How’s Your Dialogue? June 21, 2007
Posted by Steve in : Methods & Strategies, Leader Zone , add a comment“When it comes to improving performance, most organizations’ problems can be traced to their inability to think and talk together at critical moments.”– Paraphrased from William Isaacs’s book Dialogue, p.3
How do you talk to your staff? How do you conduct a meeting? Do you generally have good dialogue with your staff, first talking, then listening and then responding appropriately? Doug Sundheim of Fast Company tells us that “What passes as “communication” in most organizations is nothing more than people talking AT each other. Firing different opinions around a room with little structure to productively move any action forward. The dialogue is dysfunctional - meaning that it doesn’t produce a deeper understanding of the issues at hand. Eventually, when a decision must be made, it’s often the person who has spoken the loudest, longest, or with the most conviction that wins - whether it was the best idea or not.”
Good dialogue can be boiled down to 5 key elements - Listening, Respecting, Suspending, Voicing, and Inquiring. When dialogue breaks down, it’s usually because one or more of these are missing between the players involved.
Think of an unproductive conversation you’ve recently had. Consider the following questions to see where you might have been contributing to the problem.
1. Listening - Did I truly hear what the other person(s) said?
2. Respecting - Did I respect their opinions - even if I didn’t agree with them?
3. Suspending - Did I suspend my own opinions long enough to create an opening for new perspectives?
4. Voicing - Did I say what I truly thought and felt in a responsible way?
5. Inquiring - Did I probe for clarification when things weren’t clear?
6. When you find that one or more of these are missing, experiment with ways to bring them into the conversation.
Bears Win! $810 Million Productivity Loss… January 22, 2007
Posted by Steve in : Chicago, The Cultural Conversation , add a commentWow! The Bears win and we are off to the Super Bowl after a 21-year drought! Good news for all Bear fans but bad news for employers, or so says a human reource consulting firm. According to consulting firm Challenger Gray & Christmas Inc., football fans pondering the matchup between the Chicago Bears and Indianapolis Colts, or planning Super Bowl XLI parties, or deciding their picks in the office pool, may reduce productivity by $16 million per minute! (that a lot of Tostito’s and dip!).
Chicago could be hit especially hard, the report said. The Super Bowl will be played in Miami on Sunday evening, Feb. 4 and Challenger estimated that 90 million people will tune in to the game. Using figures about the national employment rate and average pay, the analysts calculated that employers around the nation will pay football fans $162 million for every 10 unproductive minutes they spend discussing the game or reading about it online. Multiplied by the five work days between next Monday and the game, that amounts to $810 million — $73 million paid to 3.9 million people in the Windy City alone. And that’s not taking the current week into account.
However, this productivity loss is less than the 16 day run of the NCAA “March Madness” basketball tournament, which annually costs the nation’s employers about $3.8 billion, while they were focused on last year’s tournament instead of their jobs. Read the article here.
