How often have you been to one of those training talks or team building exercises where what gets expressed has little significant change on your personal development in the workplace?
We attend the talk by the “expert” in the field and we sit through a long presentation with 100 powerpoint slides.
While some of the points may be valid, there is invariably no follow up. We walk out of the talk, perhaps feeling slightly better, or even slightly worse, and in the next couple of days we fall back into bad practices and ineffective communication.
The problem with most powerpoint presentations is that they try to get you to understand, and if you don’t understand you fail. This just erodes trust and creates misunderstanding.
The core assumption of traditional communication is: I must get you to understand me, and you must get me to understand you. This either results in tension or frustration and anger or people just go quiet and sulk in the corner.
Through a process of feeling valued and understood will team performance in the workplace begin to escalate.
Learning healthy communication skills is a process. It’s something that has to be learnt and practiced and then learnt again and practiced again.
If we are to develop empowered team players, strong relationships, success and results in the workplace, we have to take the time to understand ourselves, our colleagues as well as each others feelings, needs, desires and aspirations.
Without a strong sense of identity and connection, we remain at the surface level of fault finding, trying to get people to understand us and marginalization.
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