Looking at ways to improve your communication is very valuable and something everyone can afford to do.  My last article I discussed how to improve your communication skills by listening better , and now I’ll explore how to use regular questions to better communicate with others.

Stay Engaged

Asking questions is a simple way to stay engaged when communicating with someone.  It shows interest and encourages the other person to keep communicating.  If you don’t show any interest in continuing a conversation, it often ends without making any ground.  Asking questions helps you to keep that person going into more detail or to branch the discussion into related areas.  Its important to keep the questions on topic and don’t use them to steer the conversation in your own way.

Always ask Ask open ended questions to keep the conversation moving forward. These are questions that require some explanation to answer, such as "Why do you think that is important?"  Closed questions tend to end topics quickly since it gives little to no room for a party to elaborate on their response, they are simply yes/no type of questions.  Keeping yourself and the other party engaged is an important way to have better communication, and asking questions is a powerful tool to ensure that happens.

Ensure Understanding

Communication is not just someone telling things to someone else.  It is about how that communication is received and understood.  You can use questions to ensure that you understand as well that the other person understands what you have to say.  Questions can help you to clarify the content of communication and they provide a tool that you can use to ensure there is understanding from the other party as well.  Ask someone to elaborate on a statement, or ask about what they think of something or perhaps even ask if they can explain what they think you are saying (or vise versa), these are all great ways to ensure that there is complete understanding.  Mind you, you still have to learn to ask the right questions and to ask at the appropriate time in a conversation but these comes with practice and even a beginner with this will gain from it in communicating better.

Keep an Open Mind

Questions help communication because they keep you open minded since you use them to learn more about others’ ideas and comments, instead of presenting your own in place of them.  Using questions is very effective even if you don’t agree with that person so that you are looking to see things from their perspective and consider more than your initial reaction.  When you are asking questions, you come across that you are interested in learning about the other person and not just yourself.  Its an easy way to hold back your own advise and comments in a conversation if you first look at asking more questions with an open mind about what is really being communicated.

Lead The Other Person

While its important to keep an open mind, there are times when you want to really get your own point or argument across in a conversation.  This can be done as well with questioning.  If you use your questions with a word or focus on a particular outcome, you can often lead the other party your way with them still feeling like it was their decision to do so.  This is obviously a powerful communication tool for a leader as there are times you already have a certain direction you would like a conversation to go, but don’t want to tell or force the other person to go your way.  If you use questions that lead them to what you want, you can communicate your direction and keep the other person highly engaged and interested.  Sometimes a simple phrased question like, "Are you planning on writing a brief report then on that issue and getting everyone involved?" is a lot more powerful than, "What are you going to do next?".

So, you obviously have to balance this with keeping an open mind and using open ended questions when appropriate but you can definitely control how your questions impact a conversation just by the way you ask them.

Reflect

A final area I find critical in regards to questions in communication is actually reflecting on the questions from others.  You should never interrupt or even respond too quickly to a question.  Take an extra moment and reflect on that question.  What are they really asking?  Why are they asking it?  What are they likely wanting from you in response?  All these can be part of a momentary reflection in your mind before actually responding.  Take a minute, show some facial expression to indicate that you are thinking on their question and then respond after reflecting on it.  This helps to build rapport with others as they take you seriously and know then that you do in fact care about your response and that you put at least a moment of thought into it, and not just a reactive or instinctive answer.  Watch for others reflecting on your questions and see what impact that has on you?  You can do the same with your responses, it just takes a bit of reflection time.

What other communication techniques do questions give you?

Posted by Mike King under Life | 2 Comments »

This article is the first in a series of 4 on communication.  The articles in this series are:

• Better Communication: Listening for Improvement
• Better Communication: Writing with Impact
• Better Communication: Using Questions Regularly
• Better Communication: Control Your Speaking

There are so many different aspects of communication, I couldn’t hope to cover them in a single article so I’m going to look at a few specific areas of communication in how it affects our lives and our ability to learn and improve.  This first one I was inspired by Jennifer at Principles for Peace with her article on listening.  I definitely agree with many of her points and I like the background she gives about why so many struggle with listening.  I have my own recommendations (definitely some similarities here) that I wanted to write for this first article on communication.

