Practical rules and resources for writing quality emails

This might be difficult to imagine if you are under 35, but when I started my career in finance there was no email. All written communication was by letter, and if something was really urgent you might send a telex or a fax. Written communication was an investment – an investment in time and in labour.  The process of sending a letter was a slow one; dictating it, the secretary/typist typing it, checking it, finally signing it, putting it in an envelope and posting it. There was no word processing software – if you wanted to make changes to the content, you returned it to the typist who would retype it.  Again, this may be difficult to imagine, but in some ways this wasn’t such a bad thing and there was a plus side to the writer and the reader. Exactly because it was so time consuming and labour intensive, you thought carefully about what you wanted to say and how you were going to say it. You invested in the quality of your written communication.

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Today email communication, combined with documents being available online, has replaced the letter. Email beats snail mail letters. Approximately 280 billion emails are sent every day, and the average number of business emails sent each day is around 125 billion. In a recent workshop on Managing conflict in virtual teams one purchaser shared he had received 68 from a single person in one day!

Writing emails requires little effort and little thought– and obviously this is not always a good thing. Take a look at your inbox and ask yourself how many of these emails are unclear, unnecessary or simply unwanted. So why do we send so many? The simple answer is because we can. The process is simple, quick and easy. The challenge organizations face today is keeping the good stuff (quick, easy, simple) while eliminating the down sides.  This is made harder by our convictions that our writing is clear and understandable despite research showing we often overestimate this.

So if you want your mails to be clear, necessary and wanted then start with these 3 practical rules.

Write clear and understandable subject lines

It’s very likely that your reader is busy and that they have a lot of pulls on their time. Regardless of whether they are using a laptop, tablet or phone they will see your name/email address and your subject line. A clear and understandable subject line helps them prioritize your email, shows respect for their time, and builds trust. A clear subject line can also help catch your recipient’s attention and encourage them to deal with your mail quickly. Consider using BLUF (bottom line up front) in your subject line and also at the very start of your email.  Another simple tip that many virtual teams adopt is to  agree with your team members on a selection of limited key words (e.g Info, Action, Decision).  For more simple and practical advice plus a training activity on effective subject lines check out this post.
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Write it how you’d say it

Many of us (and I am guilty of this) use a different style when writing.  Some people opt for different words, more complicated expressions and generally take longer to say something in writing than we would face to face.

For example…. “It has been brought to my attention that the complexities of the user interface are making life difficult for some of our users. I’d like to suggest we discuss this together”. Flipping it around some people also write emails in note form, or an overly casual style e.g. “Heard user interface difficult 4 user. Talk?” Writing as you speak would give you  “Some of our users are finding the user interface difficult to use. Can we talk about this together?”

Writing in a clear and direct style definitely helps clarity.  Pay attention to tone, and as a reader try to give the writer the benefit of the doubt when you feel the tone is odd.

Take a moment before you hit send

In the days when we sent letters we took a lot of time to think about what we were writing. We planned and drafted and there were many opportunities to change what we wanted to say or how we wanted to say it. You could read your letter through before signing it and at that moment decide if you really wanted to send it.
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Today these inbuilt pauses don’t exist. You quickly read a mail, write the response and hit send. It is often done on the move and squeezed between other tasks, conversations etc.  That is generally OK for short, routine communications but for those that are longer, complicated or sensitive, type once but look twice is a good rule to follow.  Write your email, don’t add the address and put it in your drafts folder (or email it to yourself). Read it later and if it’s clear, understandable and unemotional – send it. For more help on writing emotionally neutral emails, see here.

 

Training storytelling in business –behind the scenes with two trainers

What challenges do professionals have when they join a training session on storytelling in business?

Gary: Typically its people feeling that they aren’t creative enough and wish they were. They like the idea of using stories in a work context, and are interested in the training, but they feel that either they don’t have a story in them, or they don’t have a story that matters.  They’ve seen others use stories effectively and they’d like to learn how to do that – but they just don’t know where to start.

Scott: I completely agree. Most participants do see the value and in many ways we are working with the converted. Generally, participants are looking to use stories in a presentation or at an upcoming event, but the biggest challenge they face is where to start.  I often hear “I don’t have a story “or “I have a cool story but it’s not really for our regional sales teams”.  So how have you approached that from a training perspective? In the training, how do you get people to find their stories?

Gary: When we train storytelling skills my very first goal is to show them that they are surrounded by stories and that everyone can tell a story. One of the ways I start is by asking the participants to share something that has changed them or others.  This could be a simple business experience that made a difference to them or shaped them. It could also be something from their private life. I’ve found it is easier with participants who have stronger emotional intelligence, but everyone can find something.  The challenge then is getting them to slow down and see it as they tell it.  It’s not unusual to see people rushing through their story and speaking in bullet points.  This has a lot to do with nerves, but is also connected to wrongly believing that the others won’t be interested in listening to them. When we model the activity it always helps.

Stories are at their most powerful when they get inside people and either connect with an emotion or trigger an emotion.  This is the starting point – at the end of the story how will your audience feel? And what will they know and do?

Scott: I do something similar, “tell us about a moment you are proud of” or “tell us about a moment you regretted”. Anything that taps right into a feelings dimension rather than just narrating factual events.

Gary: When I first started training storytelling in business, I was concerned that when people talked about a moment that shaped them that they would be a little bit light emotionally.  I was expecting people would gloss over it or “present” it.  But I find that this isn’t true and that people tend to really dive in and quickly tap into their emotional memory. This then impacts the listeners.   They leave this activity with a few big wins – firstly that they can actually tell a story, secondly that they have stories to tell, thirdly that they can convey emotion without having to explicitly talk about it and finally,  and perhaps this motivates them the most,  that people want to listen and do quickly connect.

Scott: I think if the storyteller tries to obviously connect their story to the listeners experiences it doesn’t always work that well. The audience is often put off if you try to get too personal too soon. Pulling people into your story beats pushing a message.  Every time we train storytelling skills there is always one person who, in the first 30 minutes of the day, will share an experience that unexpectedly hooks the other participants.

Recently we were delivering training a ½ day session on “Storytelling skills for internal trainers”  in a European investment institution. The first warm-up task of the training was to share a story with your table about something that impacted you in a way you had never anticipated.  One French lady shared a story about her family going to lay a “stolperstein” at the weekend in front of the house where her great-grandparents had lived.  Obviously, the context of the story had everyone paying respectful attention, but it was the unexpected joy and warmth in her story, and the way she described her family reconnecting,  that had the room in silence and actually grinning. She pulled people into her story by telling it naturally, not over-structuring it, and tapping into her emotional memory. When we started looking at their organizations greatest learning moments and the managers practiced telling stories aimed at reinforcing their culture, we reinforced 3 key points from her first story – tell it naturally, tell it simply and see it as you tell.

Gary: Once we’ve shown participants that they do actually have stories, the next challenge is finding the right story for the situation.  There’s a simple and effective model we use with 3 concentric circles, and the key is to start with the emotion. The central point of this circle is “By the end of story what do you want them to feel, know or do?” Occasionally we need to help out by sharing a list of emotions to get people thinking. Feel comes first, and then comes what do you want them to know and what you want them to do. We train our clients to build stories from the inside out.

It’s worth highlighting that sometimes that feeling isn’t going to be a positive feeling … and that is okay. There is a place for warning, shocking, etc. as long as the intention is positive.  I remember a CFO wanting to shake his peers up and confront the arrogance he saw within his organization head on. He knew he wanted his listeners to leave with a sense of humility.  Once he had identified this, he quickly found his story. I still remember his presentation years later. He showed an actual cutting from a newspaper with the photo of a farmer saying, “If they’d asked us locals, we would have told them that this area floods heavily every few years. So why did they build a motorway here?”. Once he had got their attention, he could then talk more about how he wanted things to be going forward.

I often use this “farmer” story when training storytelling because it really does reinforce the importance of starting with the emotion, and being honest with yourself about which emotion you want, when you are choosing and building a story.

So what do you do if somebody can’t think of a story?  In every training group there’ll often be a few participants still struggling.

Gary: Yes, this can be tricky because there are some people who feel that they just don’t have it in them. If that’s the case, we have prepared training aids with “classic stories” that managers need in their pockets. For example, you need the story of when you overestimated yourself, when you failed to prepare, what you stand for, what is important to you when working with new hires, a story of vulnerability, a story  of learning from your mistakes etc etc.  There are similar “templates” for sales professionals, service desks, L&D managers etc.  I find that this “cookie-cutter” approach helps people get going, but I also find that very quickly they begin to leave the “template” and they make things real and personal.  The aid just gets them going.  Stories that follow a template are a safe place to start and then we push people to tap into their own experiences …. And everything becomes far more powerful.

Scott: Absolutely, “typical stories that you need in your pocket”  help get people past staring at a blank piece of paper. Even the process of just asking “What about this one? Have you got that one?” gets them thinking.  And then its all about delivery, and here is where we bring in LOTS, which means “language of the senses”. Using plenty of language of the senses such as “heard, saw, sensed, touched, felt” brings your listeners into your story. Speed and pace is important too. Getting them to slow down, speed up, use pauses for effect.  But the key is to live the story and see the story as you tell it. To tap into your emotional memory. We’ll expand on this in another blog post.

For more information: Storytelling in business

 

 

Book review: The happy mind

Before I read the book “The Happy Mind”, by Kevin Horsley and Louis Fourie, I already knew that happiness comes from the self and that the building blocks of happiness are things that have no physical form. Things like love, acceptance and beliefs are what give or take away happiness – ultimately. Subtitled “A simple guide to living a happier life starting today”, this book is not the type of book you would expect us to review. But, when trainers talk amongst each other at Target, about how the training went, we sometimes talk about the person(s) on the verge of a burnout – one of the clearest signs of unhappiness. The phrases “the doctor told me to take it easy” and “if only I could switch my head off on Friday” are often uttered during our stress- and self-management training sessions. A happy mind is a wonderful thing and we all deserve happiness. At home, at work and everywhere else. For that reason, this book is exactly the type of book that deserves our attention.

The first three chapters

With “The Happy Mind”, the authors want to “present you with valuable insights and create the private intellectual space for you to consider the subject of personal happiness, and of course to try and convince you that it is within your reach.” Throughout the book there are lots of questions for the reader to answer. Even if you read only half of it, you will have enough material to help you examine your personal happiness, to define what it looks / should look like and lots of things you can do to get your mind happy.

The search for happiness

The general perception is that most people view happiness as the result of something exceptional that should happen to them. They believe happiness is an external phenomenon that crosses your path and changes your life for the better, Kevin and Louis state in the first chapter. Some people rely on an if-then chain reaction (if this happens, I will be happy) to obtain happiness. This leaves them searching for secret doors to happiness, time travelling their way through the day to a happier time and place, and looking at others to give them the happiness they deserve.

Happiness is…

Genuine happiness is a ‘now and here’ skill, the authors write in chapter 2. Happiness exists in the present, not as an accumulation of highs, but as a by-product of how you live your life. According to the authors (they mention research several times in the book but leave it unsourced), happy people share nine common qualities:

  1. They think in a different way
  2. They assume full accountability for their circumstances
  3. They enjoy simple things more
  4. They own up to their future
  5. They are passionately engaged in what they do for a living
  6. They invest in their overall wellness
  7. They have constructive relationships
  8. They harness an optimistic world view
  9. They accept that happiness is a day-to-day effort

From asking “what can I do about this?”, instead of “why does this always happen to me?” to being constructive and decisive, to remaining positive, the chapter goes into more detail for each of the qualities.

The origin of unhappiness

On the other side of the scale, there are the unhappy people. Being unhappy is “not about having more downs than ups. It is about going through life forever desiring something else. It’s a state of lasting discontentment, for different reasons at different times.” Unhappy people have developed destructive thinking patterns, they place blame and are passive bystanders in their own lives. The list goes on – think the exact opposite of the above list to begin with.

‘Why are some of us unhappy?’ It’s our old brain, sociologists claim. We’re unable to control primitive instincts. When we are faced with rejection (not being enough) and scarcity (not having enough), we could be excluded – our old brain tells us. Our “present-day” brain is not in charge when we are faced with such fears. The primitive brain takes over, and it’s fight or flight.

Chapter 4

The next 60+ pages are “a bouquet of hints” for the reader. There are short, individual chapters with tips and advice and if you ask me, the old farmer (p.62) is a smart man. It’s thorough enough though sometimes repetitive. This part of the book is clearly intended for you to take what you want from it – whatever works for you. If you want to have a happy mind and you want to work on that, then here are some ingredients. It’s an important part of the book. However, I found that the pages are difficult to work with for a reader. Luckily, my mind is happy pretty much all the time.

