Category Archives: Communication

Communication, Conversations That Matter, Dialogue, effective communication

Tips for public speaking in another language

Imagine having to do an important presentation. A lot hinges on its success. Get it right and you’ll maintain your grade point average or secure your first overseas job. Get it wrong and all the money you have invested in studying overseas could be wasted.

Gary RyanAs part of a leadership development program at the Monash Business School that I have been facilitating for over 8 years, I teach public speaking.

The majority of the attendees are international students. In the pre-workshop survey that I conduct, the responses to the question, “What are you greatest concerns regarding public speaking?” are generally along the lines of, “English is not my first language and I am worried that I will use the wrong words when I speak. This causes me to worry a lot about public speaking.”

To alleviate their concerns about this issue, I explain the following key points to them.

1. Your audience wants you to be successful

When you are an audience member, what are you hoping the speaker will do?

The majority of people I have asked this question respond by saying that they hope the speaker is affective in getting their message across.

I then ask, “Are you waiting for the speaker to fail?”

“No, of course not!” is the response I receive.

The first place to start to be an effective public speaker is to realise that the audience does not want you to fail and is not sitting there ready to pounce on every mistake that you make. Instead, they are anticipating that you will get your message across and want you to do well.

2. When English is another language for you, use the words you have

Everyone has an accent, me included. Your accent only becomes noticeable when it is different to the accents of the people with whom you are speaking.

As soon as you start to speak, your audience will recognise your accent and immediately understand that English may not be your first language. Over time your vocabulary will grow, so use the words that you have at your disposal, rather than worrying about the words that you don’t have. Your audience will understand.

3. Test your speech on people for whom English is their first language

A quick way to expand your vocabulary is to test your speech (as part of your preparation) with people for whom English is their first language. Give them the specific instruction that they are to identify when there may be an easier way to say what you are trying to say. You don’t have to use all of their feedback, especially if you don’t understand what they are suggesting you should say. Nevertheless this tip will quickly improve your vocabulary.

4. Include challenging words in your presentation

If there are words that you intend to use in your speech that you recognise may be difficult for the audience to understand due to your accent, include these words in your presentation. Make them nice and big so they are easy to read.

When your audience reads the words and connects them to your accent, it helps them to ‘tune in’ to your accent which in turn helps them to understand you. As an example, last weekend a Thai student spoke about “Mergers and Acquisitions”. When she first spoke without an accompanying presentation, very few audience members understood what she was saying. When she repeated the speech, this time with an accompanying presentation with the words, “Mergers and Acquisitions” prominently displayed, everyone understood what she was saying. They ‘tuned in’ to her accent.

5. Recognise that what you are doing is amazing

There are over 320,000 international students in Australia. This can make it seem as though it isn’t a big achievement to do a presentation in English. The reality is that any presentation that is conducted in another language is an amazing achievement. Be proud of yourself because you really are awesome.

I am constantly in awe of the international students with whom I work. Studying, let alone public speaking in another language is a huge challenge, yet you do it.

Use these five tips to help you to build confidence in your public speaking. See yourself as someone who is constantly learning and improving and be proud of your improvements over time.

Gary Ryan enables talented professionals, their teams and organisations to move Beyond Being Good®

Communication, Conversations That Matter, Dialogue, effective communication

Should you be thanked for just doing your job?

How often do you recognise people for doing their job? Not the over and above work, just the work that they are ‘paid’ to do. You know, the ordinary work that is part of their job.

By ‘recognise’ I mean a simple thank you or a quiet pointing out that you appreciate such and such being done.

Gary RyanMaybe a junior administrator completes photocopying tasks for you. Simply saying, “Thanks for getting that done so quickly, I appreciate it.” can go a long way to helping that person feel valued. When people feel valued they are more likely to keep repeating the (often) simple behaviours that have been recognised.

I’m not talking about going over the top and making a big deal about ordinary tasks. In fact, my experience indicates such behaviour would have a negative effect on your colleague.

Interestingly, I find quietly appreciating people for their efforts works just as well with children and adults outside of the work environment. I have five children of my own (aged from 15 to four) and am also heavily involved in junior sport where parental support is essential for the teams to function properly.