Patient Listening is Humble Listening

I’ve written a series about learning to be more humble and being humble definitely helps with listening also.  It is important to ignore yourself, forget about what you have to say and start paying attention to the other person.  Give them time to speak and don’t interrupt by adding your opinion unless your asked to.  Be patient with your responses by purposefully waiting after each of their sentences or comments before you respond.  Count to 5 slowly in your mind before you speak to ensure the other person has said everything they wanted to say.  Often, they just need a second or two to organize their thoughts and have more to say.  If you interrupt them and scar them with your own opinion, you really are not listening.  Be patient, and give them time to share everything they want to share.

Use Your Imagination and Curiosity

I like to focus my articles and activities on what can be learned.  Listening is no exception and good listening is practiced by showing interest and having some real curiosity about the person and what they are sharing.  Put yourself into their shoes and imagine what they are feeling and thinking from the words and body language they are sharing.  Think of how you are seen in response to that and use your imagination and curiosity to think on the subject with them.

Reflect and Paraphrase

Having those inquisitive thoughts will lead you to questions.  Be careful not to jump the gun and ask those questions immediately.  The first questions that usually come to mind are simple ones and they often only require yes or no answers.  Avoid asking these types of questions.  Take a moment and reflect on what has been shared and think of questions that require more elaboration on.  Asking how and why questions that require more explanation.  These will ensure you get more valuable information and will show you have more interest as you dig deeper into the conversation.

Use paraphrasing to repeat the speaker but in your own words and paraphrase what they have said with what you interpret that to mean by asking about what they means or how it makes them feel or what you thought they were saying.  This will ensure you are interpreting their message accurately and gives the speaker a chance to correct or elaborate on anything misunderstood.

Listen Entirely

Studies show that there is a lot of non-verbal communication from person to person and its estimated that of all communication, up to 75% is non-verbal.  This means that there is a lot more to listening then the words themselves.  There are many other things to other than just their words:

• tone of voice
• speed
• body posture
• eye movement
• facial expressions
• hand and body gestures

All these other components require that you pay full attention and listen entirely, not just with your ears to hear what they are saying, but with everything to fully understand all the signals in the communication.  To do this, you need to put your eyes on the other person, but also open your own body up to them by facing them.  You should always turn your shoulders to the person that is talking and have an open body posture towards them.  Don’t fold your legs or cross your arms or even lean back in your chair.  These are all signs of disengaging or disagreement. Face them directly, learn towards them and make eye contact.  Give them your full undivided attention.

Now, when it comes to attention, its important to remove any or at least ignore any distractions when listening as well.  If you are really going to listen, you should step away from what you are doing to pay full attention.  In the workplace this means turning your chair away from your desk or computer to face the person.  If you have a desk that you sit behind, pull your chair to the side and come around your desk.  You don’t want to have any barriers or large space between you.  If your phone rings, someone else approaches, or any other distraction is nearby, simply ignore it.  Keep your attention on the person speaking.  Ignoring a phone call or another person for moment (even if its your boss) is a powerful message that you are truly focused on listening to that person and goes a long way in credibility by building trust.

