other) because you have different philosophical positions. You can take that to the bank. If you are connected with someone, but not related, your communication isn’t going to go very far! Test that perspective with Uncle Barney.