‘Catching‘ children doing the ‘right thing‘ and pointing it out helps them to repeat those good behaviours (although isn’t it interesting how many adults are very good at pointing out the poor behaviours that children do but completely miss pointing out the good behaviours! Then this pattern is repeated at work – only the poor work is noticed!).

Quietly and subtly thanking parents for their support also re-enforces the supportive behaviours. It doesn’t matter who does more or less in terms of contribution, what matters is that the jobs get done (and done properly!) and the team co-ordinators aren’t left ‘pulling teeth‘ to get parents to help them.

In simple terms, appropriately acknowledging people for doing the right thing at work, home and in community organisations simply makes life easier and more pleasant too! As Dan Pink says in the RSA Animate video below, treat people like people and organisations can make the world just a little bit better!

What simple, yet effective methods do you have for recognising people for ‘just doing their job‘?

Gary Ryan enables talented professionals, their teams and organisations to move Beyond Being Good®

Communication, Conversations That Matter, Dialogue, effective communication

Do you know how to Dialogue?

In 2011 Michael Porter and Mark Kramer wrote an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) about organisations creating shared value.

Porter and Kramer argued that organisations need to operate from a new paradigm. One where value creation is not just about profit generation but also about how organisations can contribute to solving community and societal problems. Interestingly their article was not solely about corporate social responsibility.

They spoke about a genuine paradigm shift in which profit and social responsibility create equal value and they argued that it is possible to create such an organisation.

Shared value provides value to the organisation achieving its objectives, provides value to the employees of the organisation in helping them to contribute to worthwhile projects and provides value to the broader community in contributing to solving social problems. Importantly, shared valued will enhance your performance and therefore your career.

A challenge you face is that it is highly likely that neither you nor your colleagues know how to have the conversations that will enable the paradigm shift that Porter and Kramer described. This is difficult for professionals to acknowledge because in doing so you will be admitting that, from your perspective, you are not fully competent in your role. After all, aren’t you supposed to have developed your management competencies both from your education and your experience over time?

If you see yourself as a life-long learner you will be okay with identifying skills that require improvement.

Unfortunately you won’t have been exposed to the set of skills required to enable you and your colleagues to engage in dialogue. The short video below explains where dialogue sits within the Conversation Continuum, and the essential skills that underpin its development.

The fastest way that you and your colleagues can develop the conversation skills required to enable a paradigm shift to occur, is to learn dialogue together. A safe environment where both you and your colleagues are willing learners will enable you to quickly master the skills associated with dialogue and create the opportunity for paradigm shifts described by Porter and Kramer to occur.

Gary Ryan enables talented professionals, their teams and organisations to move Beyond Being Good and has been teaching dialogue for more than 15 years.

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Chris Judd’s Success Lessons

Gary RyanRetiring Australian Football League (AFL) legend Chris Judd has shared two key lessons for success in his recent speeches and newspaper article. Both lessons are not your run-of the-mill lessons. They are insightful and more importantly useful. Use them to help you stay on track on your journey toward more success and life balance.

Lesson 1 – None of us are Nostradamus

When quizzed about his decision to play again in the 2015 season, Judd was asked if it was the wrong decision. Here is his response:

Playing on this year had proved to be the wrong decision for the right reasons. By that, I meant that I hadn’t persevered for money, or for personal glory, but to help the club build a culture. I have some good memories from the second half of last season, and had hoped to solidify them. They were good reasons to play on. As it turns out, I was wrong. But none of us are Nostradamus. As long as you go about the process correctly, and your intentions are pure, even if you make a wrong decision, you can sleep at night. That’s how I feel now.

None of us are perfect. Occasionally you will make wrong decisions. As Robert Louis Flood stated, “The future is unknowable“. When your intentions are honourable, and it turns out that you made a wrong decision, so be it. Learn and move on.

Lesson 2 – Enjoy the good moments when they happen

When asked for his advice to current players, Judd replied:

I think one of the main things, if I had my time over again, is just to appreciate the good moments a little bit more. I was always so ambitious and focused on what was coming next that I probably didn’t recognise as much when something special had happened.

