FIONA COHN MAXIMISE YOUR IMPORTANT BUSINESS CONVERSATIONS ACHIEVE A POSITIVE AND PRODUCTIVE RESULT IN ANY CONVERSATION Download free eBooks at bookboon.com Maximise your important business conversations: Achieve a positive and productive result in any conversation 1st edition © 2016 Fiona Cohn & bookboon.com ISBN 978-87-403-1556-1 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com MAXIMISE YOUR IMPORTANT BUSINESS CONVERSATIONS CONTENTS CONTENTS About the Author Section 11 It’s more complicated than you think – common myths 12 1.1 Giving information is communicating 12 1.2 Communication is two way 12 1.3 What you say is the most important element of communication 13 1.4 It’s obvious what you mean when you communicate 14 1.5 Communicating effectively takes too long 15 1.6 You don’t need to plan your communication 15 1.7 Stories are for children 15 1.8 Big words make you look clever 16 The key components and basic principles of communication 17 2.1 Verbal and Non Verbal Communication 17 2.2 Choose your Channels wisely 25 2.3 Speaking and Listening 27 www.sylvania.com We not reinvent the wheel we reinvent light Fascinating lighting offers an ininite spectrum of possibilities: Innovative technologies and new markets provide both opportunities and challenges An environment in which your expertise is in high demand Enjoy the supportive working atmosphere within our global group and beneit from international career paths Implement sustainable ideas in close cooperation with other specialists and contribute to inluencing our future Come and join us in reinventing light every day Light is OSRAM Download free eBooks at bookboon.com Click on the ad to read more MAXIMISE YOUR IMPORTANT BUSINESS CONVERSATIONS CONTENTS Communication breakdowns 30 3.1 Test understanding 30 3.2 Lack of consistency 31 3.3 When Words and Behaviour don’t match 31 3.4 Having a preconceived idea 32 3.5 Lack of Trust 33 3.6 The consequences of communication break-down 33 Section Putting Communication Theory into Practice 36 Conducting productive appraisals 37 4.1 Frequency 37 4.2 Responsibility 38 4.3 Preparation 38 4.4 How not to it 40 4.5 Intent 41 4.6 Physical surroundings 42 4.7 Focus 42 4.8 What are you noticing? 43 4.9 Questioning 43 Giving and receiving Feedback 45 5.1 Feedback is a gift 45 5.2 Golden Rules of Feedback 49 Making Change Work 55 6.1 Why change fails 55 6.2 The Change Curve 56 6.3 Principles of change communication 56 Delegating to get great results 65 7.1 Delegating versus Dumping/Abdicating 65 7.2 Understanding preferred management style 66 7.3 Basic principles of delegating 67 Section Conclusion 73 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com MAXIMISE YOUR IMPORTANT BUSINESS CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THE AUTHOR ABOUT THE AUTHOR Fiona’s background is in media, marketing communications and management and she brings a wealth of experience gained in a variety of business sectors She has sound commercial acumen and experience of supporting businesses to grow their market share and proits She works with business owners, executives and teams, improving eiciency and productivity and saving them time, and their businesses money…by doing things diferently After a 15-year career in the competitive world of sports broadcasting, marketing, PR and sponsorship, she moved into business development and consultancy, in industries as diverse as insurance, distilling, international courier services and sport Using her marketing skills, she built and enhanced clients’ brands to increase market share She has also managed major accounts in IT and Telecommunications businesses to increase proitability and provide communications expertise A frustration with the way businesses communicated with their staf, led her to specialise in corporate and internal communications She has run successful communication activities for a range of business transformation, consultation, organisational change and employee engagement projects She has experience of embedding change, making it work for staf and the organisation; and coaching and mentoring staf through the process Download free eBooks at bookboon.com MAXIMISE YOUR IMPORTANT BUSINESS CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THE AUTHOR Passionate about efective communication and employee engagement, often overlooked by businesses, but fundamental to business success, she has worked with organisations to improve management/staf relationships through better engagement his has resulted in more commitment and productivity from staf, improved customer service, retention and inancial performance She has also been responsible for ensuring the success of a variety of change initiatives including organisational and people change, IT and systems, business transformation and client transfers She has a natural coaching style, and even before qualifying as a coach, she successfully coached and mentored staf in the workplace for many years Her coaching qualiication gave her the conidence to set up her own business with the aim of making workplaces happier, healthier and more productive hat often starts with focussing on leadership behaviours, attitudes and communication practices She works with ambitious business owners and senior staf to help them overcome barriers to growth, helping them develop the mindset, skills and systems essential for high performance She is an engaging trainer who has worked with managers and teams to make them more efective In addition, she has coached small business owners to become more productive, focussed and successful Fiona’s strength is a natural ability to solve business problems Her client led, pragmatic and goal centred approach is designed to achieve improvements in performance Additionally, her clients beneit from increased conidence, more focus and more structured, client focussed ways of working She provides a balanced external