Ayansh felt powerless. His promotion had put him in an extremely contentious engineering team. They didn’t discuss each other’s ideas, they shredded and destroyed them. No one listened. They were all sneering. Each one showing off how brilliant they could be, and the way to do that was to see the others go down in flames.
They were brilliant. But it was all being wasted.
Everyone also tells me, “I know that listening and acknowledging are ‘the right thing to do’” and they wish they could do it because, “A good person does it.”
But, there seems to be a big split between “The right thing to do” and GETTING THINGS DONE!
Of course, people want to do the right thing and be a good person, and the people I teach really are good people already. But more than anything, they need to GET THINGS DONE!
Paula was a young “Early in Career” engineer, her first job out of college. She was excited to land in a successful corporation filled with 80,000 employees. As a new member, Paula was at the very bottom of the towering command chain.
While her position was small, her vision and her dreams were big. More than anything, Paula wanted to do good in the world around her.
She came to Causative Communication to learn how to communicate effectively with the whole world where everything was new to her. She was young and wide-eyed and innocent, no accumulated failures pulled back her confidence. She was driven by her dreams, not by her fears.
Paula knew she had no command power over anyone, but she could already see that communication is a powerful force, and had concluded by watching others that the ability to communicate is the most powerful ability she could have when it came to working with a whole lot of people.
She was part of a small team that was part of a larger team that was part of an even larger team. Paula often attended meetings with 40 others from her division. Everyone had seniority and experience over her.
With the communication skills she developed in the workshop under her belt, Paula spoke up with confidence in these larger meetings. She voiced her thoughts, she acknowledged others, she participated. She didn’t try to control the meeting. She just wanted to be a part of it.
Victoria leads a high-level Engineering team. It’s vital to her team that Sales doesn’t promise the customer anything Engineering can’t deliver.
It wasn’t going well. Engineering was no longer being invited to meetings involving Sales. That’s putting it mildly. Engineering was told to “stay out.” The relationship with Sales had gotten extremely contentious, to the point where the door was completely shut.
Victoria showed up for the Causative Communication workshop wanting to know how to communicate effectively with these people. How do you talk to someone who doesn’t even want to talk to you?
Her big focus was on finding out, “What do I say?”
She honestly believed she understood the Sales position and needed to get them to listen to her. She also knew they weren’t open to hearing anything.
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