Jeffrey Hopkins, in his translation of the Dalai Lama’s ‘How to Practise – The way to a meaningful life‘ shares that too many people cause themselves suffering because they are not present in the moment. Rather, they are stuck in the past or already focused on the future.

You share this challenge. Remembering to live in the moment when you are doing something important is a critical trait to develop.

I recall that a good friend of mine shared some excellent advice with my wife and I prior to our wedding. He said, “I encourage you to take some time out during your celebrations. Just sit by yourselves on four or five occasions and take it all in. Commit the experience to memory. The sights, the sounds, the taste of your food and drink. You won’t regret it.”

We followed his advice and 18 years later we can both remember our wedding as if it were yesterday, as I can the birth of each of my five children and many other important events in my life as a result of practising this technique.

Taking the conscious time to be present in the moment is important for success because it provides you with the experience of success that you strive so hard to achieve. It is worth following Judd’s advice – enjoy the good moments when they happen.

Gary Ryan provided leadership development services to the Richmond Tigers in 2007 and 2009, and sat on the AFL Coaches Association Board of Management from 2009 to 2014.

 

Gary Ryan enables talented professionals, their teams and organisations to move Beyond Being Good®

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Quality Workplace Conversations Matter

Here’s a formula.

High quality conversations lead to high quality decisions, which lead to high quality actions and ultimately, high quality results and performance. The reverse is also true. Low quality conversations eventually lead to low quality results.

Achieving high quality results and performance are worth the effort to learn how to conduct high quality conversations.

Gary RyanThe point of leverage in this model is high quality conversations. But what is a high quality conversation?

Unfortunately you have experienced more than your fair share of low quality conversations. These are ones where you walk out of the meeting and think any one of the thoughts below:

  • “Wow, that was a complete waste of time”
  • “When will people finally start to listen around here?”
  • “Why does everyone have to make my life so difficult? Why won’t they listen to me?”
  • “There’s no point saying what you really think around here because no one is going to listen anyway!”

High quality conversations are more natural than you might think. Peter Senge, author of the Fifth Discipline states,

As far as I know, no indigenous culture has yet to be found that does not have the practice of sitting in a circle and talking.

For the ancient Greeks dia logos was the ‘flow of meaning’. It was the cornerstone of civic practice. The polis was the gathering space for conversation. The purpose for the dia logos was about enabling self-government to occur. This system was the birthplace of the western world.

As time has passed the practice of dia logos has diminished. When you converse in a workplace your purpose is no longer to consider what is best for the whole. Rather, your purpose is to win. You are a master of debate. I win. You lose.

Our modern word for dia logos is dialogue. When we dialogue our purpose is not to win. It is to discover what no individual could discover on their own and it is to discover what is the best solution for the whole, not the part.

Think about the conversations that you have at work, especially the ones where everyone in the room is ‘representing‘ a specific department or unit. What is the intent that each of you bring to those conversations? Is it to do what is best for the whole organisation, or is it to defend, protect and/or promote what is best for your department or unit?

The root cause of the lack of dialogue in organisations is the lack of the practice of dialogue itself. Quite simply, well-educated and/or experienced people don’t know how to dialogue. The reverse is true. They know how to debate. It is little wonder that debate rules, but the overuse of debate lowers the overall quality of your conversations.

Debate is not bad. In fact a form of debate (known as ‘opposing’) is encouraged in the practice of dialogue. The issue with debating is that it is overused. Our conversations are out of balance. We require more use of dialogue to improve the quality of our conversations.

The solution is to learn dialogue together. The beauty of the learning process is that you can practice dialogue, while learning it, on real organisational issues.

In the foreword to William Isaacs’s book, ‘Dialogue and the art of thinking together‘, Peter Senge highlights that,

In almost every setting where practices of dialogue have become embedded and part of everyday routines, the ensuing changes have become irreversible, as near as I can tell.

The projects to which Senge was referring involved practical people such as line managers, executives and staff from mostly Fortune 500 companies. The improvements were clear. Improving the quality of work-place conversations improve performance.

