~~The Introduction: An Introduction to Introductions, or Dave Arch, the Trainer of Trainers~~
In the Sandler circles Dave Arch is a legend. He is a master of engaging people in training and he runs courses to better training. He’s the author of the book, “Transforming Leaders the Sandler Way” and offers us his incredible insight on leadership. Dave’s format of writing is a topical explosion of specific areas that we may either overuse or have strengths. Then he helps us focus on areas that we might need to develop.
Dave likes books that are in short bursts as chapters and don’t function as sequentially dominated lectures. Instead, his book exists of short articles that you can bounce around through using the table of content as an index to engage with the areas that you are interested in applying to your leadership.
Leaders can deliver their messages from three ego states. When anyone goes parental on you, you know there is a parental ego state. There is a critical parent which is judgmental and a nurturing parent which is empathetic. You have a child, a component that doesn’t get more emotionally mature than seven years old. Within that seven year old we have the rebellious child, the person who won’t be told what to do, the complaint child, the person who doesn’t want to displease and shakes their head yes, and we have the creative or natural child, that’s the part of us that plays.
Then there’s the adult. The adult has no emotion. Emotion resides in the parent or the child. The adult is facts in, facts out and speaks with no emotion, does tasks with no emotion, and does things and understands things that the seven year old child inside of you won’t believe or accept. All of these ego state components are ours, but our followers also have ego states and these same ego states can be tripped by the interaction with the ego state that you choose to engage them with.
~~The Conceptual: How Transparency and Vulnerability Enable Strong Leadership, or Wait--You Mean I Don't Just Yell?~~
Dave spends his time doing executive coaching and he sees great leaders as “velvet-covered bricks”. In coaching he facilitates fine tuning the velvet and the brick. Some leaders are too bricky and they’re difficult to get close to. Some are too velvety, you push and sink up to your first knuckle. The key is adjusting this composition so that the leader balances out what is important in leadership. That means that leaders must discover the right ratio of hard-hitting brick to soft, cushy velvet.
In the terms of transactional analysis, it’s the balance between the nurturing parent and the adult. A mixture of facilitating discovery and putting out hard truths that allow for individuals to face the facts of their reality. For Dave, he encourages people to face themselves in a mirror and repeatedly send the message: “that could be a problem.” When you are able to speak with no emotion then you are able to help facilitate discovery on what changes need to take place.
Jim is a natural brick who gives opinions rather than asking for them. He efficiently tells people what to do but this proves ineffective because people leave and don’t do what he’s said, or do it under protest. Dave sees this as learning to substitute the critical parent for a nurturing parent. The critical parent provokes the rebellious child or the compliant child. By approaching constituents from the critical parent you trip the ego states from the other person. If, instead of the critical parent, you give the same message from the adult, conveyed with no emotion, then we can communicate the point of the discussion without tripping the ego states of the constituents that lead to defense.
Instead of telling someone when they have a problem and they need to fix it, forcing people into a defensive position, we facilitate discovery and help people find buy-in to the change that must take place to solve the problem. The brick needs to have a clear understanding of our expectations and the velvet needs to deliver those expectations in a non-threatening way that allows self-cognitive change to occur without becoming the persecutor. A great leader has made a distinction between their standards and their expectations. Standards come from an external source; here are the standards I have for this job. But, the expectations come from the individual and these expectations must adjust to the individual, but standards seldom deviate from the required competencies for success.
So what room does this leave for a passionate or dramatic person who is in a leadership role? To throttle this back we need to stick it in our upfront contract. We’re going to have a conversation and sometimes I get too emotional, too passionate, too wound-up, but please understand I’m trying to be as non-emotional as possible and I want to just put the facts on the table. Dave has given a sign to his wife and she turns a knob clockwise. If they’re out in public and Dave is ramped up and talking loudly and his wife turns a knob which is a silent signal to him to tone it down. Dave gives individuals he works with the sign in order for them to be able to communicate with him that he needs to roll it down to a more measurable approach because its his ultimate goal, he’s simply not practiced enough at it.
On any given day we may have trouble finding our nurturing parent. We want to have that velvet, but it may not be there. If its not there then we need to create a word track that kicks it into gear. Specific statements like, “Help me understand …” or “would you tell me more …” These words trigger an emotion that follows such as the empathy required to express from our nurturing parent.
We should always work for a 70/30 split. 70% of our communication should come from the nurturing parent and 30% should come from the adult. When we need to draw upon a hard truth or say something that is temptingly critical we need to shift away from the critical into the adult that speaks with facts and does not come straight from an emotionally triggered perspective.
To help someone get to the point of change we need to use bonding and rapport. When the Sandler system was originally introduced the bonding and rapport was the water in which the submarine floated. If I have a trusted advisor relationship with the person I’m coaching then they’ll be honest, open, and transparent as opposed to similar to pulling teeth. Like selling, the pain and the felt need, comes from the child and we need the child to feel safe enough to tell us what the felt needs are. We use assessments that point out real needs, but it doesn’t mean that the real needs we can see are the felt needs that an individual feels.
Where do you sense you have a need? What do you want to work on? We are susceptible spending way too much time planning and thinking how people should change, but we need to listen to what people want to change and what they have pain around. The importance of felt needs revolve around the importance of listening. We must become listeners who dissect communication in a productive way.
To be a good listener we cannot feel the pressure to respond in the moment. We should open first meetings with, “I really want to make sure I understand your business, your issues, and your concerns.” I’m going to write them down because I may have nothing to say to them, I’m going to write them down and take them away so I can think through them thoroughly. By setting ourselves up to listen we can bypass the pressure of quick response, we’ll be able to listen clearly and well and won’t trap ourselves in the position to immediately respond when a client voices a frustration, concern, or fear.