Posted by Mike King under Life | 4 Comments »

One of the simplest things I’ve learned about improving your relationships is an important habit to develop.  Its simple, but not that easy to put into practice without paying attention to it, which is the point of this article. Its so simple its often overlooked when people teach about communications and relationships.  The idea is to never talk negatively about anyone.  What I mean by this is to avoid all the typical team / relationship killers that go on in normal office politics such as:

• Talking about someone’s performance with anyone other than them
• Rumors and gossip in the workplace or friendship circles
• Telling others what someone else did without a reason or something to be learned
• Using others’ negative behaviors as an example without their permission

These are just a few examples of how simple communication might be unintentionally harmful but end up being very harmful indeed.  Even the most innocent discussions about someone else can easily get retold and end up in the ears of the actor in the story which can easily be taken the wrong way.  Things get misinterpreted and told differently each time its communicated.  The best way to avoid this is just to never talk negatively about anyone.  Keep in mind that anything you say could get back to that person and so if you’re not willing to say it to them directly, then you shouldn’t say it in the first place.  If you do have something to say, why not tell them directly and deal with the issue, instead of complaining to others about them and making the situation worse.

This works not only for negative things you have to say, but also for positive.  Its not much point in telling someone else about the things a person does well or poorly, you might as well tell them directly.  If you do have feedback for someone, then base it on what they’ve done and don’t make it negative about the person themselves.  I learned this topic primarily from the book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People ” which I definitely recommend if you haven’t read it.  It covers so many critical life topics on relationships you’re missing out if you haven’t learned the teachings from it.

What is an important rule you follow for building relationships?

Posted by Mike King under Relationships | 3 Comments »

I’ve been thinking a lot more about the topic of employee engagement. David Zinger sparked the label in my mind some time ago when he started up the employee engagement network along with his active discussions and wise words on the subject. There is a huge level of job dissatisfaction in today’s workplace and there is an equal level of disengagement from workers. Perhaps they go hand and hand? I think so.

There are a number of things that can help to get people more engaged with others and I wanted to outline some of the ones I’ve learned from my experience and what I’ve encountered reading and discussing the topic with others.

Human Diversity

There needs to be some diversity to bring about a healthy level of differences. These are everything from cultural and societal to personality and motivation. Having diversity with people will bring out questions, differing opinions, curiosity, conflict, and perhaps even personality clashes. All of these are useful at a reasonable level to promote engagement. If everyone was the same, there would be little reason to even discuss anything and so communication wouldn’t be all that important and that can’t be true since its my next item on my list.

Open Communication

Communication that is open is really about an environment or attitude about the communication that is comfortable in an organization. It should be welcoming to new ideas, disagreements and opinions while being presented with sincerity, respect and an intent of trust. If these things are not there with communication, then the employee engagement suffers as that is when communication will begin to break things down. An appropriate style and expectation for communication needs to be presented and more importantly, demonstrated by the leaders in an organization.

There are many ways to bring about more communication and they all work in different situations and with different people.  They might include any forms such as common chit-chat, sharing of stories and experiences, discussing lessons learned, collaborative tools to allow individual content, a feedback system with regular reviews, suggestion boxes (NOT anonymous), and a willingness of any leader to accept feedback from others including their directs without judging it or holding it against that person.  There is much in the topic of communication that they deserve several other articles just on there own, so I’ll leave it at this for now, but I think that open communication really has the largest impact on employee engagement and they really go hand in hand in a lot of ways.

Common Goals / Visions

When people have a common goal or vision to work together on, its easier to dismiss personal differences and specific likes and dislikes between individuals. A common goal is the easiest way to have an immediate purpose together, even with someone you don’t know and it leads to a working relationship that opens new lines for building deeper relationships. The extreme of this is when enemies can even unite to work to one goal. Enemies will quickly realize that if they are after the same thing, its more effective to work together and set aside their differences to reach the common goal.

In order to make progress towards a common goal, those involved have expectations of each other and will begin to communicate these things, whether it is encouraged or not. Getting a group of people to a common goal or vision is a whole other article (or ten perhaps) but once its truly in place, people will help each other and engage with one another to meet that goal at a higher level than if there was no common goal. Individuals will begin to look from themselves and from others the next level of engagement.