In conclusion

As a passionate happiness practitioner, I was looking forward to reading this book. My ‘search’ for happiness took me along a completely different path, and I was interested to learn more about the thoughts and ideas of the authors. “This book was not meant to be a scientific masterpiece nor an empirical research document. It had a simple aim – to draw your attention to the dynamics of personal happiness”, are the opening words of the final chapter. Even so, for me, the book didn’t go deep enough into its own subject matter but I found there was interesting food for thought on a large number of pages. As I mentioned before, there is no list of sources to refer to when they mention research (pity).

Then again, I don’t really care about that when the book is clearly a very positive contribution to the creation of more happiness. We all deserve to have a happy mind. With a happy mind, we can achieve more. A happy mind is not stressed all the time. A happy mind is forgiving, a happy mind accepts. Sharing happiness creates happiness. Where there is happiness, there is love. Where there is love, there’s no hate. I like the sound of that. Don’t you?


For more information

 

 

Die vier Reiter: Verachtung und Einmauern am Arbeitsplatz

Healthy and respectful working relationships are a must if you want an effective and enjoyable workplace.  In the first post of this series, I introduced John Gottmann’s work on the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In the second post, we looked at what you can do to tackle the toxic behaviours of criticizing & blaming and defensiveness. This blog post will dive deeper into the last 2 toxic behaviours – and possibly the most damaging of the 4: stonewalling & contempt. We’ll explore why they happen, their impact and how both parties can change things for the better.  We’ll end with what a manger can do when they see these behaviours within their teams.

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Contempt

Contempt is when somebody makes it clear that they feel somebody has no value and deserves no respect. As it has been built brick-by-brick over time, it is tough to dismantle, and is probably the most destructive behaviour amongst Gottman’s “Four Horsemen”.

Contempt can manifest itself as ongoing sarcasm, cynicism, insults and aggressive, belittling or mocking humour. It can be seen in small gestures (eye-rolling when a colleague starts talking in a meeting, snorting at the mention of a project, a smirk or a single “hah” when a  colleagues name is mentioned) to full on mocking and cruel statements e.g. “Wow, you’ve done better than I ever expected – even by your standards that’s truly great work Susanne. You must be exhausted after having made so many mistakes”.

When somebody shows contempt, they are actually communicating that they see themselves as better and worth more.

Why do we do show contempt?

Feelings of contempt are typically built up over time – negative experiences create their own story and, too often, nobody has tackled the situation effectively. This can leave a person feeling frustrated and angry and looking to establish some sort of “superiority”.  Contempt can also come from a sense of moral superiority based on class, cultural or religious differences. Peers can feed into it or enable it.

What happens when we show contempt?

Contempt destroys teams and relationships. It prevents trust and respect and makes it hard for any real human warmth. It is tangibly damaging, causes stress and can harm people emotionally, mentally and ultimately physically.

So, what can the person showing contempt do differently?

Truth be told, if you are showing contempt for others there is a good chance you no longer care about turning things around. However, if you have a high level of self-awareness and realise that you have become somebody you don’t want to be then this is already a great step. Going forward you can focus on redefining your relationship with your colleague through …

  • seeing the other person as a human being with equal value.
  • seeking a positive trait in them and acknowledge it first to yourself and then to the other.
  • finding something they do that you value – then tell them.
  • communicating your needs with “I” statements and not “you” statements e.g. “I feel…”, “I want…”
  • actively looking to find opportunities to make deposits in their “emotional bank account”.

And what can the person receiving contempt do to limit the toxic impact and turn things around?

  • Look after yourself and work to stay balanced and neutral when interacting with this person. Shut out the unhelpful “whatever I do will be seen as wrong” self- talk. Reward yourself for not feeding into a situation.
  • People don’t always realize that they are being offensive… or how offensive they are being. Raise awareness of behaviours in a neutral / inquiring tone e.g. “What would you like to achieve by saying that?”, “Why are you rolling your eyes?”
  • Ask questions about the other’s intent – especially if they are not communicating in their first language. e.g. “Are you aware that, when I hear you say … I feel …?” “
  • Reflect how the contemptuous behaviour is impacting you e.g. “I feel belittled when you roll your eyes when I talk. Is this intended?”
  • Say how you feel about what is going on and show your desire to make things right, e.g. “Can we take a step back and slow things down?” “Insulting me isn’t helping us to move forward and find a solution”, “ What is the best way to tackle this issue for both of us?”
  • Indicate that you are willing to move beyond the present and press the reset button e.g. “I feel we are struggling. How about we try and start again from the beginning and build a new working relationship?”
  • And when things get too much, don’t be afraid to seek support within your organization. When you do this focus on you and your feelings… and not what they said/did.
  • And finally, know where your limits are and seek support from your manager or HR if you feel these are being crossed.

Stonewalling                     

When somebody feels they are frequently and undeservedly being blamed or treated with contempt, they may choose to withdraw into themselves and give one-word answers or even refuse to participate at all. Discussion, healthy questioning and positive conflict are key elements of any successful team.  Stonewalling stops this from happening, and feeds contempt, defensiveness and blaming.

Why do we do stonewall?

By refusing to cooperate, engage, react or communicate we look to protect ourselves and ride it out. Beneath this we may be seeking to control or establish hierarchy e.g. “I don’t need to listen to you”.

What happens when we do this?

The impact is that communication stops. The other person may become increasingly frustrated, angry and then despondent. Communication collapses and relationships quickly collapse too. Other colleagues get pulled in to the toxic situation as they become impacted, and everything gets slower and tougher … meaning ultimately performance and results suffer.

So, what can the “stonewaller” do differently?

If you recognize this behaviour in yourself and want to change you can…

  • focus on who you choose to be – who am I really? How do I want to behave?  How do I behave when I am at my best?
  • ask for space if you need it, and commit to resume once things have calmed down.
  • find a way to calm your emotions. Is there a third party you can express your feelings to? Alternatively, verbalize them out loud to yourself (or write them down if you prefer).
  • work out why you have reached this point. Why are you so angry and reluctant to contribute? Answering these questions may help you to understand your feelings better and enable you to continue.
  • avoid righteous indignation e.g. “ I don’t have to take this anymore” or seeing yourself as an innocent victim

And what can the “stonewalled” do to limit the toxic impact?

  • Ask yourself why are they stonewalling? What are you doing/have you done that is making the other person not feel safe in expressing themselves?
  • Focus on building safety. Agree a fixed time, neutral and private location, confidentiality and help them come back into the conversation with simple exploratory open questions.
  • Accept that a break might be needed and press the “pause” button while communicating that you are committed to continuing the conversation later.
  • Really listen to what the other person is saying.

What can a manager do when they see contempt and stonewalling within their team?

The hard truth is that as a manager you probably won’t be able to do as much as you might like to.  Whereas a skilled manager can actively help team members get past criticizing, blaming and being defensive, contempt and stonewalling are far more difficult to deal with. In fact, any blog would struggle to explore the variables and options.  Here are some questions to ask yourself…

  • What is the impact of the behaviour on the team and our results?
  • What can I accept? What can’t I accept? Where is my line in the sand?
  • Where is the contempt or stonewalling coming from? e.g. why this person? this situation? this environment?
  • How willing am I to reflect back what I am seeing? The impact it is having? And the impact it may have later?
  • Am I prepared and committed to consistently confront contemptuous or stonewalling behaviors over the long-term?
  • To what extent can I ring-fence a person without impacting the team or passing more work and responsibility on to others?
  • Am I choosing to do nothing? Or am I afraid to do something?
  • Who else can help me in this situation?
  • To what extent has HR been involved so far? What can they do?
  • Under what circumstances am I prepared to let this person go?

Whether you are just moving into a management position, managing a conflict in your virtual team, or just want to get the very best from your staff and the teams you manage, being aware of Gottmann’s work on the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse is incredibly useful and practical. At the end of the day, results are delivered through people and people are complex. None of us are always at our best and we can all struggle in relationships.  Awareness of the 4 Horsemen is a start, followed by self-reflection and support.  An effective manager is neither a counsellor nor a buddy – but they do need to manage people as individuals – and this means managing knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours.

The why, when, where, who, what and how of the meeting agenda

Scott Adam’s Dilbert cartoons capture some of the worst meeting behaviours perfectly. No matter which industry you work in, you’ll run into poorly prepared and badly run meetings. There are a lot of factors which contribute to an effective (or ineffective) meeting and near the top of the list is the agenda. Having a purpose-built agenda for your meeting brings you and your team real benefits. Even just having an agenda sets the right tone. The agenda means that you know what’s happening, once you go to the meeting. Beyond that:

  • Agendas show you expect a productive meeting and not a rambling chat.
  • Time spent planning up front will increase your chances of delivering results by helping to keep everyone focused.
  • A well thought out and communicated agenda helps people better prepare their thoughts and gather any relevant information they’ll need before the meeting starts.

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So how do you build an effective agenda?

The purpose of the agenda is to explicitly tell participants what they need to prepare and be ready to discuss. An effective agenda needs to answer 5 questions. Starting off with the first and most important …

WHY are we meeting?

Who called the meeting and why? What is the context for the meeting? How does this meeting fit into your broader purpose? Once you’ve thought this through properly you should be able to crystallise this in 20 words or less.  “Team meeting to discuss the changed scope and plan available resources for project XYZ.” The sentence encourages focussed thinking from the very start. Insert the sentence into your agenda, and be ready to recap them when the meeting starts.

WHEN and WHERE are we meeting?

Sounds obvious, and I know many client’s we’ve worked with tend to overlook this under the defence “well the same as always, of course”.  I’d argue that it only costs you seconds to include the meeting place to avoid sarcasm and irony.

WHO needs to be there?

Meetings are only as effective as the people who join (or don’t join) the meeting. Your agenda needs clarity about who will lead, present, or facilitate each point. You’ll also want to be explicit about who needs to be involved or is affected by each point on the agenda. Responsibility assignment matrix system like ARCI can very easily be integrated into your agenda.

Related to this theme, a common question we receive when training meeting facilitation skills is “What if they don’t really need to be there for this item?”. This can lead to wide-ranging discussions and scenarios – and to cut this short here are a couple of ideas to consider…

  • Do you want to reorganise the order of items so that a group of people can leave early? Avoid the ‘join late option’ if possible as the first few minutes is where you’ll review the all-important why.
  • Do you want to give them the option of stepping out for this section? … yet make sure they are back in time for the next item? If yes, then make sure they are next door and not back upstairs or in another building.
  • Do you want to address it as a “development opportunity” directly in the meeting along the lines of “I understand the next point isn’t relevant for you, but I think might help you to build a broader understanding of the project if you stay and listen”?

WHAT are we meeting about?

Describe the “meeting items” so that they are simple and unambiguous… without being meaningless headings.  This is where so many agenda templates fail.  Roger Schwarz’s advice to “List agenda topics as questions the team needs to answer” is a great tip I found while I was writing this blog post.

This part of the agenda also contains information such as:

  • What is the desired outcome?  (make a decision, brief people, discussion, brainstorm)
  • How much time is planned for this point?
  • Who should do what in advance of the meeting?

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HOW can we improve our meetings?

This is a very important, often overlooked part of the agenda. The last building block for any successful meeting agenda should be: Make your meetings even better. Are your meetings too long, too short, too often, too big? Low energy meetings are far less productive, even if you have a great, well prepared agenda. It could be as simple as changing the environment of the meeting. Go outside, meet by the watercooler, meet over lunch, meet over breakfast, have a stand up meeting… Remember, it’s your meeting. Change it when something stops being effective. Regularly plan into your meeting agenda 5 minutes to do a simple review. Effective teams take the time to reflect and learn. Ask yourselves:

  • What did we do well today?
  • What can we improve on?
  • How exactly will we do this?
  • What actionable to dos can we take?

More on this topic

Watch this TED Talk “How to save the world (or at least yourself) from bad meetings”, by David Grady.

