Nish always takes it slow! He may be ten steps ahead of his audience but he is very careful to nurture their understanding as he tells his story. I had the honour to be present as he introduced some new ways of working to his colleagues.
Nish and I knew the answer. We had a plan. My natural approach would be to tell the world the plan and bask in the glory of my great insights and creativity. However, after too many failures to convince others of how to do things better, I have learned that others are better at getting ideas accepted than I am.
Don is Australian and the slight accent seems to charm people. But his greatest skill, in my eyes, is taking my injudicious statement, rewording it and making it acceptable to a hostile audience. I did adopt, in my own clumsy way, a technique from a CIO that I used to work for. He used the phrase “I want to build on that” and then say what ever he wanted very loosely attaching it to the previous statement. I have got away with some quite outrageous leaps doing this.
Back to Nish. He would:
- Identify all the people who might have an interest
- Work out a message that they would accept
- Carefully plan the steps in getting that message over
- Pace his communications to take just one step at a time
- Meet each group of people and slowly and carefully take them through one concept, one change, one idea at a time.
I would sit and try to fade into the background. I wanted to speak, I wanted to accelerate the conversation. But I knew better. My natural confrontational approach does open up the discussion but sometimes it closes minds. So I continue to sit there, only speaking when asked to, partly frustrated and partly bored.
Nish would achieve his communication goal and close the meeting, no extended discussion. We would then review what had happened. What were my observations on:
- Body language
- Voice tone
- Unusual phrases
- Changes in posture
- Was anybody left out?
- What were the energy level? Did they change?
- Had he communicated effectively?
We would assess and revise our communication plan after this review. We would also assess and revise the changes that we planned. Nish emphasised that we should be learning from our communication not telling.
After our audience had time to adsorb the message but before they forgot it, we would take the next step in the communication plan. After some weeks or months, Nish would have convinced all the stakeholders that there is a useful change to be made and we would be given the go ahead to implement the changes. These changes were not ours any more. They had evolved through the conversations and now belonged to the group.
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