The effort is worth it. Higher quality conversations lead to higher quality decisions which lead to higher quality actions and ultimately higher quality results and performance. Results and performance matter and so does improving the quality of conversations in your organisation.

What actions are you taking to improve the quality of conversations at your work-place?

 

Gary Ryan enables talented professionals, their teams and organisations to move Beyond Being Good®

If you would like to learn more about learning how to Dialogue, contact Gary here.

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Gallup Research: How To Increase Employee Engagement

The most recent Gallup research (conducted in the USA) on manager effectiveness has shown that seven out of ten managers are directly reducing rather than increasing employee motivation and engagement. If you are a manager, then this means that you have a 30 percent chance of being an effective manager, and a 70 percent chance that you are an ineffective one. Which one are you?

Gary RyanThe report highlights that effective, engaging managers result in a, “48% increase in profitability, a 22% increase in productivity, a 30% increase in employee engagement scores, a 17% increase in customer engagement scores and a 19% decrease in turnover.” How do your numbers compare with these?

The evidence is overwhelming. Closing the gap between ineffective and effective management matters!

What is it that effective managers do that makes such a big difference?

Firstly, they are talented. Gallup defines talent as, “… the natural capacity for excellence. People can learn skills, develop knowledge and gain experience, but they can’t acquire talent — its innate. When individuals have the right talent for their role, they’re energized by their work, rarely thinking of it as “work” at all.”

The skills required for effective management and leadership are specific. They include being able to listen, to communicate effectively, to have foresight, to be able to find employee strengths, to be able to paint a picture of success and more. Identifying people with the talent to manage is just as important as identifying people with the right talent for any job.

Next, talent is grown and not promoted. Promoting people into roles beyond their competence is one of the greatest flaws that contribute to the generally poor performance of managers. Just because someone is good at their frontline role doesn’t mean they will make a great manager. Yet that is exactly the practice that exists today. How are people promoted into management roles in your organisation?

Gallup recommends that people be paid for their performance, not their job title. This means that an employee could be paid more than their manager. Place the right talent into the right roles and pay them for their value, not their title. For most companies, this will require a structural change to how they manage their pay scales. Are people paid for the value or their title in your organisation?

Manager’s themselves need to continually improve and to further develop their strengths. Too many managers have limited opportunity to improve their management skills once they become managers, which decreases their own engagement, the ripple effect of which is to further decrease the engagement of their direct reports. Lower engagement leads to lower productivity and lower profits. Clearly this is madness, yet this vicious cycle continues to thrive.

How can these issues be resolved? Fortunately, there is a solution.

Servant Leadership is a management and leadership style that addresses these issues. Cheryl Bachelder, CEO of Popeyes, shares in her book Dare To Serve the power of Servant Leadership and how it has driven the company’s turn-around since 2007 (it’s share price has risen from $12 to over $56 – how happy do you think its shareholders are about this improvement!). A clear and deliberate cultural shift to practice Servant Leadership, including changing systems and processes to make sure they are aligned with the principles and practices of Servant Leadership has driven their performance improvements.

The test for effective Servant Leadership focuses on the growth of the people you are serving.  Gallup’s recent research identifies that growing talent is what matters. Servant Leaders take action to help the people they are serving grow. The results; increased engagement, productivity and profits!

Existing management practices are not working. Companies and organisations need to adopt a completely different approach to how management roles are executed. Servant Leadership is the answer. It results in more engaged employees and customers and increases profitability. Who doesn’t want those outcomes! Make the decision today to change your management practices for the better.

Gary Ryan enables talented professionals, their teams and organisations to move Beyond Being Good

If you would like to learn more about Servant Leadership, contact Gary here.

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This is what we should be doing!

My eldest child Liam is a teenager and loves his Australian Rules Football and his cricket. He is on an Australian Football League (AFL) Pathway program and he played representative cricket last summer. While he loves both sports he has said that his personal goals are to be the best that he can be so that he can (at the very least) enjoy his sport at the local level.