Commitment

That next level where there is an engagement between people is that of commitments.  Commitments are a way to ensure that there is discussion between each other and that true engagement is when people hold each other accountable to any commitments made.  Encourage this heavily, be true to your commitments yourself and work hard to ensure that trust is not broken where commitments may not be met.  You can salvage that trust even when commitments are not met by bringing it up early (before a deadline is past), accepting the consequences of it and by apologizing to those you made the commitment to.  All these reinforce the trust and ensure that you can stay engaged with those individuals.  Ask for help when its needed  and continue to talk about the commitments of others instead of simply ignoring them or letting them get by without a commitment. Doing this at an individual level or as a leader to set an example is a powerful way to get more engaged and engage others in your work.

Training

I’m a huge advocate for internal training in the workplace and I’ve seen how this has a huge impact on employee engagement. Internal training programs should be made as visible and public as possible with ideally, a sizable group of people.  Generally having more people discuss, learn and share ideas on a given topic will generate more discussion and engagement among that group and training is a great avenue to bring this into the workplace.  I’ve found that the best courses and training for engagement ensures that every single person in attendance has to participate and that this is done out loud and with some kind of opinion, answer or comment.  I love content that has self-reflection or questions about oneself that you share in a group.  This helps everyone learn more about each other as well as have discussion on one’s own perspective and opinion on things.

Make it Part of The System

None of these methods work entirely on their own and they are all interdependent at some level. In order to ensure that employee engagement is something that gets attention, is measured and has various methods contributing to it, its important that it is part of a system.  Not many things work on their own in business and its important to look at ways to embed it into the business practices.  I regularly read Mission Minded Management where I love Michelle’s tag line of, " I’m OK.  You’re OK.  Let’s fix the system. "  This is true with employee engagement as well as there are always examples where individuals do things right, but unless its fixed at a larger scale, it doesn’t become cultural or lasting, which I think is crucial for engagement.

Employee engagement takes a lot of effort to build and as outlined here, has a number of methods.  To make them stick, they need to be driven on a continual basis, they should have regular discussion with various groups, they should be presented and taught to new employees, measured and used as an evaluation basis for employees, put into procedures and any relevant policies, shared with investors, clients and other business partners and in general, made to be part of the company’s business system in as many ways as possible.  The more ingrained it is into the system, the more likely employee engagement will expand and retain itself as part of the culture in the workplace.

I’d love to hear your ideas on promoting employee engagement and I hope this gives you some ideas on how to become more engaged yourself as it certainly starts with each individual.

Posted by Mike King under Business | 4 Comments »

Author: Madelyn Burley-Allen

This book has a ton of great content and is a perfect how to guide book if you are willing to practice, change and learn better techniques in listening. The values of listening are explored from many roles, and the tools you acquire from this book help in many separate areas. This includes business relationships, selling to clients, customer feedback, friends and family relations, and in every way, simply understanding better what you hear.

Many tools and techniques are taught which include:

• Focus and eliminating distractions
• Picking up on key elements of what is said (words, expressions, etc)
• Reading body language and controlling your own
• Ask non-threatening questions to elicit useful information
• Ways to get others to listen to you
• Mastering a number of listening tools

Overall, the book is very practical in that it gets right to the point and has guides, exercises and specific things to do to improve your listening and your communication in general with other people. Its straight forward, easy to read and very useful to quickly improve your listening.

Note : I started out listening to this as I do with many books thinking that listening to a book about listening only makes sense. The problem is, the audio version of this book read by the author is probably the worst I have ever heard for an audio book. She mumbles, is incredibly monotonous, pauses at strange times, breathes heavy and flips pages very loud. The book is simply not written in a way that can be listened to easily. There are many tables and comparisons of good and bad approach to listening which doesn’t work well read, it needs to be seen. A professional reader should have recorded these so don’t waste your time on the audio version, its awful. Get it on paper. I’d only give the audio version a 1 out of 5. Its nearly useless.

Posted by Mike King under Book Reviews | 5 Comments »