With a fast-approaching deadline, your client hasn’t responded to multiple emails about a project. What’s the holdup? Everyone’s favorite, fun-loving managing director is wildly popular. He seems to know how to motive his staff, so why is the turnover rate in his division the highest in the company? Your sales team just scored a big win for the company. Already battling downtime issues, your plants are not prepared to meet the new client’s deadline requirements promised by the sales team. Sound familiar?
In most cases, workforce conflicts like these are the result of a simple miscommunication or disconnect and could be the underlying reason your company is not reaching its goals. While effective communications is not a new concept, learning how to identify and relate to different communication styles is more important than ever before. It’s a winning business strategy in preventing conflicts, keeping employees productive, making smart hires, and protecting your bottom line.
According to the Harvard Business Review, when global CEOs were surveyed about their biggest challenges, strategy execution topped the list ahead of concerns about top-line growth, innovation and geopolitical instability. In addition, studies have found that the main reason organizations struggle is because leadership focuses on the wrong issues. The most common? Believing that communicating a message will result in understanding that message.
The more you talk about your company’s strategy, the more everyone will fully understand it, right?
Not exactly. For example, just half of the C-suite executives surveyed said they had a good understanding of their company’s strategic priorities. But down the command chain, when messages reached managers, team leaders and frontline supervisors, only 16 percent had a solid grasp of their company’s priorities.
The good news? There’s a solution.
In today’s workplace, communications is a 360-approach and training your staff, at all levels, can greatly transform outcomes. HR assessment tools, like D.A.R.E, SENTIO, Birkman, DISC, and Omnia, are just a few resources available to help companies decode the communications styles influencing work-place behavior.
Generally, people fall into one of four widely-accepted communication styles.
The value of understanding how to communicate with each different style is not only effective in relating to your employees, but also with clients, prospects and vendors – all relationships where business and revenue are at stake.
The decision-rights have now changed. The new marketing director is data-driven and more focused on your product’s performance attributes and cost-saving benefits than your company’s stellar brand reputation.
Can the relationship be saved? Absolutely. By recognizing the behavior queues of this analytical style, your team was able to win-over the new marketing director by delivering an action plan detailing responsibilities, production deadlines and fee schedules. Effective communications saved the business.
While miscommunication, workforce conflicts, bad hires, and difficult relationships are often unavoidable, equipping your workforce with techniques to build effective relationships is an investment with long-lasting benefits.
Here are a few:
Need help with identifying the different communication styles of your workforce? A corporate coach or HR professional can help your business make the most of your current workforce, as well as provide the guidance to attract new hires and strategically assemble your teams. Learn how to establish trust, negotiate without alienation, and successfully build strong relationships.
From selecting the right assessment tool for your company to management and employee development and training, our experienced professionals can help strengthen your workforce and propel your business forward.