Gary RyanEver since he has been exposed to a higher standard of training it has opened his eyes to how low the standard is at his local team. This isn’t a criticism it is just a fact.

He has come to realise that if he hadn’t been exposed to a higher standard he would have continued to think that his effort at his local team was at a high standard. He wants his local team-mates to raise their standard and is frustrated by the fact that he knows that they think that they are already training with a high level of effort. He doesn’t blame them for thinking that way because he used to think that way too. They simply don’t know anything different.

He has a dilemma. How can he help his team-mates to ‘see‘ the gap that he has seen without looking like a know-it-all!

Unbeknown to me he has executed a plan. You see, as part of his own development he has “run water” for the past two seasons with our local Under 19 team who play in the Victorian Amateur Football Association (VAFA). His perspective is that by being involved with the older boys he is continuing to be exposed to a higher standard of effort. His plan has been to continue to invite his team-mates to come and help him run water with the intention being that by doing so they will be exposed to the higher standard of effort and have the opportunity to see first-hand the gap with his underage team.

Last weekend, for the very first time, one of his team-mates took up the offer. At the end of the warm up his team-mate came over to Liam and said, “Wow, did you see the standard of their warm-up? This is what we should be doing too!”

Bam! Liam smiled and agreed.

His plan had worked and it only took exposing his team-mate to the Under 19 team’s warm-up before their game for the gap to be ‘seen’ for the first time.

This example is relevant well beyond junior football. If you have team members who are performing at a low standard, it may be that they have never seen what a high standard actually looks like. Finding ways to expose them to that higher standard is a leadership challenge. It can be a slow journey, but one by one you can change a standard and a culture by exposing people to a higher standard, having them ‘see‘ the gap and then challenging and coaching them to ‘bring‘ that standard to their normal work.

Gary Ryan enables talented professionals, their teams and organisations to move Beyond Being Good

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What every employee needs to know (but most don’t!)

If you wish to be successful in your role there are two critical questions that you need answered:

  1. What is my role?
  2. How do I know that I am doing a good job?

Gary RyanKnowing the answer to the first question is not enough. You also need to know the answer to the second question. The performance of your role may be measured in many ways and if you aren’t addressing the measures that matter to your employer, you will be judged as a non-performer.

The reverse is also true. If you are a manager one of your roles is to make sure that your team members are clear about their role and are clear about how they will be judged for doing a good job. If your team members aren’t clear about the answers to both of these questions, chances are they will be doing unproductive work. And that reflects poorly on you.

How well do you understand your role and are you clear about what you need to do to be sure that you are doing a good job? If you are not clear about the answers to these questions go and find the answers now. Success in your role depends on it.

Gary Ryan helps talented professionals, their teams and organisations to move Beyond Being Good.

 

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Dan Price Gets It. Do You?

Dan Price, the Founder of Gravity Payments, gets it. Dee Hock, the founder of VISA International got it. Do you?

“Gets what?” you ask.

Gary RyanWhen Dee Hock founded VISA International in the early 1970s he created a rule that his pay could be no more than ten times the lowest paid employee in the company. “How could I possibly provide more than ten times the value of any other employee in the company?” was his perspective. This rule remained in place until Hock retired from VISA International in 1985.

Dan Price has just reduced his $1M salary so that he could provide a pay rise to his staff to ensure that the lowest paid staff members at Gravity Payments earn at least US$70k per annum. Why this number? Because it is the number that Price read in an article about happiness that indicated that if people are earning lower than this amount, then any extra money they receive up to US$70k makes a big difference in their lives. So he decided to do something about it. He wants his staff to be happy.

Dee Hock was an explicit practitioner of Servant Leadership. I don’t know whether Dan Price even knows about Servant Leadership, but his behaviour is certainly aligned with Servant Leadership principles. I’m not suggesting that CEOs should be paid the same as everyone else, after all Peter Drucker recommended that CEOs could reasonably earn up to 20 times that of their employees. But the current gap where many CEOs are earning thousands of times what their employees are earning is unbalanced.

Dan Price, kudos to you!

 

Gary Ryan helps talented professionals, their teams and organisations to move Beyond Being Good®.

 

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