Further reading on our blog

 

Die vier Reiter: Kritik und Schuldzuweisung, sowie Abwehverhalten am Arbeitsplatz

Gesunde Arbeitsbeziehungen sind ein Muss, wenn Sie einen effektiven, effizienten und angenehmen Arbeitsplatz wünschen. In unserem letzten Blogbeitrag stellte ich John Gottmanns Arbeit an den 4 Reitern der Apokalypse vor; Kritik & Schuldzuweisung, Verteidigung, Verachtung und Einmauern. Wir haben untersucht, warum die Bekämpfung dieser 4 toxischen Verhaltensweisen unerlässlich ist, wenn Sie die Leistung steigern und Ergebnisse erzielen wollen. Dieser Blogbeitrag wird tiefer in die ersten 2 toxischen Verhaltensweisen eintauchen. Wir werden uns mit Kritik und Schuldzuweisungen UND der damit verbundenen Abwehrbereitschaft befassen. Wir werden dann untersuchen, warum sie geschehen, welche Auswirkungen sie haben und wie beide Parteien die Dinge zum Besseren wenden können. Schließlich werden wir uns ansehen, was Sie als Manager tun können, wenn Sie auf dieses Verhalten zwischen den Teammitgliedern stoßen..

 

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Wie man Kritik und Schuldzuweisungen am Arbeitsplatz verwerten kann.

Wie jeder Manager weiß, wenn etwas ernsthaft schief geht, ist es wichtig sich zu fragen was passiert ist und zu diskutieren: “Wie kann man das beim nächsten Mal anders machen? Dies auf transparente, offene und konstruktive Weise zu tun, ist enorm wichtig.  Jim Collins untersucht in seinem exzellenten Bestseller Good to Great genau das: die “Autopsie ohne Schuldzuweisungen”. Damit “Autopsie ohne Schuldzuweisung” funktioniert, brauchen Sie Menschen, die sich sicher fühlen – Sie müssen Kritik und Vorwürfe am Arbeitsplatz verwerten.

Zunächst einmal ist es wichtig, den Unterschied zwischen Beschwerde und Kritik zu verstehen. Eine Beschwerde bezieht sich auf eine bestimmte fehlgeschlagene Aktion. Eine Kritik beinhaltet ein negatives Urteil über die Persönlichkeit oder den Charakter des anderen. Schuldzuweisungen sind, wenn man auf die Verantwortung verzichtet und alle Fehler und Konsequenzen in die Schuhe einer anderen Person schiebt. Zum Beispiel…..

  • Beschwerde – “Thierry, wir liegen jetzt hinter dem Zeitplan mit der FAT zurück.  Ich bin in einer wirklich schwierigen Position mit dem Kunden.””
  • Kritik – “Wir sind mit der FAT in Verzug, weil Sie vergessen haben, Max wieder zu upzudaten. Du bist so desorganisiert.  Jetzt bin ich in einer wirklich schwierigen Position mit dem Kunden, Thierry.”
  • Schuldzuweisungen – “Das ist alles deine Schuld…. und jetzt liegen wir wieder hinter dem Zeitplan mit der FAT zurück. Du hast Max nicht so upgedated, wie du es hättest tun sollen, und jetzt muss ich die Dinge lösen und mich um den Kunden kümmern…. was hältst du davon? Das ist alles deine Schuld, Thierry.

Offensichtlich sind Kritik und Schuldzuweisung keine hilfreichen oder produktiven Verhaltensweisen – aber wenn wir ehrlich zu uns selbst sind, haben wir sie alle irgendwann einmal gezeigt.

Warum beschuldigen und/oder kritisieren wir andere?

Wir haben uns darüber Gedanken gemacht, was passiert ist und wollen entweder jemanden zur Verantwortung ziehen oder das Verhalten eines anderen ändern. Wir sagen uns, dass wir nur “Feedback geben”, “andere zur Verantwortung ziehen” oder “sagen, wie es ist”.

Was passiert, wenn wir das tun?

Der typische (und oft unbeabsichtigte) Effekt ist, dass der Empfänger defensiv wird (der zweite der 4 Reiter) und die konstruktive Kommunikation stoppt. Der Empfänger wird wahrscheinlich weniger offen darüber sein, was tatsächlich passiert ist, da er sich nicht sicher fühlt – und möglicherweise sogar unehrlich wird, Informationen zurückhält oder Dinge neu erfindet. Alternativ fühlt sich der Empfänger bedroht und wehrt sich mit Kritik oder Schuldzuweisungen. Nichts davon ist sehr produktiv oder vorteilhaft für eine gesunde Geschäftsbeziehung.

Was also kann der “Schuldzuweiser” anders machen?

Um das oben Gesagte am besten zu vermeiden, müssen Sie als potentieller “Schuldzuweiser”…

  • Verantwortung für die eigenen Gefühle übernehmen – und sie nicht auf den “Empfänger” legen.
  • Offen und neugierig darüber sein, was passiert ist. Genau hinschauen, um zu verstehen.
  • Verwandeln Sie Ihre “Beschwerde” in eine Anfrage. Konzentrieren Sie sich darauf, Lösungen für das Problem zu finden und wie Sie es in Zukunft vermeiden können, anstatt sich auf die Vergangenheit zu konzentrieren, z.B. anstatt zu sagen: “Sie haben mir nichts von dem Review-Meeting erzählt”, sagen Sie: “Ich möchte wirklich kein weiteres dieser Review-Meetings verpassen, könnten Sie mir die Termine für den Rest des Jahres schicken?”
  • verwenden Sie die Sprache “Ich” und nicht “Sie”, z.B. “Ich habe den Eindruck, dass… / Für mich kommt das wie…”.
  • prüfen Sie, wie Sie aktiv zu einer Lösung beitragen können – es ist unwahrscheinlich, dass Sie völlig machtlos sind, und Sie werden sich besser fühlen, wenn Sie wissen, was Sie ändern und kontrollieren können, unabhängig davon, was der andere tut.
  • zukunftsorientiert sein. Auch hier gilt: genau hinschauen, um zu verstehen, damit die Dinge in Zukunft besser werden können. Auf einem Stück Papier darzustellen, was passiert ist und welche Faktoren dazu beigetragen haben, kann ein effektives Werkzeug sein.
  • Entschuldigen Sie sich, wenn es angebracht ist – Wollten Sie “angreifen”? Es könnte sein, dass Sie sich nicht kritisch gefühlt haben oder eine andere Absicht hatten, aber es kommt darauf an, wie der andere es erlebt hat.
  • und um jeden Preis vermeiden Sie es, den anderen mit weitreichenden persönlichen Angriffen wie “Was ist los mit dir?” oder “Was genau ist dein Problem” zu verletzen?

Was können die “Schuldigen” tun, um die toxischen Auswirkungen zu begrenzen?

Wenn Sie kritisiert oder beschuldigt werden, versuchen Sie…

  • anzunehmen, dass die Absichten gut sind. Man versucht nicht absichtlich Sie zu verletzen, noch will man, dass Sie sich “nutzlos fühlen”. Sie machen einfach keine sehr gute Arbeit bei der Kommunikation.
  • zuzuhören und eine angemessene Aufforderung zu finden, die in der “Beschwerde” enthalten ist.
  • sich auf ihre Beziehung zu konzentrieren. Wenn andere Ihnen “Schuld” zuweisen, was sind dann ihre Bedürfnisse
  • dem Drang zu widerstehen, sich zu wehren – bleiben Sie nicht in einer “Wer macht was mit wem” Spirale stecken
  • ruhig, durchsetzungsfähig und empathisch zu sein.
  • Diskussion wieder auf die Zukunft auszurichten. Wie oben, hilft es, das Geschehene darzustellen und Fakten zu veranschaulichen
  • der anderen Person zu helfen, sich wieder auf eine bessere Beziehung zu konzentrieren.

Wie man “Abwehr”-Verhalten am Arbeitsplatz entkräftet

The toxic behaviour of “defensiveness” often follows feeling criticized or blamed. It is a natural fight/flight response and, just like criticism & blaming, defending is very much about the past rather than the future.  Defending can look like excuses, denying responsibility, or even blaming the other (“I’m not the problem here – you’re the problem!”). Defensiveness rarely helps move things forward.

Das toxische Verhalten der “Abwehrhaltung” folgt oft dem Gefühl, kritisiert oder beschuldigt zu werden. Es ist eine natürliche Kampf-/Fluchtantwort, und genau wie Kritik und Schuldzuweisungen geht es bei der Abwehrhaltung sehr stark um die Vergangenheit und nicht um die Zukunft.  Sich zu verteidigen kann wie eine Ausrede aussehen, oder es wirkt wie die Verantwortung zu leugnen oder sogar dem anderen die Schuld zu geben (“Ich bin hier nicht das Problem – du bist das Problem!”). Verteidigung hilft selten, die Dinge voranzutreiben.

Warum verteidigen wir uns?

Wir verteidigen uns, um unser eigenes Selbstwertgefühl zu bewahren.  Wir wollen unsere Selbstidentität, unser Integritätsgefühl bewahren.  Wir schützen unser Ego vor Kritik und können uns schnell wie das “Opfer” verhalten.

Was passiert wenn wir das tun?

Die unbeabsichtigte Auswirkung ist, dass Konflikte entweder aufkommen oder eskalieren.  So oder so, die Beziehung leidet. Die Defensive verhindert auch die Analyse und das Verständnis des Problems, was wiederum die Suche nach nachhaltigen und realistischen Lösungen verhindert.

Also, was kann der “Verteidigende” anders machen?

  • Wirklich zuhören…. wirklich, wirklich zuhören. Schließen Sie nicht hilfreiche Selbstgespräche aus und nutzen Sie aktive Hörfähigkeiten.
  • In Verbindung mit dem oben genannten, hören Sie hin, um herauszufinden, was Sie denken, dass Sie hören.
  • Jetzt suchen Sie nach den “10%” der Wahrheit. Es ist unglaublich unwahrscheinlich, dass die andere Person alles erfindet. Ignorieren Sie die Kritik und konzentrieren Sie sich auf das angesprochene Thema. Selbst wenn Sie mit dem, was sie sagen und wie sie es sagen, nicht einverstanden sind, gibt es wahrscheinlich irgendwo etwas Wahrheit, die sich mit Ihnen und ihrem Teil in der Situation verbindet.
  • Und wenn Sie Ihren Beitrag zu dem Problem bedacht haben, akzeptieren Sie Ihre persönliche Verantwortung für das Problem. Jeder hat manchmal Unrecht.
  • Erkennen Sie die Wirkung an, zu der Sie beigetragen haben. Entschuldigen Sie sich, wenn es angebracht ist. Und um ein überzogenes Klischee zu zitieren, gestehen Sie Fehler ein. Sie werden überrascht sein, wie kraftvoll und effektiv es ist zu sagen: “Ich habe mir angehört, was du gesagt hast, und nachdem ich darüber nachgedacht habe…. hast du Recht. Das ist mein Fehler.” Manchmal kann die Auseinandersetzung mit einer Situation auch schnell die Dynamik verändern, z.B. “Ich habe mir angehört, was du sagst (Kritiker richtet sich auf Leugnung ein und bereitet sich auf einen weiteren Angriff vor), und ich stimme dir völlig zu.  Ich habe das nicht richtig oder gut gemacht [Kritiker überrascht und still]. Lass uns reden und sehen, was wir beide beim nächsten Mal anders machen könnten [Kritiker in eine zukunftsorientierte Diskussion einbezogen].”

Und was kann der “Angreifer” tun, um die toxischen Auswirkungen der Verteidigung zu begrenzen?

  • Verdeutlichen Sie ausdrücklich und authentisch Ihre Absicht. Arbeiten Sie daran, zu helfen zu verstehen, dass Ihre Absicht darin besteht, andere nicht zu verletzen. Sie wollen nur ein ernstes Gespräch führen, weil Ihnen das wichtig ist.
  • Noch einmal, wirklich zuhören… weniger reden und mehr zuhören.
  • Klären Sie, was von der anderen Person gehört wird.
  • Verwenden Sie “Ich” und nicht “du”.
  • Zeigen Sie Respekt.
  • Und versichern Sie anderen, dass ihr Image oder ihr Ruf nicht auf dem Spiel steht. Sie konzentrieren sich auf diese Situation und nicht auf die Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft.
  • Gewinne Sie das Vertrauen wieder.

Was kann ein Manager tun, wenn er Kritik, Schuld und Abwehrhaltung in seinem Team sieht?

Kritik und Schuldzuweisung ist menschlich. Wir alle haben es schon getan. Wir alle waren unhilfreich defensiv. Unterscheiden Sie zwischen einem Teammitglied, das dieses Verhalten hin und wieder zeigt (das ist menschlich) und einem, das ein Muster auf einer fortlaufenden Basis zeigt.