We need to spend time to create the perception of thorough thought. We also need to repeat back to them at regular intervals what we are hearing, this means focus on your ability to paraphrase and summarize in order to articulate and give the other person the opportunity to clarify. “Before you go on, let me make sure this is what you’re saying up until now …” By breaking it into these pieces we give proof that we’re listening, but we also challenge ourselves and keep ourselves engaged.
Some people are great listeners but you would never know it because they’re not active. A passive listener may be hearing, but since they don’t engage the person speaking won’t be able to tell. To be an active listener we need to think of the three components of communication. In body language we’re shaking our head, we’re nodding, we’re leaning forward, we’re not glancing at our phone or watch. In words and tone of voice we’re regularly inserting, summarizing, and paraphrasing what they’ve said so they continue to be convinced that they’re being heard. By doing this in active listening we’re ensuring that we’re being heard.
~~The Technical: The Velvet-Covered Brick, or Guidance with A Firm Voice, What’s that Sound Like?~~
When it comes to criticizing people we might be inclined to say, “Don’t you ever be late again,” but using a soft question that cuts to the core without judgment allows us to engage it in a healthy manner. “Is that working for you?” “Is being late working for you?” These approaches to reprimand are much healthier than straight judgment from our critical parent. Nothing is nurturing to out someone in front of a group, but neither will it do to allow people to treat us the way. We allow people to treat us the way they do and we train them, so if you’re concerned with how someone is treating you, it may be importance to consider what you have done that allows them to think of you in that sort of manner which justifies the way they treat you.
“Uhh Dave, you wanted to seem?”
“I do, I do. I have noticed from the past few meetings that you’ve been running five to ten minutes late to each meeting. Is that pattern working for you? Help me understand more of what’s going on that’s causing that behavior to occur. What is going on?”
“Well you know how busy I am, I mean I’ve got five projects that are deadline driven and sometimes they take a higher priority. I just needed to wrap things up.”
“Tell me more.”
“Well specifically I was working XYZ project and I was finishing an e-mail to get everyone together and pick a time that would work for everyone and in my mind that’s a priority.”
“…Let me be sure I heard what you said. So the priority for you are the tasks that you’re being given from other folks and you’ve made a judgment call over, and I have three meetings you’ve been late to, and you’ve made a judgment call that what you had to do back at your desk was more important than the meetings I’ve called. Am I understanding you correctly?”
“Well, yeah, I guess if you wanted to look at it that way.”
“I’m sorry, how are you looking at it?”
“Well I don’t mean to imply that your meaning isn’t important…but yes I did make the judgment call that this was more important.”
“Is there something I can do? If I made my meetings ten minutes later so instead of the top of the hour at 10 it was 10:10, would that take care of it for you?”
“Well, as you pointed out I’m consistently late so I would likely still be late.”
“How can I help?”
“Well I don’t think its your issue, I think its my issue.”
“How so?”
“Well, I guess maybe its time management.”
“Well, I want to be able to adjust my expectations. I can make the meeting 10:10 if that would help next Tuesday. Where should my expectations be next Tuesday?”
“I will do my best to be there on time.”
“If I set it at 10:10 would you be able to say you would be there on time?”
“I don’t think it’s a time difference. I think its me.”
“Well my expectations will be that at 10 next Tuesday, you’ll be there. Is that fair?”
“yeah that’s fair.”
“Okay that’s what we’ll do and make any adjustments necessary so that you can consistently be on time every Tuesday when we have these meetings.”
This may air on the side of softness but the point was still made. There’s no line in the stand that hangs as a threat. This is a first encounter with an issue that can be ratcheted up. We need to bring the brick out through time. We must start with nurturing to assume responsibility, fall on the sword, and offer some benign solutions.
The follow-up conversation takes place—this time the person is five minutes late:
“Dave, you wanted to see me, I’m guessing this is about me being late Tuesday to our meeting.”
“It is, it is about you being late. You being late is no longer acceptable.”
“Okay.”
“Is there a way that we can come to an agreement that that behavior on your part is going to stop?”
“Well I really did try, I almost made it.”
“It was better. But, put yourself in the perspective of the people that were there on time. When you walk in late and they all worked to be there on time, how do you believe they view you and your brand when they’re there waiting and you come in late? What kind of messages do you believe go off in their head? I’m trying to help you because I don’t believe being late to these meetings is helping your brand in the company at all.”
“Well I believe you. I can see people physically rolling their eyes, so I’m sure there’s some level of distrust and disgust at my cavalier attitude toward the time and frankly, as you mention it, I’m wasting their time as well.”
“Well, I believe I watch them and some of the messages that are going on, that I’ve heard, is your time is more important than their time. They’re on time and you’re not and so your time must be more important and that undermines the team. That behavior needs to change.”
“Okay.”
“Can we agree?”
“I agree it needs to change.”
“Alright, so you know these are weekly meetings—ten o’clock on Tuesdays, so ten o’clock or even a little early would be great. You got a little make-up to do with the group. Come a little early and show them that you don’t believe your time is more important than their time.”
This adult approach of lets deal with the facts and low or no emotion is the healthy approach. But, how far should we take this or allow this? Some people can get to the point where they believe the conversation over this issue is a waste of time. There needs to be consequences at some point. The next step is write them up. Most companies have a series of steps—a warning, a write-up, and we continue on and go from here if someone’s behavior does not change. But, there’s no reason to be emotional. We need to speak unemotionally, otherwise we get to the point where we become the persecutor and give people a beating when it never helps us get to the place where we want to lead our constituents.
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