Last month I ran the first of a series of 3 teleseminars on having real conversations.

Here’s the condensed version of what was discussed.

What is a real conversation – how do I define it and what does it look like?

1. Inner talk becomes outer talk
2. It’s about the giving and receiving of real material
3. Minimum of ritual – little talk about the weather and even less figures of speech such as “to be honest”
4. It is ‘in the moment’ – not prepared and not tactical – usually lots of thinking and pauses to take things in. To watch – a bit scruffy

Does the whole thing have to be like this? – no we can work towards the ideal – being real (authentic) for even bits of a conversation can really drive the result a lot quicker

But why have a real conversation?:

1. To be believed
2. To have an effect – to change something or to keep something going

When for example?

When a relationship needs repair work, when a process has stalled, when performance is not good, when there is stuff going wrong, when there is stuff going right, when wrongs need righting. When there is something that we would rather went away by itself but we know won’t.

Risks – real and perceived

1. Real feelings being exposed – need to be dealt with – will I get them back in the box – will they?
2. Commercial advantage – I’m I saying things that wil make my brand look bad or will prejudice me getting the right deal?
3. Image – is that at stake here?

What actually has to happen for it to occur?

• 2 tangible things – behaviours
• and two intangible things – notions or drivers

Intangible first…

The wish:

• A realisation that the situation has to change – usually because of pressure or a block or hitting rock bottom
• Seeing that I have something to gain
• Knowing that I have something to give

The courage:

May come from…

• Realising that the potential gain outweighs cost
• Being very unhappy/annoyed
• Getting excited about a good outcome

Now the tangible… the behaviours

Empathy and assertiveness

A very brief glance right now at both and a bit more on the assertiveness right away.

Empathy – the capacity to sense a little bit of what the other person is going through

Communicated empathy – the act of reflecting back for checking.

i.e. How they feel, what about and why.

4 outputs:

1. I am forced to pay attention
2. I get trust and respect from the other
3. I remain open-minded – an intellectual challenge in itself
4. I give an invitation to talk without having to say it

Assertiveness

What we normally don’t say – how we feel.

I can mentioned 3 things about myself:

1. How I feel
2. What about
3. Why

But why would I bother? How does it help make a conversation ‘real’ and what does that sound like in a more naturalistic situation?

1. It makes me more compelling to listen to – because I am telling the truth
2. It makes me easier to read – I win trust
3. I am easier to understand

4 examples of how this moves into language…

Jane, thanks for doing that. I was getting worried – I know I needn’t have. I like the fact that you just get on with doing things when I ask you to – it couldn’t be easier for me. And yet I do worry about whether something has been done or not because you tend not to tell me and I tend to fear the worst.

I’m worried that we are falling behind with our digital strategy planning – it’s Feb already and we want to launch in June – it doesn’t leave much time.

I was really pleased to get your mail – it explained the background to some of the things that had really puzzled me in the presentation.

I’m nervous about presenting these figures to you because at this stage they are tentative and yet you may be inclined to take them ask gospel.

Recap:

1. Real conversations involve real news about things like emotions as well as opinions
2. They involve inner talk – the stuff we don’t always say – the stuff in brackets.
3. They are not rehearsed and non tactical
4. We can strive to make conversations real when we need to be believed
5. They always involve some form of assertiveness and empathy

Here’s sound file from the last teleseminar.

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At about 7.20 every morning I take our two Deerhounds for a run. They are brother and sister, very large and easy to care for. They love running but they love snoozing and generally lying about even more. The only problem is their coats. Cross a sheep with a grey wire scouring pad and you begin to get the picture – and the problem.

Actually there is another problem – Milo and fizz hate being brushed. In fact all deerhounds hate it (it’s an insult to their dignity) unless you give them cheese to eat at the same time and that can become expensive given how much brushing is involved. The fact is that most owners simply don’t bother unless they plan to show. And since showing involves giving up your life and that of your family, liquidating your assets, giving up work and buying a gypsy caravan to take you round the country for 6 months of every year, most deerhound owners don’t show – well not us sane ones anyway.

Back to the coat.

It takes about an hour and a half to groom a Deerhound that has been left a little too long. It takes about an hour to groom a deerhound once a month. It takes about a minute to groom a Deerhound once a day. In that light I could say that Fizz and Milo embody the dos and don’ts of maintaining relationships and intimate communication. By intimate I not only mean the conversations that we have within our most personal relationships but to those that we can have with colleagues with whom we have developed what we might call a special relationship. A situation which enables either person to raise even awkward topics so openly and honestly that there is very little risk of the input being met with anything more obstructive than moderate awkwardness (a red face or a bit of fidgeting!).