  1. Schaffen Sie eine sichere Umgebung und bauen Sie Vertrauen auf, indem Sie persönliche Erfahrungen austauschen, und an beiden Enden sitzen – konzentrieren Sie sich auf die unmittelbaren und längerfristigen Auswirkungen des Verhaltens auf Einzelpersonen, Teams und Ergebnisse. Achten Sie darauf, keine Vorträge zu halten und teilen Sie stattdessen Ihre Wahrnehmungen und Erfahrungen.
  2. Konzentrieren Sie das Team auf das, was beim nächsten Mal passiert (und verstärken Sie diese Zukunftsorientierung, wenn jemand anfängt, Vergangenheitsformen zu verwenden).
  3. Wenn Sie auf ein Muster stoßen, in dem eine Person regelmäßig andere kritisiert und beschuldigt, scheuen Sie sich nicht, Ihre Macht als Manager geltend zu machen und Feedback über das destruktive Verhalten zu geben, das Sie sehen.

Im dritten und letzten Teil dieser Serie werden wir untersuchen, wie Sie die verbleibenden 2 “Reiter” – Einmauern und Verachtung – angehen und überwinden können.

Lernen Sie die “Vier Reiter der Apokalypse” kennen – Was bewirken Sie an Ihrem Arbeitsplatz?

Seit 2015 sind wir stark an einem Management Development Programm für eine der großen 4 Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaften in Luxemburg beteiligt. Einer der vielen lohnenden Aspekte der Beteiligung an so großen Vorzeigeprojekten ist die Möglichkeit, mit anderen Management-Trainern zusammenzuarbeiten und voneinander zu lernen. Dank Alexandra D. entdeckte ich 2017 John Gottmans Arbeit und seitdem habe ich gesehen, wie seine Methoden Menschen in und außerhalb der Arbeit bei den Beziehungen helfen, die für sie am wichtigsten sind. Wenn Sie (wie ich) noch nichts von ihm gehört haben: John Gottman ist ein hoch angesehener Psychologe und Beziehungsexperte, der mit seiner Frau Julie das Gottman Institute (https://www.gottman.com) leitet. Gottman studierte über zwei Jahrzehnte lang die Beziehungen zwischen Ehepartnern und Paaren und entdeckte Verhaltensmuster, mit denen er – mit einer Genauigkeit von über 90% – vorhersagen konnte, welche Beziehungen nicht  überleben würden.  Obwohl sich seine Forschung und Berufung ausschließlich auf Paare konzentriert, übertragen sich seine Gedanken und Methoden leicht auf unser Berufsleben und auch auf unsere Arbeitsbeziehungen!

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Die 4 Reiter (oder die 4 Teamtoxine)

Gottman glaubt, dass es 4 negative Verhaltensweisen gibt, die Beziehungen zerstören können. Dieses 2-minütige Video stellt sie gelungen vor.

Die vier destruktiven Verhaltensweisen sind:

  • Schuldzuweisung und Kritik – Angriff auf den Charakter, das Verhalten oder die Persönlichkeit des Partners.
  • Defensivität – sich selbst als Opfer zu sehen, um Angriffe zu verhindern oder abzuwehren und andere für sein Versagen zu beschuldigen..
  • Verachtung – das Selbstgefühl seines Partners mit Sarkasmus oder Zynismus angreifen, um ihn zu beleidigen oder zu missbrauchen.
  • Einmauern – Rückzug aus der Beziehung und jeder sinnvollen Verbindung.

Gottman nennt diese 4 destruktiven Verhaltensweisen “die vier Reiter der Apokalypse”. Ich habe auch gehört, dass Coaches und Trainer sie in “die 4 Teamtoxine” (engl. The Four Team Toxins) umbenennen, um sie geschäftsrelevanter erscheinen zu lassen.

Warum die 4 Reiter der Apokalypse am Arbeitsplatz anzutreffen sind?

Wenn wir ehrlich sind, haben wir diese 4 toxischen Verhaltensweisen vermutlich auch schon gezeigt und uns irgendwann einmal toxisch verhalten. Wir sind menschlich. Und ob man sie nun “die 4 Reiter” oder “die 4 Teamtoxine” nennen will, diese Verhaltensweisen sind am Arbeitsplatz von Bedeutung – und das auf sehr greifbare Weise.

Diese Verhaltensweisen sind Gift für einen effektiven, respektvollen und bereichernden Arbeitsplatz. Wenn zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen zusammenbrechen, können Sie erwarten, dass sich die Qualität der Kommunikation verschlechtert.  Aufgaben und Projekte dauern länger, die Arbeit wird unvollständig oder unter den erwarteten Standards sein, und da das Verhalten die Produktivität beeinträchtigt, können Sie mit schlechten Ergebnissen rechnen.  Motivation, Engagement und Teamgeist werden alle leiden, und destruktive Konflikte werden zunehmen. Und im schlimmsten Fall sieht man Stress, Krankheit und fähige Menschen, die kündigen, weil “es ihnen reicht”. Wenn Sie Leistung also steigern wollen, müssen Sie diese Probleme direkt angehen.

Also, was können Manager gegen die 4 Reitern der Apokalypse machen?

“Ok, einige Leute sind nicht so nett wie andere, so ist das Leben… aber  was soll ich als Auditmanager tun? Ich bin Manager, nicht Berater.”

– Marcel, Manager im Bereich Audit & Assurance

Jeder Profi, der sich um seine Beziehungen zu anderen kümmert, wird von der Erforschung der 4 Reiter profitieren…

  • indem er in der Lage ist, zu erkennen, wann er sich negativ verhält.
  • indem er lernt, seine Denkweise bei Bedarf bewusst zu ändern

Egal ob toxisches Verhalten ein häufiges Ereignis oder ein glücklicherweise seltenes Phänomen ist, gute Manager müssen…

  • in der Lage sein, zu erkennen, wann sich andere negativ verhalten.
  • lernen, anderen zu helfen, ihr Verhalten und die Auswirkungen zu verstehen.
  • in der Lage sein, schwierige Gespräche mit Einzelpersonen und Teams anzugehen.
  • lernen, anderen zu helfen, negative Spiralen zu stoppen und toxische Beziehungen umzukehren.

In den Teilen 2 und 3 dieses Blogs werden wir untersuchen, wie dies erreicht werden kann, aber zum Schluss folgen 5 praktische Tipps für den Einstieg…

  1. And when you do see toxic behaviours between team members, tackle them.
  2. Übernehmen Sie die Verantwortung für Ihre eigenen Gefühle. Das fängt damit an, dass Sie konsequent Selbstwahrnehmung und Reflexion in Ihrem Handeln aufbauen. Konzentrieren Sie sich darauf, wer Sie sein wollen und wie Sie sein wollen… unabhängig davon, was die andere Person tut oder sagt. Das ist hart, aber enorm wirksam.
  3. Die Neugierde der Praxis – fragen Sie sich “Was passiert hier eigentlich”, “Was fehlt mir”, “Wie habe ich zu dieser Situation beigetragen” und “Was wird uns dabei helfen”
  4. Machen Sie keine Annahmen und überprüfen Sie Ihre Ergebnisse offen. Dies wird dazu beitragen, die Bereitschaft anderer zu erhöhen, zuzuhören und sich auf einen gesunden Konflikt einzulassen.
  5. Gehen Sie auf andere Menschen ein und speisen Sie Positivität in Ihre Beziehungen ein: Führen Sie regelmäßig anerkennende Gespräche und versuchen Sie, Anerkennung zu zeigen.
  6. Und wenn Sie toxische Verhaltensweisen zwischen Teammitgliedern sehen, gehen Sie sie an.

How to avoid your emails going viral

“Worst email ever?”  was the headline that got my attention when I read my newspaper on a Saturday morning. The story was about an Australian manager who had sent an email which he later described himself as a “Gordon Ramsay meets Donald Trump-style email rant”.  His email went viral on Twitter (#bossoftheyear) and the story was an online sensation for a couple of days. 

Although, or maybe because, we send and receive countless emails every day it is sometimes easy to forget some of the golden rules of email etiquette. To give the manager his dues he later apologized to his staff (“It seems I am becoming an online sensation for how NOT to communicate – and in hindsight I agree!!”), but his story is a timely reminder to review some important dos and don’ts for emailing. Starting with the most important one, here are six tips for you to consider…

Writing emails that people read: Free eBook download

Tip 1 – Don’t send emails when you are angry / frustrated/ tired etc

This is, and always will be, the first rule of email communication. In “Writing emails that people read”, our most downloaded ebook with 18,000 downloads to date, we suggest you write the whole email if it will make you feel better and help you to get some-thing out of your system – BUT only add the recipients and send it after you have had space and time to reflect and think about what you are sending and its potential impact. Rule #2 builds on this by emphasizing that email is great for giving information, sharing updates or making simple requests. However, use the phone if something could be a sensitive or emotional topic. When it comes to management communication, in our Practical Toolbox for Managers training we also suggest that emotional communication is done face-to-face, via Webex or over the phone. Email just doesn’t help … although you might feel better for a few minutes.

As the Australian manger himself later said, he sent it “in a moment of seeing red and it most definitely should not have happened”.

Tip 2 – Watch your tone, mind your language

Emails need to be respectful and clear. Body language, facial expressions and tone of voice cannot be communicated by email. How an email sounds and the message it sends are determined only by the words that we use. Read this blog post if you want to learn more about tone in emails. Make sure that your message is respectful and clear. In his viral email the manager knew he’d misjudged this and later wrote “Obviously some of you know me pretty well and know I shoot from the hip, but obviously others don’t”.

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Tip 3 – Get the person’s name right

This is a very personal tip for me. I get a lot of emails from French contacts and probably 20% start with Hi Taylor (my first name is Ian). When you type the recipient’s name in the “To” line or select them from your address book – make sure it’s the right person. (In 2000, a British schoolgirl was on the receiving end of inappropriate business emails after a US naval commander accidentally added her to his confidential mailing list.) Be sure that the name you use at the beginning of the mail is the name of the person in the address line and that you have spelt it correctly.

Tip 4 – KISS: Keep it short and simple

Everybody is busy and everybody gets a lot of emails.  The average number of emails received per day in 2018 is 97!  If each email takes just 2 minutes to read and deal with this is 3 hours of your day done already!

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5 typische Fehler beheben, die deutschsprachige Personen auf Englisch machen.

Deutsche sprechen in der Regel gutes Business Englisch. In einer von Harvard Business Review veröffentlichten weltweiten Studie belegte Deutschland den 14. Platz für die Kompetenz der englischen Mitarbeiter (oder “hoch” mit 60,2 von 100 Punkten). In einer weiteren Studie gaben 100% der befragten deutschen Arbeitgeber an, dass Englischkenntnisse für ihr Unternehmen von Bedeutung sind. Solche Beweise zeigen, warum die Deutschen zu Recht stolz auf ihre Englischkenntnisse sind – und die überwiegende Mehrheit der Deutschen, mit denen wir zusammenarbeiten, will noch besser werden. Wenn Ihre Muttersprache Deutsch ist und Sie Ihr Englisch bei der Arbeit verbessern möchten, könnte es für Sie frustrierend sein, dass Ihre englischsprachigen Kollegen Sie nicht korrigieren. Schließlich kann man nicht besser werden, wenn man nicht weiß, was man falsch macht! In diesem Beitrag werfen wir einen Blick auf eine Handvoll deutschsprachiger Fehler, die im Business Englisch wirklich häufig vorkommen. Die gute Nachricht? Sie sind wirklich einfach zu beheben.
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1. “We discussed about last month’s figures at the meeting.”

Auf Englisch diskutieren wir nicht über (about) etwas. Um das zu beheben, lassen Sie das about hinter dem Verb discuss weg. Der richtige englische Satz lautet also: “We discussed last month’s figures at the meeting.” Beachten Sie, dass Sie about nach dem Substantiv discussions verwenden können, wie in “There were discussions about last month’s figures at the meeting”.

2. “Good morning together.”

Dies ist eine direkte Übersetzung einer schönen (und effizienten) deutschen Art, alle gleichzeitig zu begrüßen. Together ist zu 100% logisch, aber es funktioniert im Englischen nicht. Wie kannst du es beheben? Wie im letzten Beispiel: Lassen Sie es komplett raus. Der richtige englische Satz lautet einfach “Good morning”. Sie können auch Alternativen wie “Good morning everyone” oder “Morning all” (ugs.) nutzen.

3. “We see us tomorrow.”

