The Stanton Marris Blog

• The six Cs of communication

  Nearly every client meeting at the moment touches on conversation that managers may find difficult – communicating downsizing programmes and redundancies, or just the need to manage general uncertainty and anxiety that can affect performance.

  When emotions are involved, too many managers handle the conversation badly, or avoid it altogether.

  We use a simple, effective tool for communicating high-concern messages, known as ‘The six Cs’. Of course there’s a skill to how you use them, but if you follow them in order, you can be sure you have at least touched all the bases:

  • Care – show empathy with the person/people receiving the message
  • Cut to the chase – say in a simple, clear sentence the news you have to communicate
  • Criteria – give the three main (evidence-based, not opinions) reasons why the decision has been made, or the criteria used to reach a decision
  • Concerns – acknowledge the concerns of the potential human or personal impact of your message
  • Confirm – repeat the headline message to re-state the facts, and add any helpful practical details such as next steps
  • Commitment – genuine personal commitment to provide support, keep people informed, and an organisational commitment to treat people fairly and well.   
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  Published July 2, 2010
  Written by Beatrice Hollyer. This article is filed under: communication
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• 3 simple questions to improve collaboration

  How many businesses do you know with the word ‘collaboration’ in their set of values? In my experience, there are dozens.

  And yet, it’s one of those organisational goals that sometimes seems to run counter to human instincts. As we often say, ‘easy to understand – hard to do’. While everyone signs up to collaboration in principle, it’s certainly not easy to achieve in practice. There are always a thousand reasons why it comes more naturally to work with the people in your immediate team than the team on the next floor, or on another site.

  At the most basic level, managers are busy, and talking to people who aren’t in your immediate loop takes time. It might achieve more for the success of the business than keeping your head down in the tunnel of yet another task, but it can be hard to keep that wider perspective.

  What could this mean for your business? Improve your businesses collaboration efforts by asking these 3 questions:

  • Do you all have a shared vision of the strategy? Go round the table and ask people to describe it in their own words. You could be surprised how much the visions differ.
  • What is pulling you away from the shared commitment you have all made to the success of the business? An honest answer to this question from each key individual could form the basis of a fundamental re-think about how to re-energise the business and make it work for everyone.
  • Has everyone bought into the vision and the strategy? How do you know?  Engaging everyone from the ground up in the development of the way forward is the best way to make sure that, even when times are tough, people retain commitment to the business they have helped to shape.

  Advancing your own agenda might win you a few battles. But it won’t win the campaign. And success in today’s economic climate means that focus on the wider campaign, and being willing to let go of any personal priorities that don’t serve the shared goals of the enterprise, could make the critical difference for your business.

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  Published June 1, 2010
  Written by Beatrice Hollyer. This article is filed under: collaboration, communication, partnership
  1 Comment

• Direct engagement over religious marriages

  Recently I was honoured to be asked to take the role of independent chair and skilled facilitator for an exciting new initiative from the Ministry of Justice.

  In response to the issue of religious marriages not being legally recognised, the Secretary of State for Justice, Jack Straw, supported face-to-face meetings to discuss these issues directly with Imams, given their influence in the community and role in officiating over religious marriages.

  Having a religious marriage that is not recognised under civil law, often means people can encounter difficulties with division of assets should the marriage break down, and with inheritance and pension issues if a partner dies. It can mean that couples cannot receive married couples’ benefits and can lead to problems when applying for passports or to institutions such as universities. Feedback from Islamic groups was that people wishing to get married would benefit from more mosques being registered as buildings where marriages can take place.

  Thirty seven Imams attended the event, including others with influence in the wider community. The discussion was honest and open, with many difficulties aired and ways forward developed. By the end, many Imams present had decided to register as registrars so as to be able to perform civil marriages as well as religious ones.

  The seminar was considered by those attending to be a valuable and worthwhile exercise, hopefully the first of many. For me, it was a powerful reminder that nothing succeeds in communication like face-to-face engagement, where you are able to listen to people and respond to them in the moment. In this way, new solutions to what seem like difficult problems can often be found.

  I’d also like to pass on the news that the North African food at the Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre in West London is absolutely delicious – and the chef is available for private parties!

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  Published April 28, 2010
  Written by Beatrice Hollyer. This article is filed under: communication, engagement
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• Leadership development 1,000 at a time

  The old adage goes: leadership development is a tough, laborious and lengthy process, and usually happens one person at a time. When tackling it, the industry norm is to plump straight for 1:1 coaching or small group leadership courses, which are more often than not costly ventures. But are they really impactful enough, how about challenging the norm and trying something different?

  What do you do if you only have one hour to work with a leadership issue, and an audience of 1,000 people? You book a big theatre in the West End, work with actors to bring the leadership issue to life, and you facilitate a short and crisp session for impact.