perspective and holds her clients to account so that they implement changes and make sustained improvement Fiona enjoys working with businesses on the following activities: Communications and engagement – consultation, employee lifecycle, recruitment and retention, induction, channel creation and management, messaging, event creation and management, feedback, employee investment, performance and productivity measurements Leadership and management development – including diagnostic, communication and presentation skills, performance improvement, training and behavioural change Download free eBooks at bookboon.com MAXIMISE YOUR IMPORTANT BUSINESS CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THE AUTHOR Customer Focus and Marketing – Internal engagement – building the business strong from the core; sales, marketing, account management, client and supplier relationship management Making Change work – overcoming resistance to change, embedding change, maintaining productivity during the change process Strategic Planning – bringing the business plan to life and ensuring staf support business growth and work to further the business objectives Business diagnostics, planning and systemisation – research, analysis and action planning making businesses scalable, monitoring and evaluating “People are the reason why businesses succeed or fail and that means employing the right staf and treating them with the care and respect they deserve Workers are no longer willing to tolerate a ‘command and control’ management style and that means that business owners and leaders will have to become better at leading and inspiring, communicating with their teams and working with them to achieve better results Most business owners I speak to believe that the customer is the most important focus for their business, but they often focus on the customer at the expense of their staf I believe that businesses are built from the inside out and the internal brand and values need to be strong and inform behaviour if the customer is to be served well I’ve been a professional communicator for my whole career and I have seen and experienced the beneits of great communication on business performance Sadly, the instances of poor, inefective and destructive communication practices vastly outweigh the positive experiences I’m on a mission to help the businesses I work with change that.” If you are interested in inding out more about how Fiona can support you or your business, please connect with her: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/ionacohn email her at: excelarate.uk@gmail.com Call her on: +44 (0) 7971 103232 Download free eBooks at bookboon.com MAXIMISE YOUR IMPORTANT BUSINESS CONVERSATIONS At work – and everywhere else for that matter, inefective conversations lead to misunderstanding and conlict In business, not only is this frustrating for business owners, managers and staf, but it costs everyone time (something we all complain we don’t have enough of ) and it costs the business money It is possibly the single greatest barrier to achieving business objectives and business success George Bernard Shaw summed it up perfectly: “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place” Can you remember the last time you delegated a piece of work or asked someone to something for you – and what you got back just wasn’t what you expected? How frustrated were you? And what about the other person? Was there a bit of ‘strained relations syndrome’ going on as a result? his happens at work every day of the week and all because people don’t know some of the basic rules about efective communication We think that because we were born with mouths and ears that we use every day, and we often get away with it, that we can communicate But in my decades as a communication professional I have seen otherwise his book sets out to help you understand the basic principles of efective communication and show you how to put them into practice And unlike most books covering this topic that are aimed at managers, I’ll be looking at conversations from a variety of perspectives so it will be as relevant for you if you are the most junior person on the team or the business owner hat’s because it’s all about perspective…not yours but the person you are communicating with he book will focus on four of the most critical business communication conversations that regularly take place at work and have the greatest inluence on staf productivity and business performance hese are: Delegating to others Giving and receiving feedback Appraisals Managing change Download free eBooks at bookboon.com MAXIMISE YOUR IMPORTANT BUSINESS CONVERSATIONS his book will give you strategies and tools so you’ll know exactly how to have these conversations to get the positive and productive result you want You’ll help others get it right irst time, most of the time, get rid of employee apathy and make the place you work better at making change work Much of what is in this book will seem like common sense Sadly, it is not common practice in business In my work I’m constantly amazed by how uncommon, common sense is Communication is how we business – we get it wrong at our peril Download free eBooks at bookboon.com 10 ...FIONA COHN MAXIMISE YOUR IMPORTANT BUSINESS CONVERSATIONS ACHIEVE A POSITIVE AND PRODUCTIVE RESULT IN ANY CONVERSATION Download free eBooks at bookboon.com Maximise your important business conversations: ... bookboon.com MAXIMISE YOUR IMPORTANT BUSINESS CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THE AUTHOR Passionate about efective communication and employee engagement, often overlooked by businesses, but fundamental to business. .. Download free eBooks at bookboon.com MAXIMISE YOUR IMPORTANT BUSINESS CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THE AUTHOR Customer Focus and Marketing – Internal engagement – building the business strong from the core;