Dies ist auch eine Direktübersetzung aus dem Deutschen. Wir haben keinen identischen Satz auf Englisch, also klingt es zwar verständlich, aber seltsam auf Englisch. In diesem Fall müssen Sie einen anderen Ausdruck verwenden. Der korrekte englische Satz lautet also: “We’ll see each other tomorrow”. Sie können auch “See you tomorrow.” order “Look forward to seeing you tomorrow.” verwenden.

4. “I visit normally on Thursdays my clients in Bamberg.”

Die Wortfolge ist deutsch. Der Satz ist 100% verständlich, aber er klingt im Englischen einfach falsch (ebenso wie, wenn Englisch sprechende Personen Deutsch sprechen, kann es zwar verständlich, aber grammatikalisch falsch sein). Adverbien der Häufigkeit (Wörter wie: normally, sometimes, always, never) kommen fast immer zwischen der Person (I) und dem Verb (visit). Der richtige englische Satz lautet also: “I normally visit my clients in Bamberg on Thursdays.

5. “I work since five years by my company.”

Es gibt hier nur 8 Wörter, aber eigentlich sind 4 Fehler in diesem Satz.

  1. Die Zeitform (work) ist falsch.
  2. Man kann das Wort since nicht mit einer Zeitspanne kombinieren.
  3. By ist nicht die richtige Präposition.
  4. Die Wortfolge ist deutsch.

So beheben Sie es:

  • Wenn etwas in der Vergangenheit begonnen hat, jetzt geschieht und wahrscheinlich auch in Zukunft weitergehen wird, dann verwenden wir in der Regel die present perfect simple oder continuous Form, z. B. I have worked / I have been working…
  • Wir verwenden since für einem Zeitpunkt, und for für einem Zeitraum. z. B. since 2012/ for 5 years.
  • Es gibt nur sehr wenige konkrete Regeln für Präpositionen. Du musst also ein Gefühl für sie entwickeln und sie in einem Kontext erlernen. Auf Englisch sagen wir “We work for a company”.
  • Wortfolge. Dies ist ähnlich wie beim letzten Beispiel – eine Zeitangabe kommt üblicherweise an das Ende eines Satzes im Englischen.

Der richtige englische Satz lautet also: “I have been working for my company for five years.”

Wenn Sie mehr Übung wünschen, dann schauen Sie sich unser aktuelles Ebook an: “Common English mistakes (Germans make) and how to correct them”.

Organizing management and leadership training programs – the secret L&D manager

This month’s Secret L&D manager is German, based in Germany and works for a global automotive supply company.  He/She has worked in training and development for over 7 years.

New Call-to-actionWhat is important to you when designing and rolling out a leadership program?

For me a successful leadership or senior manager program in our company can never be a “one size fits all” solution.  Leadership and people management is not like a manual. We don’t want a “that’s how you have to do it” approach and we are serious about offering an individualized approach. The programs we build with companies like Target give people a chance to identify whatever they need and benefit from support in applying this in their day-to-day tasks – or in their life as a whole. Individuals take different things from the program.

Who do you target when you set up management and leadership programs?

When I set up a leadership program we are typically involving managers and leaders from a broad range of different functions – from HR to finance, logistics to manufacturing etc.  This means I have to exclude functional topics from the training design because they won’t be relevant to the whole group.

What kind or development areas are you targeting when you set up management and leadership programs?

We’re working in a very fast-paced environment and there are always a lot of changes going on.  A lot of our managers and leaders are firefighting, and really involved in operational work. We want to focus on soft skills like strategic thinking, so that they can step out of the operational and build a broader view of everything.

It is really important for me that our managers have the chance to step back and have a look at the broader picture – this means looking especially at strategy and finance. The leadership program needs to tackle what finance means for our company and to ensure the leaders have a big picture of company decisions that are made based on our financial performance. This extends to them having a broader view on strategy.  Our programs support them in building a strategic view of the company, their area and their immediate objectives.

We also want them to develop a stronger understanding of the consequences their own behaviours have, for example, on an individual, team or another department. If they are stressed out and don’t recognise that somebody in their team is drifting away, that’s not good.  The programs develop them to focus on their people –  their team is what makes their life easier in the end. They need to see not only themselves, their own workload, their own fires that are burning but also to focus more on their people and our overall strategy and values.

Do to summarize, strategy, finance, self-awareness, leading teams, and managing and developing the people they are leading. We want them to just take a step back and have a look at this and to have also the chance to experiment with tools, models and ideas. Not every tool is suitable for every person so they should decide on their own what they want to apply in the day to day what’s useful for them.

What is important to you when designing the training interventions which make up such a program?

I want them to work in groups and have personal time with the trainer. We have a mixture of formats including 1-to-1 intakes, using a tool such as DISC or MBTI, face-to-face seminars, virtual workshops and individual coaching. As the participants in the program are coming from all over Europe we also look to reduce travel costs and time using webinars, e-learning, virtual training sessions. The intakes, accountability calls and transfer coaching are all normally done via phone calls or using Webex. Then there are 3 to 4 onsite events with the groups coming together and meeting each other. These could be at the headquarters, a nice seminar hotel or near a plant (so we can organize a plant visit). Cost- and time- wise it is just not possible that they are travelling every few weeks.

What are you looking for from the trainers?

The trainers, of course are a very important element. When we look for trainers it is important to us that they are flexible. Our audience is usually, during the day, under pressure and there can be last minute things coming up so they are not able to attend a the whole session or training. So we need the trainer to be timewise as flexible as possible so if somebody missed some content they don’t get lost in the program. The trainer needs to help them and give an insight into what has been done. They need to be supportive with the people through the whole process – that is really important. Then of course that they have to be able to handle different personalities, functions, nationalities and cultures.

You mentioned culture – what role does this play in delivering the training?

This is a huge challenge, I can tell you. It depends a little bit on which positions the people are coming from. If they are coming from central positions and travelling a lot, meeting a lot of people etc. then usually they are open to everything and it’s easier to work with them. People coming from the production sites somewhere far away in the middle of nowhere – then it’s sometimes hard for them to connect with the other leaders and the softer stuff. It’s also hard for the trainers to manage them in the right way because they are really stuck in their culture. They are not as open as the people who are already used to being in this international environment – but it’s really important to get them to the stage where they are more open to the other cultures and diverse people.

How do your managers and leader react to the programs you offer? And how do you assess the training ?

The reaction of the operational leaders to this approach is very very positive. There are people who are more willing to open up and to work on themselves than others but I must say that those people who opened up completely are the ones that benefited the most from the program in the end.

About assessment, after the training I usually do a post training assessment where it’s a questionnaire where I ask people different sort of questions.


Who is the Secret L&D manager?

The Secret L&D manager is actually many L&D managers.  They are real people who would prefer not to mention their name or company – but do want to write anonymously so they can openly and directly share their ideas and experience with peers.

Implementing the 70-20-10 model- insights from a secret L&D manager

This month’s Secret L&D manager is German, based in Germany and works for a global automotive supply company. She has worked in training and development for over 7 years.

Why are you using 70-20-10?

We introduced the 70-20-10 model in 2016, mainly because too many people were thinking that “development” is just about training, and that if our company wasn’t providing “training” the company wasn’t developing people. The 70-20-10 model helped us show that learning and development is more than just training. Training is one tool, but you can develop yourself all the time. The 70-20-10 model is rolled out globally to our whole organisation. There are also individual initiatives that I have developed which are only rolled out in a specific business area in Europe and for specific development programs like our talent development program.

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How did people react?

I would say the majority of the people in our company did not really understand at first. Only those people who joined the sessions where we explained and showed what 70-20-10 is really about – they understood the sense behind it. Learning and development is not such a big topic in our company and is not the highest priority, so many people read about it and ignored it.

So how have you brought 70-20-10 to life in the organization?

I created an individual development plan, built around 70-20-10, specifically for participants in our training programmes.

Which kind of programmes?

A development programme for our most talented young professionals. First of all, I introduced the 70-20-10 model a little bit to them, and I explained what 70-20-10 is about – and what it is not about too. Mainly that 70% of everything they learn is learning by doing, 20% is learning from others and only 10% is learning by “training”. I must say people were quite surprised about this when I started talking to them about it, but they quickly related to it.  They saw it reflected how they had learned their technical skills, and also their softer skills.

I then introduced a new individual development plan, which I have here in front of me.  I structured it in different levels. First of all, people were asked to define an overall individual development goal. Strictly speaking they weren’t all SMART goals – some were closer to a vision for where do I want to be and by when. As most of the goals were very general, I asked them to explain a little bit about what they meant with this goal. Where they are now, where they want to be and what they think would change when they achieve this goal. These were the key questions we asked them to think about.

Then they had to define three key development areas that they need to work on in order to achieve that very goal. These areas had to be really, really specific. They have to be SMART.

Once they had defined key development areas, they had to define development actions. On the tool I gave them, these actions are actually structured using 70-20-10.  They need to define mostly “learning by doing” actions, then partly “learning through others” actions and the smallest part is the “learning in training” actions.

And then, last but not least, for the individual development areas they were asked to define key performance indicators where they can measure the success of their development. Using KPIs is very characteristic for our automotive supply company because everything is measured in KPIs here. This is a step they understand easily, and I didn’t have to explain to them what a KPI is. Everything they do is measured.

How do you get a KPI from a soft skill?

Well, that’s tricky. Let’s take the simple example of improving presentation skills. So development actions can be “I will present my project four times in front of my boss or my team, and one of these will need to be delivered virtually”. The KPI could be the number of presentations you have done.

So you are just tracking that it’s happening?

Yes. Another example for management training is if you give or receive positive feedback – yes or no – it can be measured. It just helps a little bit, like you said, to track it, to know that they have to document their status. It really helps them to be motivated or to stay motivated.

Have you integrated the 70-20-10 into your senior management programs?

We have.  I think the 70 is really covered by the business simulations we use. In these simulations people lead their own company, competing against each other and most of it is really learning by doing. They have to work with the numbers, they have to work with the reports, they have to make their own decisions. They have the chance to contact their trainers for example, or their colleagues, and ask them for advice, so that’s learning by others maybe, but mostly it’s the learning by doing.

How do senior managers respond to being asked to build KPIs for their own development?

I must say I only really push the KPIs with the young professionals. They need the orientation to have this measured and their development areas are way simpler than the ones from the very experienced senior leaders that we’re training. I don’t push measuring of the senior managers and leaders. I think at their level they should be capable of measuring themselves and knowing how far they have come with their development.

What advice would you give to another training manager who wants to try and introduce this 70-20-10 approach to their organisation?

Firstly, I would say it’s a very rational approach to learning and development. You have to look a little bit at your target training audience and at your people. I mean in our automotive world there are a lot of engineers, and a lot of very structured thinking. They need tools that fit into their rational world and I think 70-20-10 does this for them. Learning is quite abstract and 70-20-10 gives them a framework to put it into numbers. So if you would like to apply this in your company you should really look at what is your target group.

And I see that structure is reflected in the way you have built your tools. I mean you’ve got boxes that need filling in which fits with your target audience, tick boxes, % etc.

Exactly, I’ve got KPIs. As I mentioned, everything is measured here and that’s their way of working. It is what people are used to and comfortable with. I think if you are trying to implement this in a more “creative” or “service”  company you might see much more pushback to the way my tools are designed and the use of KPIs

Thanks for your time and for sharing!

You’re welcome!


Who is the Secret L&D manager?

The Secret L&D manager is actually many L&D managers.  They are real people who would prefer not to mention their name or company – but do want to write anonymously so they can openly and directly share their ideas and experience with peers.

When trainers become participants: 17 tips for getting the most from your training

As a training company we invest in internal training with a passion. We can cover many of the soft skill and leadership topics internally, but when we are lacking the insider knowledge we carefully qualify and source external providers. One of the questions we ask a potential provider is their experience in training trainers. Training trainers can be daunting as you know that your participants are evaluating the training and you as the trainer with a insider’s eye (much like a chef cooking for another chef who is watching them work in their own kitchen!). When trainers become participants, they also go through an internal process which can be every bit as uncomfortable. We recently organized a seminar for a small group of our management team. Bringing in an external trainer changed the dynamics, and as experienced trainers we were now in the passenger seat. Over the 2 days we asked ourselves “what could we as participants do to get the very most from our training?”. Here are our tips for getting the very most from your training experience.

Engage with the training and trainer before you start

  1. Make sure you know why the training has been organized. What is the context for the training? And what does your organization / your manager hope you’ll take from the training? Ideally your manager will have shared this with you, but if not then seek it out.  And if for some reason you can’t get an answer before the training stats then get it during or after the training!  If you want to make the most of your training investment, understanding the what’s and why before the training starts is a must [Making most of your TI ebook]
  2. Build clear goals. What would you like to leave with? What questions do you have? What would you like to learn? practice? reflect on? And discuss these with your colleagues too!
  3. Is there anything you as the participants can do before the training to help the trainer/training really go to plan? Is there any information that you’d like to share? Or want them to be aware of?