  One of our clients did just that, and the topic of the hour was leadership on safety issues, the goal of the session to make them “think again” about their leadership behaviours and the impact it has on their safety culture.

  A critical success factor for a session of this size is to manage the energy in the room. It’s a bit like photography, often you have the opportunity to take several shots of a scene, but when you only have one chance, you have to get it right first time. It’s the same when on stage instructing 1,000 people to discuss their observations in pairs, there is no room for error.  They only have a few minutes and can’t waste precious time on understanding what the task is.

  It’s important to strike a balance between encouraging your audience and increasing their level of discomfort to get your message across – not an easy task with such a large audience. So pick a target of 3-5 audience members and focus on them as your representatives of the wider audience. Don’t be afraid to ask challenging rhetorical questions, backed up with the right tone, pace and body language to drive the message home.

  The success of the event was evidence that you should think again if someone says you can’t run an effective session with 1,000 people. So why not run your next business critical session on the big stage?

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  Published March 12, 2010
  Written by Marcus Druen. This article is filed under: communication, engagement, leadership
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• How to live on Planet Introvert

  About 25% of the population are introverts.  This is a minority, but a significant one, especially since there seems to be a greater concentration of introverts amongst intellectually gifted people.

  Myers Briggs defines introversion in terms of the source of energy which a person draws on in order to function in the world.  Introverts get their energy from within.  Extroverts need external stimulation (a bit like lizards in the sun). Jung says that we all prefer to behave as introverts or extroverts – one or the other.  We are born with this preference, and it remains with us throughout our lives.  However, this does not mean we cannot behave in other ways.

  If you are an introvert, there are some very interesting things going on in your head and your heart.  Myers Briggs identifies four functional preferences (sensing, intuition, feeling and thinking), all of which play out in a person’s behaviour.  But they do so in a particular order (from most preferred to least preferred). So the first thing introverts can do to bring balance to their personality is to focus on their second preference.  It’s the easiest one to work on, and usefully it happens in the outside world – so people will notice the change quickly.

  Practice makes perfect, so try out small ways of extravert-like behaving during your day.  Here are some examples:

  • Take a look at your diary and move meetings so that they occur when you will have most energy
  • If you have friends who are introverts, or many of your colleagues are introverts, talk to them about their experiences of this preference.
  • At the next meeting you attend, seek out a participant you have not met before and introduce yourself to them before someone introduces you
  • The next time a thought occurs to you in a meeting, say it rather than writing it down
  • If someone asks a question in a meeting, get the first word in rather than waiting for everyone else to speak

  Click here to read the full article on ‘How to live on Planet Introvert’

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  Published January 8, 2010
  Written by Rupert Symons. This article is filed under: communication, engagement
  3 Comments

• Putting priority on communication

  We’ve always known that communication is a core skill for a successful leader. It’s hardly surprising that this core skill is being severely tested in our more testing market environment. More surprisingly, it’s the skill where leaders still lack confidence and find it hard to work out both what to do and how to do it. As one senior HR director said to me recently: ‘Don’t assume that leaders know how to handle difficult news’.

  In times of rapid change, people are searching daily for clues about the state of the business and will look for it by magnifying every bit of leadership behaviour, interpreting it, looking for hidden meaning and signals; they need to see you to see the whites of your eyes so they can be reassured about the authenticity of what you are saying. All too often, in a time of crisis the response from senior directors is to cut themselves off from the day to day business while they go into a huddle to work out the new crisis strategy or plan. At that moment invisible leaders are the most damaging action to the business. At times like this you need to be on the front foot with your own highly visible, personal and relentless communication campaign in order to manage the mood of the moment.

  From my experience, we have to turn communication on its head; see it as listening and learning rather than informing and involving. As soon as leaders realise the value of the information they can acquire by being out there talking to people about their concerns, about their customers and about their business, they can see it as quite a sophisticated form of radar communications, and as a valuable data gathering activity, rather than a chore. It’s a win-win, as people feel reassured to see their leader face-to-face, and leaders feel reassured by picking up signals directly about the environment without any forms of interference. So what can you be doing?

  • Give weekly updates – via an informal channel such as a personal blog or email – and in your own words
  • Make weekly visits to all sites and offices, have informal lunches with small groups of employees, listen to what’s going on
  • Share the key challenges – ask people what they think should be done e.g. ‘How can we maintain our margins in these highly competitive times?’ – you will be surprised at the ideas that will come in
  • Communicate immediately when you take a decision – don’t leave people in the dark
  • Celebrate an early success that shows the new strategy or plan is working, help people to believe it’s the right thing to do.

  People know things are changing; they want to see that the company is keeping pace with those changes. So avoid telling them what you think they want to hear and focus on being with them, being honest and being alert to the signals that will tell you when it’s time to change tack.

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  Published August 11, 2009
  Written by Virginia Merritt. This article is filed under: communication, leadership
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