Choose your attitude

  1. Suspend judgement. You, your manager or your organization has qualified and selected this training (and maybe this particular trainer) so trust that they know what they are doing and let them do it.
  2. Connected to this, the trainer and training is already paid, so adopt a “what can I take from this?” mentality and not a “prove yourself to me” Be curious and be open to learn what you expect and what you may not expect too!
  3. Share your thoughts and feedback with the trainer before it is too late. Don’t wait until the end to tell the trainer you would like them to have done something differently. Don’t adopt a “I don’t want to rock the boat” or “why bother approach”. It could be that the trainer or training can’t give you what you want – but wouldn’t you rather want to know sooner than later rather than sitting there thinking “when will we ..?”
  4. Reinforce the positive – feedback forms have a place, but like anyone trainers like to hear positive feedback as they work. If you find something useful, interesting or enjoyable then openly share this.

Help yourself during the training so you can help yourself later

  1. Organize and write your notes from the outset in a way that will help you make sense of them when you refer back afterwards.
  2. Find and use tools that will help you during the training. If something interests you proactively ask for suggestions for books, websites etc so you can go deeper later
  3. Be honest and open about your problems. Don’t hesitate to ask you trainer to repeat something, explain something again or share more examples.  If you are struggling there’s a good chance one of your colleagues is too!
  4. Look to bring in examples from your day to day life during the training. This helps to make the training more relevant and transferable. It will also help the other participants and the trainer to connect learning to reality.
  5. Ask all your questions. I mean, why wouldn’t you?
  6. Use your breaks to reset and recharge. Don’t try and work for 10 minutes, but instead stretch, get some fresh air, talk to the others.  Network, reflect or recharge.

See the training as the start of something

  1. Review your notes at the end of each day and in a few weeks, to help with transfer and long-term memory. Consider setting up a calendar reminder a month later to revisit the training
  2. Take one concrete action immediately after the training.
  3. Catch up with your colleagues back at the office. Maybe you want t0 schedule lunch with a colleague who was also in the training and review both content and actions since the training.
  4. Commit to one or two transfer steps you will do after the training. Make these concrete and share them with others.

So whether you have an internal or external trainer, you also have a big role to play in getting the very most from your training day.  Let us know if you have any other tips too!

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Schnelle Behebung von 5 typischen Fehlern, die deutschsprachige Personen auf Englisch machen.

Germans generally speak good business English. A worldwide study published by Harvard Business review ranked Germany 14th for English workforce proficiency  (or “high” and with a score of 60.2 out of 100).  In another study, 100% of German employers interviewed said that English skills are significant for their organization. Evidence like this shows why Germans are rightfully proud of their English skills – and the vast majority of Germans we work with want to be even better. If your first language is German, and you want to improve your English at work, you might find it frustrating that your English-speaking colleagues don’t correct you. After all, you can’t get better if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong! In this post, we’re going to take a look at a handful of German speaker errors that are really common in Business English. The good news? They’re really easily fixed.
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1. “We discussed about last month’s figures at the meeting.”

In English we don’t discuss about something. To fix it, leave out the about after the verb discuss. So the correct English sentence is “We discussed last month’s figures at the meeting.” Keep in mind that you can use about after the noun “discussions” as in “There were discussions about last month’s figures at the meeting”.

2. “Good morning together.”

This is a direct translation of a lovely (and efficient) German way of greeting everyone at the same time. Logically, together, makes 100% sense but it doesn’t work in English. How can you fix it? As with about in the last example, cut it out completely. The correct English phrase is simply “Good morning”.  You can also use alternatives like “Good morning everyone” or “Morning all” (informal)

3. “We see us tomorrow.”

This is also a direct translation from German. We don’t have an identical phrase in English, so it sounds understandable, but strange in English. In this case, you need to use another expression. So the correct English sentence is “We’ll see each other tomorrow”.  You can also use “See you tomorrow.” or “Look forward to seeing you tomorrow.”

4. “I visit normally on Thursdays my clients in Bamberg.”

The word order is German. The sentence is 100% understandable, but it simply sounds wrong in English (likewise when English speakers speak German it can be understandable but grammatically wrong). Adverbs of frequency (words like: normally, sometimes, always, never) almost always go between the person (I) and the verb (visit). So, the correct English sentence is “ I normally visit my clients in Bamberg on Thursdays.”

5. “I work since five years by my company.”

There are only 8 words here, but there are actually 4 mistakes in this sentence.

  1. The tense (work) is wrong.
  2. We can’t combine since and a period of time.
  3. By is not the right preposition.
  4. The word order is German.

Here’s how to fix it:

  • If something started in the past, is happening now, and is likely to continue in the future, then we usually use present perfect simple or continuous e.g. I have worked / I have been working…
  • We can use since with a point in time, and for with a period of time. e.g. since 2012/ for 5 years.
  • There are very few concrete rules for prepositions. You just need to develop a feel for them and learn them in a context. In English we say “ We work for a company”.
  • Word order. This is the same as in the last example – time generally goes to the end of the sentence in English.

So, the correct English sentence is “I have been working for my company for five years.”

And if you’d like more practice then check out our latest Ebook “Common English mistakes (Germans make) and how to correct them”.

Wenn Bullen aneinandergeraten – warum Senior Manager Einfluss nehmen sollten, anstatt Macht auszuüben.

Im vergangenen Jahr haben wir an 3 Führungsprojekten mit Werksleitern in ganz Europa und den USA gearbeitet. In diesen Projekten wurden talentierte operative Führungskräfte am Rande der Beförderung auf eine strategischere Ebene gecoacht. Für viele dieser Manager ist dies ein überraschend schwieriger Sprung. Sie sind nun nicht mehr der einzige “Go-to”-Entscheidungsträger für ihre Teams. Jetzt müssen sie den Input ihrer Vorgesetzten und Kollegen bekommen, um ihre Arbeit zu erledigen. …. sie müssen andere beeinflussen.New Call-to-actionFragen anstatt sagen: der richtige Ansatz beim Beeinflussen

Für Manager mit einem bestimmenden Führungsstil stellt dieser Übergang eine besondere Herausforderung dar, da sie von einem “sagenden” zu einem “fragendem” Ansatz übergehen müssen, um andere zu beeinflussen. Diejenigen, die es gewohnt sind, anderen zu sagen, was sie tun sollen, sind in der Regel mit schnellen Entscheidungen und Sofortmaßnahmen vertraut. Bislang haben sie sich auf ihre “Macht” verlassen…. und waren in ihrer Karriere bisher relativ erfolgreich! Ihre Macht stammt von/aus:

  • Organisationsbefugnis (“Ich bin der Betriebsleiter”)
  • Expertenstatus (“Ich habe 15 Jahre Erfahrung in diesem Bereich”)
  • Informationskraft (“Ich war von Anfang an dabei”)
  • Ausstrahlung (“Ich weiß, dass du mir folgen wirst”)

Tatsächlich ist ein Manager oft so sehr an die Ausübung von Macht gewöhnt, dass er den Unterschied zwischen Macht und Beeinflussung nicht kennt. Ein Teil unserer Rolle im Training besteht darin, Ihnen zu helfen, die greifbaren Unterschiede zwischen “Ich möchte, dass du X machst und du tust es. Was du darüber denkst, ist zweitrangig.” (Macht) und “Ich weiß, dass du tun wirst, was getan werden muss, weil du es tun willst und glaubst, dass es das Richtige ist.” (Beeinflussen).

Wenn Bullen aneinander geraten und warum die Beeinflussung durch Macht aufhört, effektiv zu sein.

Stellen Sie sich zwei Stierbullen vor, die aneinander geraten und ihre Hörner wetzen. So ist es auch, wenn zwei Führungskräfte mit bestimmenden Stilen versuchen, den gleichen operativen Raum zu teilen – es können Probleme auftreten. Während Trainings und Coachings haben wir folgende Ausdrücke öfters gehört: “Er hört mir nicht zu”, “Sie untergräbt meine Expertise” und “Es ist sein Weg oder kein Weg”. Nachdem wir tiefer gebohrt und nachgefragt haben, wie sie versucht haben, andere zu beeinflussen, stellten wir oft fest, dass sie sich nur auf einen bestimmenden oder einen überzeugenden Stil der Beeinflussung (push styles) verlassen – im Gegensatz zu einem kollaborativen oder visionären Stil (pull styles).

Warum verschiedene Beeinflussungsstile wichtig sind

Im Rahmen unseres Training “Beeinflussen und Überzeugen” arbeiten wir mit Kunden zusammen, um ihnen zu helfen, verschiedene “Beeinfluss-Stile” zu verstehen und anzuwenden. Kein Stil ist besser oder schlechter als ein anderer – jeder hat seine Stärken und Schwächen, und jeder findet seinen Platz.  Wie Dale Carnegie jedoch so visuell in How to win friends and influence people beschreibt, ein Stil für jede Situation zu verwenden, ist wie “mit Erdbeeren zu fischen”…. mit anderen Worten ineffektiv und letztlich sinnlos. Da Manager sich auf eine strategischere Rolle zubewegen und in Zusammenarbeit mit anderen Führungskräften Ergebnisse liefern müssen, müssen sie verschiedene Überzeugungs-Stile entwickeln. Sie müssen manchmal “fragen” und nicht nur “sagen” – pull not push. Sie müssen davon loslassen Dinge durch ihre “Macht” allein erledigen zu wollen. Also, was soll man tun?

Hören Sie auf zu “sagen”, fangen Sie an zu “fragen” – 5 praktische Schritte, um andere Führungskräfte zu beeinflussen

Wie Marshall Goldsmith sagte: “Was dich hierher gebracht hat, wird dich nicht dorthin bringen”. Sich nur auf Macht zu verlassen, wird nicht das Engagement liefern, das für den individuellen und organisatorischen Erfolg erforderlich ist. Führungskräfte müssen das Beeinflussen und Überzeugen auf Ihrem Weg nach oben beherrschen.

  • Zu erkennen, dass der Stil und die Methoden, die Sie gewohnt sind, nicht funktionieren, ist ein erster großer Schritt. Diese Erkenntnis kann sich unangenehm anfühlen und manchmal länger auf sich warten lassen!
  • Die Bereitschaft, etwas anderes auszuprobieren, ist der zweite Schritt. Ein einfacher Tipp ist es, immer mehr als eine gute Option zu präsentieren. Wenn Sie versuchen, jemanden zu beeinflussen, der ebenfalls ein bestimmender Typ ist, denken Sie daran, dass er (wie Sie) es nicht schätzt, mit nur einer Option eingekesselt zu werden. Eine einzige Option fühlt sich wie ein Befehl an. Wenn Sie sich selbst sagen hören “Wir müssen…” oder “Unsere einzige wirkliche Option ist…“, bedeutet das, dass Sie sich wahrscheinlich immer noch auf Ihre Macht verlassen.
  • Versetzen Sie sich in die Lage des Anderen und versuchen Sie herauszufinden, was für Ihr Gegenüber wichtig ist, und beziehen Sie es in Ihre Überlegungen ein. Lassen Sie die andere Person wissen, dass Sie versuchen, deren Bezugsrahmen zu verwenden. Wenn Sie deren Interessen nicht kennen und nicht wissen, was sie schätzen, ist es wichtig, es herauszufinden. Lassen Sie ihr Gegenüber wissen, dass dessen Erfolg auch für Sie von Bedeutung ist.
  • Finden Sie heraus, was Sie kontrollieren, beeinflussen und akzeptieren können. Erweitern Sie Ihren Einfluss, indem Sie mehr Überzeugungs-Methoden entwickeln.
  • Und dann überlegen Sie, was Sie sagen und wie Sie es sagen.

Wenn Sie mehr darüber erfahren möchten, wie wir erfolgreich Präsenztrainings und Trainings in virtuellen Vortragsformaten in ganz Europa und darüber hinaus durchgeführt haben, dann zögern Sie nicht, uns zu kontaktieren.

How experienced presenters do it

There are presenters out there who seem to have it all. They speak, the audience listens. They make a joke, the audience laughs. They don’t umm, they don’t ahhh, and they speak clearly, sharing their message and reinforcing it just enough throughout. By the end of the presentation, their audience is informed, educated and leaves the room with all their questions answered. How? This blog shares 4 simple tips and includes 4 extremely useful presentation eBooks.

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Know your whats and whys

This is incredibly obvious, perhaps even to inexperienced presenters – but it probably the most overlooked element during the design stage. When you ask them, experienced presenters tell you that the very first thing they do is crystallize what they want to achieve with the presentation.

These questions will help you get started:

  1. What do I want to achieve?
  2. Why should people listen to me?
  3. What do I want the audience to know after the presentation?

An excellent tip is to write down in a single sentence what your presentation is about and why you are presenting. If you can’t do it in 14 words or less, rewrite it – and one of the 14 words needs to be the powerful “so”. e.g.  “I’m sharing how experienced presenters do it, so you can improve your presentations.” That sentence then gives you a very simple framework and clear criteria for what I want to put in and take out.

“Designing your presentation well lays the foundations for your success.”

Scott Levey

Powerpoint doesn’t make the presentation

Perhaps the comedic writers Steve Lowe and Brendan McArthur[1] best summed it up – “PowerPoint: The Microsoft tool that encourages people to think and talk like ********s.” You make the presentation. Powerpoint is a supporting tool. We’ve all done it. We find a set of existing slides and copy and paste our way to a new presentation. We think in slides and we build what we say around what’s on the slides. Experienced presenters build the presentation slides after they have planned the presentation, when they know what they are going to say and have a clear structure in mind. They use as few slides as possible because they want the focus on them and their message. This way, the presentation has a better chance of becoming a visual aid, rather than the main feature.

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Get comfortable

Have you noticed it? The best presenters are in control and entirely comfortable with what they’re doing. Wow. How do they do it? They practice. Out loud, probably. Practicing is not thinking to yourself what you will say – it’s actually saying it. Recording yourself and practicing in front of a mirror will tell you exactly what your audience will see and hear as you present your content. When you come across as unsure of yourself or uncertain of your content you are creating barriers to success. And don’t focus on “learning it by heart” – focus on the big messages and the important bridges.

“Practice your presentation a day before you hold it -if you start practising an hour before you run the risk of deciding to change things around which makes things harder.

James Culver

 

eBook: The definitive checklist for qualifying training providers

Don’t lose yourself, but if you do…

Your mind draws a blank. You’ve forgotten to make an important point. You just realized you’re babbling away. You don’t know the answer to the question. The audience looks at you like they don’t quite understand what you’re trying to say. Now what?

We all make mistakes and “owning your mistakes” helps build credibility . Smile. Don’t wind yourself up. Move forward. Say it later. Focus on the next point. Say that you’ll find out the answer but you don’t have it right now. Ask the audience – what have you understood so far? – and take it from there.

Moments when things go wrong happen – so remember they are only moments. Even the most experienced presenters draw a blank sometimes. If you look carefully, you’ll see that they have developed techniques that work for them (they take a sip of water while gathering their thoughts, they make a joke out of it, etc.). Experience taught them that.

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If you’d like to benefit from practical training then take a look at our training solutions for presenting across cultures, presenting in a virtual environment and our challenging Presenting with IMPACT


[1] Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit?: Insanely Annoying Modern Things – By Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur with Brendan Hay (Grand Central Publishing)

Business English training: on-the-job training (for the job)

On-the-job (OTJ) training has been a cornerstone in our approach to in-house Business English training since our first InCorporate Trainers started their jobs (one of them was Scott Levey). When we explain the concept of on-the-job training to potential clients, they “understand” what we’re saying … BUT …they don’t really “get” how effective and beneficial on-the-job training is until they have seen it in action. This post aims to explain what it is, how it works, and how participants benefit, using some non-specific examples of on-the-job training.

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The benefits of on-the-job training

OTJ training is highly effective because the training takes place alongside and as part of your daily work. The trainer uses your work situations (your emails, your virtual meetings, your plant tours) as the basis for your learning. On-the-job training takes place at work, while you are working. This brings two huge benefits.

  1. You maximize your time because you are benefiting from training while you are working.
  2. You can directly transfer what you learn to your job. Your training is completely based on a real and concrete task. Everything you learn is relevant.

If you are familiar with the 70-20-10 model, you’ll know that 70% of learning comes through “doing” and from “experience”. Learning while you work is highly effective and this is the heart of on-the-job training.

“I helped Hans to de-escalate a situation in Supply Chain Management. Hans felt that the American party was wound-up and overly difficult. Hans brainstormed phrases with my help and he wrote a draft email. I helped him improve the structure and tone of the email and suggested he rewrote some of his sentences in plain English. A few hours later, the American party positively replied and the whole thing was solved by the time Hans went home.”

What exactly is on-the-job training and how does it work?

With on-the-job training, the trainer is there when you need assistance in preparing emails, specifications, manuals, reports, slides and other documentation. The trainer can support you in the planning, writing and reviewing stage. The trainer is also available to you for preparing meetings, phone calls, web meetings, teleconferences, presentations and negotiations.  They can then shadow you in action and provide personalized and situationally-based feedback.

On-the-job training focuses on your priorities at work and on you improving your business English in those areas. It can be

  • reactive where you ask the trainer for help “Can you help me improve these slides?”
  • proactive where the trainer encourages you to share work you have done/are doing in English “I heard you are involved in writing the R-Spec for the new project. How can I support you?”

“One of my participants, a product manager, had to deliver two presentations in English. It was basically the same presentation, but for two different audiences.  Observing her in our first practice session, I made a note of language points to work on. We worked on these, and a few other things (key messages, adapting messages to different audiences, Q&A session) over the next week. She delivered the presentations to me again, already with much more confidence and fluency – and then she practised with a few colleagues in a weekly group session and benefitted from both their positive feedback and the confidence boost.  Finally, I watched her deliver from the back and she did great.  After the presentations we debriefed and I shared my feedback (what went really well, what would she like to focus more on next time etc) . She was too critical of her performance and I helped her to be realistic about what she needs to focus on.”

What on-the-job training isn’t

What the trainer does not do is write the email/document for you (where’s the learning in that?). One common misconception is that on-the-job trainers are translators or proof readers. They’re not, in the same way that translators and proof readers aren’t trainers. Collaborative proof reading and translation can be an option, but the ownership needs to stay with the learner.

Another misconception is that on-the-job training is traditional “classroom training” during work time. The trainer will certainly use the “insider” view and what they have seen on-the-job to tailor traditional “off the job” training. This means your group training, coaching, 1-1 training, and seminars are closer to your workplace and that the transfer of learning is smoother.  But “on the job” training is learning while actually doing. There’s a good example of how this looks in action in an R&D department here.

“Three of my participants had written a 300-page instruction manual and they came to me with the request to help them improve it. Nobody in their department understood it enough to successfully use the system that it was meant to explain. I told them I would read it. Oh boy. We worked on writing with the reader in mind, structuring documents to make them scannable and writing in plain English. Visuals replaced paragraphs and we even created a few video tutorials too.  Four weeks later, they produced a second manual. Over one hundred pages lighter, it was clear, comprehensive, mistake free, and written in a style that everyone could understand, even me. As a result, the system that was supposed to make everyone’s job easier made everyone’s job easier.”

Bringing on-the-job training to life

We sign confidentiality agreements with our clients. Even when we don’t, we wouldn’t use their actual documentation online, so these examples are non-specific and Hans is not really called Hans … she’s called XXXX.

If you would like to know more about the benefits of this approach, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Nobody likes giving negative feedback – but many of us want to hear it

If someone is unhappy with your performance at work, wouldn’t you want to know? At the very least, you’d like an opportunity to clear the air, or address the problem, or explain…or something. Yet when it comes to giving negative or difficult feedback, most of us feel reluctant to give it. We don’t want to hurt the other person or we are afraid of a conflict, so we end up avoiding it. No, giving negative feedback is not one of the enjoyable aspects of managing people. Doing it constructively is a challenge for the best of us, and even when we do it well – who’s to say that your feedback is taken on board and improvements are made?

The big (free) eBook of negotiations language

Here are 7 tips to get you started, and they are explained in more detail below:

  1. Be clear about what you want at the end before you begin
  2. Use language that focuses on the situation, not on the person
  3. Turn up to the conversation, stay there and speak out
  4. Be open, try to be objective, don’t judge
  5. Demonstrate understanding
  6. Give examples and share patterns – and the impact on you/others
  7. Believe in change

Be clear about what you want at the end before you begin

What is obvious to you is not always obvious to others. People cannot look into your head (or heart) and guess how you’d like things. You need to be able to explain, in simple and safe language, what you want from the conversation and why you are starting it. Think about it, picture it. Simply saying that you want something to improve is not enough, it means different things to different people. Be specific and focus on the future. A useful approach is to know if this is an A, B or C discussion.  Are you focusing on a specific Action, an ongoing Behaviour or possible Consequences ? Try not to mix them. Another approach my colleagues use in training is “feed forward not back”.

And finally, think about this: if you’re giving negative feedback because you want to ‘make a point’ – there really is no point.

Use language that focuses on the situation, not on the person

Giving negative feedback is always a very personal thing, for both parties. Keep this is in mind when the other person takes your feedback personal. There are no magic phrases to use when giving negative feedback but avoid language like “you did” and “you shouldn’t have”. Owning your sentence with “I” is a better place than judging or blaming with “you”. Try sentences that start with “I noticed” or “I saw”. Avoid using “I think” or “I heard” as this implies a personal feeling, gossip, and/or judgement. Do keep in mind though that the “I” isn’t magic. If you are blaming somebody, the “I” doesn’t change how they react. And if you are managing people consider sometimes using “our” or “we” as a replacement for “I”.

Given time to absorb and reflect, most of us are grown-up enough to move past the personal impact of what is being said. More often than not, once we look back on the situation, we’re glad that someone gave us the feedback and brought it to our attention so that we can try to change our behaviour, or take appropriate action.

Turn up to the conversation, stay there and speak out

If you are going to give difficult or negative feedback you need to be present in the moment. You are committed to the conversation because you believe both parties will benefit. Shut out unhelpful self-talk like “well it won’t make any difference” or “ I knew he would say that when I said this”.  You both need to focus on this conversation and the outcome. You owe it to both of you to say what you think and feel, taking responsibility for your words and the outcome.

Be open, try to be objective, don’t judge

Don’t be vague, don’t be ambiguous. If the situation is a big deal, don’t call it a minor issue. Be open to receiving feedback on your feedback. Listening is as important as talking. Effective feedback is always a two-way street. And remember, what is obvious to others is not always obvious to you.

It’s almost never a good idea to judge others by your standards. You would do this or that, if you were him or her in this situation? You’re not him or her, you’re you. Or, he or she should do this or that in this situation? Better yet, if you were him or her, you wouldn’t even be in this situation… None of that means anything, beyond that you are different people.

Demonstrate understanding

For feedback to lead to a positive outcome for both sides you need to demonstrate understanding.  You can do this by …

  • Actively looking to find truth and agreement in what they are saying and validating this.  If you disagree with everything they say, how likely is it that they will accept and embrace everything you are saying?
  • Keep calm, centred and actively side-step confrontation and escalation.
  • Summarize your understanding of the other persons feelings (and be open to them correcting you).
  • Summarize your understanding of what they have said (and again, they can correct you)
  •  Asking a straight question to build bridges

Give examples and share patterns – and the impact on you/others

Your vested interest and understanding of the situation are important and this should be clear early in the conversation. Models such as DESC build this in. If you are not clear about something, ask and listen. Stick to what was observed. And as mentioned earlier, know whether you want to focus on an action, a pattern of behaviours  or consequences.

Trainer tip

“When we talk about patterns of behaviour, people will typically ask for an example. You are obliged to give examples- but if somebody is behaving defensively be prepared for them to then pull the example apart (challenge facts, bring in new information that may or may not be relevant, argue it was a unique situation). Your task is to listen, learn AND keep the conversation focussed on the pattern, not on single events or actions.”

Believe in change, support change

The words you say, your thoughts, your body language – if you don’t believe this change can happen, it probably won’t. You are a part of this change. You are, in fact, one of the initiators. More often than not, you can do more than give negative feedback. For change to work, it can’t come at a cost of something else and it often isn’t the responsibility of only one person to make the change. Look to create a “safe” environment where change is made easier.

And finally, not every moment needs to be a feedback moment

Sometimes people are having a rough time, sometimes problems do correct themselves. Not everything needs to be addressed, not every situation is a feedback or learning moment. Sometimes choosing not to give negative feedback is okay too – unless avoiding it comes at a cost (e.g. your frustration, team spirit, the problem escalates). Not giving difficult or negative feedback doesn’t mean saying nothing and doing nothing. Try a different approach – the feed forward method focuses the discussion on common goals and what you need to see done differently going forward. Use the  CIA model (Control, Influence, Accept) to determine which parts apply to this situation – and finding techniques that will help you move past it, without giving negative feedback.

 

Delivering your first virtual presentation – useful tips for beginners

No matter which system you are using, many people find their first virtual presentation to be an uncomfortable experience. Firstly, remember that the fundamentals behind what makes an effective presentation are generally transferable. Secondly, making changes to the way you plan your virtual presentation is where you set the scene for success. In a previous blog post”Your first virtual presentation – practical planning tips for beginners”, we looked at some key questions, including “How am I going to keep their attention in a virtual presentation environment?”, “What can I do in advance to feel more comfortable?” and the dreaded “What if something goes wrong with the technology?”. This post focuses on tips for actually delivering your first virtual presentation.  Contact us now

Build all-round confidence in the technology when you start

Start by demonstrating to yourself (and others) that the technology is working. This could be as simple as “Before we begin I want to take 30 seconds to check everybody is up and running technology-wise”. Check people can see the same thing, that they can hear you, and you can hear them. If you are expecting people to use other system functions e.g. comments, then this is the stage where you clarify this.

Remember that body language and eye-contact are even more important when presenting virtually

  • Position the camera so that either a) your audience has a good close up of your face, allowing them to see your eyes, smile and other facial movements, or, b) your upper torso so they can see your posture, arms and hands. Avoid the dead zone of  “head and shoulders”. They’ll see your head but can’t see the important facial details, nor the arms and hands.
  • When presenting look directly into your camera and not at the person you are talking to (as this will look as if you are actually looking away from them!). Although you won’t be making eye contact, the “illusion of eye contact” is important when presenting virtually.
  • If possible present standing with your laptop and camera at head-height. Its hard to maintain energy levels sat down.
  • If you are going to use notes, then have your notes at eye-height. Do not put your notes on your desk.  Looking at the top of your head doesn’t help your audience feel connected with you.
  • Always use a headset whenever possible. Mobile phones rob you of your hands and body language. And try to avoid talking over a speaker phone as this always impacts sound quality.

Virtual presentations aren’t natural for many of us at the very beginning.  I recall a purchaser sharing that “she felt like an idiot talking to herself”. But as with any communication skill if you integrate tips and advice and practice, practice, practice then they become less daunting and more effective.  Plan, practice and perfect -your audience will thank you.

Focus on bringing life and intimacy into your voice

  • Make an extra effort to speak with enthusiasm – if you sound nervous/ awkward/disengaged what are you expecting them to feel?
  • Use your hands naturally when you are speaking (even if the camera is focusing just on your face). Again, it will help you sound more natural and human. It will also help you feel more comfortable and confident.
  • Smile when you are presenting – even if the cameras aren’t on! This may sound strange but we can hear smiles, and a smile will always come through in your voice.
  • Consciously vary your pitch, volume and speed. If you are tend to speak fast then slow down for effect. Make your voice interesting to listen to.
  • Actively use pauses and “uhmms”. This remind your audience that this is a “live” presentation and that you aren’t a recording.

Build intimacy through questions and answers

  • Make a presentation – don’t read from your slides. Your audience can read faster than they can listen.
  • Encourage and take questions during the presentation. This is a huge step as it makes the interaction feel more personal, natural and fluid.
  • Use your audience’s names whenever possible. Again, this helps to make the presentation feel more conversational plus will strengthen their attention
  • Look for examples that create personal connections. This will make your presentation sound more like a dialogue vs. monologue.

And the most simple but often forgotten …

  • Keep a glass of water at your side. You’ll need it
  • And you’ll get better with practice!

 

 

10 weitere sportliche Redewendungen, die Sie in Business Meetings hören werden.

Im vergangenen Jahr haben wir eine Liste von 10 gängigen amerikanischen Sport Redewendungen zusammengestellt, die von unseren Kunden und Lesern gut aufgenommen wurden.  Da der Blog-Post so beliebt war, wollten wir noch weitere Sportbegriffe teilen, die Sie im Büro hören können…

Writing emails that people read: Free eBook download

to take a rain check

Aus dem Baseball, es bedeutet: “Ich kann jetzt nicht, aber machen wir es ein anderes Mal.’.  “Thanks for the invite to happy hour, but can I take a rain check?  I need to get home for dinner with my family.”

a Hail Mary pass

Aus dem American Football, was soviel bedeutet wie “ein verzweifelter Versuch in letzter Minute, etwas zu schaffen”. “We offered the client a 15% reduction in price as a Hail Mary to win their business.”

to touch base (with someone)

Aus dem Baseball, was soviel bedeutet wie “mit jemandem in Kontakt treten”. “Can you touch base with Chester next week to see how he is doing with the forecast numbers?”

a front runner

Aus dem Pferderennen: “die Person, die führend ist, aber noch nicht gewonnen hat”. “I think we are the front runner for the winning the account, but XYZ’s offer was also very strong.”

the ball is in (someone’s) court

Aus dem Tennis: “Es ist jemand an der Reihe, Maßnahmen zu ergreifen oder den nächsten Zug zu machen”. . “I received an offer for a new job.  The ball is now in my court to ask for more money or decline it.”

the home stretch

Aus dem Pferderennsport, d.h.’kurz vor dem Ende sein’ oder ‘in der letzten Phase oder Etappe zu sein’.  “This has certainly been a challenging project, but we are now in the home stretch so let’s stay focussed and keep on schedule.”

to get the ball rolling

Aus Ballsportarten: “etwas anfangen”.. “OK, now we’re all here for today’s meeting let’s get the ball rolling. Heinz, can you start with an update on ….”

to keep your eye on the ball

Aus Ballsportarten: “wachsam, auf der Hut sein”. “We have worked with this client before and we know that they can be chaotic. We need to keep our eyes on the ball, especially when it comes to safety on site.

par for the course

Aus dem Golf, was soviel bedeutet wie “etwas Normales oder Erwartetes”.  ‘Jim was late for the meeting again today.  That is par for the course with him.’

to strike out

Aus dem Baseball: bei etwas zu versagen.  ‘I have tried to get a meeting with the Head of Purchasing 5 times but have struck out each time.’

Der geheime Manager für Lernen & Entwicklung: Wonach suchen L&E-Manager in einem Trainingsangebot?

Der geheime Manager für Lernen & Entwicklung dieses Monats ist Australier mit Sitz in Deutschland und arbeitet für ein amerikanisches Unternehmen, das Bildverarbeitungssysteme und Software produziert.  Seit über 18 Jahren ist er in der Aus- und Weiterbildung tätig: als L&E-Manager, Inhouse-Trainer und als externer Trainingsanbieter.

eBook: The definitive checklist for qualifying training providersWas erwarten Sie von einem Trainingsangebot?

In erster Linie möchte ich sehen, ob der Anbieter mir tatsächlich zugehört hat. Ich möchte Nachweise dafür sehen, dass sie aufgenommen haben, was ich gesagt habe, und dass sie meine Erwartungen klar verstanden haben. Was ich damit meine, ist, dass das Angebot meine Bedürfnisse und die Informationen widerspiegeln muss, die ich ihnen zu Beginn gegeben habe. Als nächstes möchte ich auch einen Mehrwert sehen. Ja, ich möchte sicher sein, dass sie mir zugehört haben, aber ich möchte auch, dass sie etwas mehr an den Tisch bringen. Ich schätze, ich erwarte von ihnen, dass sie mir zeigen, dass sie etwas von ihrem Fachwissen und ihrer Erfahrung teilen, indem sie mir eine neue Idee oder eine Lösung für ein Problem anbieten, an das ich nicht gedacht habe.

Um ehrlich zu sein, will oder brauche ich nicht wirklich ein super detailliertes Angebotsdokument. In der Tat, je mehr ich darüber nachdenke, desto unwahrscheinlicher ist es, dass ich von einem 50-seitigen ausführlichen Bericht beeindruckt bin. Seien wir ehrlich, wir sind alle sehr beschäftigt, also möchte ich ein Dokument sehen, in dem sie es in Teile zerlegen, so dass ich einen klaren Blick darauf werfen kann, was passieren wird und wie sie es erreichen werden. Oh und nicht zu vergessen, das erwartete Ergebnis am Ende des Trainings. Also das, was Menschen nach dem Training besser können sollten als vorher. Deshalb schicken wir sie schließlich auf eine Schulung.

Natürlich möchte ich ein klares Verständnis dafür, wie viel mich die Trainingslösung kosten wird. Ja, ich weiß, dass es nicht immer möglich ist, alle möglichen Kosten zu identifizieren, aber was ich nicht will, sind böse Überraschungen später im Prozess. So als ob man plötzlich herausfindet, dass man für ein Business Class Ticket bezahlt. Das wäre ein Problem.

Wenn es das erste Angebot eines neuen Anbieters ist, welche Extras benötigen Sie dann?

Die Dinge sind ein wenig anders, wenn es jemand ist, den man noch nicht kennt. Wenn es das erste Mal ist, möchte ich wirklich ein Beispiel dafür sehen, wie das Trainingsmaterial aussieht. Dieses Aussehen und Gefühl ist mir sehr wichtig. Ich möchte sichergehen, dass das Material professionell aussieht und nicht z.B. voller Cartoons oder handgezeichneter Bilder ist. Am ersten Tag, wenn unsere Mitarbeiter in die Trainingseinheit gehen und das Material zum ersten Mal abholen, möchte ich, dass sie beeindruckt sind. Der erste Eindruck ist wichtig.

Ebenso möchte ich wissen, was sie am Ende des Trainings bekommen werden. Werden sie ein ganzes Folienpaket, PDF-Dokumente mit Notizen und Fotos von Flipcharts erhalten? Sie wissen, was ich meine. Was auch immer es ist, ich möchte das im Voraus wissen. Muster sind also immer eine gute Idee.

Benötigen Sie Informationen über die Anbieter im Angebot?

Generell nicht, ich mache gerne meine Hausaufgaben, bevor jemand mit mir zur Angebotsphase kommt. Ich möchte mich einigermaßen sicher fühlen, dass der Anbieter dem Job gewachsen ist, egal um welchen Job es sich handelt. Bevor ich also um ein Angebot bitte, habe ich selbst ein wenig recherchiert und das schließt Referenzen von den vorhergehenden Kunden und solche Dinge mit ein. So etwas sollte vor einem Angebot gehandhabt werden, nicht während oder nach dem Prozess.

Wie viele Angebote sehen Sie sich für eine Sitzung an?

Im Allgemeinen will ich 2 oder 3. Mehr, und ich verschwende meine Zeit damit, herumzustochern und mache dann eigentlich keine gute Arbeit dabei, die guten Angebote überhaupt herauszufiltern. Es gibt Zeiten, in denen ich genau weiß, wonach ich suche, und dann reicht wahrscheinlich ein Anbieter schon aus. Sicher, für mich als internen Trainingsanbieter ist es wichtig, mehrere Anbieter zu haben. Aber wenn es Kurse gibt, bei denen wir nur einen bestimmten Anbieter verwenden, habe ich damit kein Problem.

Welche Angebote frustrieren Sie?

Ich denke, die Sache, die mich mehr als alles andere frustriert, ist, wenn man das Gefühl hat, dass man gerade das Gleiche bekommt, was sie an alle schicken. Es macht mich verrückt! Warum habe ich 2 Stunden damit verbracht, meine Situation zu erklären und bekomme trotzdem ein allgemeines Angebot zugeschickt? Das gibt mir das Gefühl, dass ich meine Zeit verschwendet habe. Ich habe nie die Absicht und werde wahrscheinlich nie (oder sehr selten) ein Produkt von der Stange kaufen.

Und da ist noch eine Sache. Angebote, die keinerlei Erwähnung über das beabsichtigte Ergebnis erhalten und das, was wir eigentlich erreichen wollen. Ich würde sagen, das sind die beiden frustrierendsten Dinge.

 


 

Wer ist der geheime Manager für Lernen & Entwicklung?

Der geheime L&E Manager ist in Wirklichkeit eine Vielzahl von L&E Managern.  Es sind echte Menschen, die es vorziehen würden, ihren Namen oder ihr Unternehmen nicht zu erwähnen – aber anonym schreiben wollen, damit sie ihre Ideen und Erfahrungen offen und direkt mit Kollegen teilen können.