The ritual of brushing the dogs daily (I actually stroke them at the same time to take their minds off the wiry brush), whether I perceive that I have the time or not, works on many levels. (Incidentally, this morning I swore that I did not have time and yet still brushed for two minutes. Was I late for my first appointment? No, of course I wasn’t – it was only two minutes).

After two weeks of the daily campaign:

1. The hounds look great.
2. Milo and Fizz are staring to like being brushed – or at least to dislike it less.
3. I don’t berate myself multiple times a day for not brushing the dogs.
4. I feel proud every time I see them because I am caring for them properly.
5. I appreciate them and their presence more; they now receive more attention, through the day, than ever before.
6. They seem to respond to a call to heal even more quickly than before.
7. I have stopped making promises that I know I will not/cannot back-up – “I really will brush you properly this weekend…”
8. Lots of minute and apparently insignificant efforts (positive and negative) stack up remarkably quickly.
9. I have realised that there are a great many tiny things that I can do to make life go better for me and for others.

Most of us, by the time we attain a certain age, will claim to be competent at conducting positive, deep, relationships and performing all of the skills that are required to stay ‘in relationship’ with the people around us more widely. But the point is not whether we know what it takes, it is whether we do what it takes. Do we really behave as if we mean to make progress with the people we spend time with, professionally and personally? Or do we tend to operate on the literal, factual level with them, trusting against all logic and experience, that the relationship will simply look after itself, and even improve over time – just like the coat on a large, shaggy dog?

It is quite normal now for us to be working daily with people we rarely meet face to face, with people of different cultures mother tongues. Inevitably problems arise just as they do with people with whom we share a workspace and culture.  But toss in geographic and cultural boundaries to the usual list of obstacles we encounter when things are getting tense around the single location organisation and you have a much increased potential for situations to get out of control. In the absence of eye-contact and of the comfort blanket of shared culture we surely must rethink, in fact, really work at ‘making contact’, bridging gaps between the different people involved in the enterprise.

A few days ago I invited Tom Buehlmann to join me on PEC’s monthly teleseminar. I wanted someone there who had done the whole managing scattered teams for real. This Bulletin is largely a report of the nuggets of that conversation.

Tom has managed teams across multiple geographies for about 25 years for brands like Procter & Gamble, Lindt & Sprüngli, the famed Swiss chocolate maker and Catalina marketing, the company credited with the invention of the now ubiquitous card loyalty scheme.

I began our conversation by asking Tom what sort of scale of operation he had dealt with in the past. A few hundred here, fifty there, three hundred over there. Big, then. And here is the first mistake that Tom has encountered time and again. He started life with Catalina with twelve direct reports, scattered across half a dozen countries. Far too many he laments, “I ended up with seven in the end – much more manageable.” So first lesson. Keep the number of direct reports down. Seven – tops.

I then ask him about his top tips for managing long-distance, aside from the cultural stuff which we will come to later. “I’d prefer to think of it as a list of mistakes I made the first time – so what I would do differently next time is…

1. Don’t assume it’s easy managing at a distance – it’s not. It takes a conscious effort to get to know people and not just the business.
2. Don’t assume that a solid reporting line on the org. chart means that you have a relationship with that person. You don’t.
3. Don’t try to do everything – prioritise and let them do their jobs.

I am curious to know what a conversation between Tom and a direct report might sound like when things are going wrong and the person is hundreds, if not thousands, of Kilometres away (Buehlmann is Swiss). He asks me to quantify ‘going wrong’. I reply, “Not catastrophic but bothering you a lot, over a few months”. He needs no time for reflection, “When can I come and see you?”. He adds, “you have to be prepared to get into your car, train, plane or whatever and get in front of them – fast. It is time-consuming but you have to do it. Spend as much face to face time with them as is feasible and desirable – on their home territory where they feel safe and at ease”.

According to Buehlmann, when communication is not face-to-face, different methods of communication have a different effect on the dynamic – specifically changes in power and intimacy levels. According to Buehlmann, different methods carry different messages too. He goes on to specify: “A personal, hand-written note is very special, very powerful, very personal”. A text is about as impersonal as you can get – it’s about the worst. No, actually email. I really don’t like it. It is so open to misinterpretation.” The message is: choose the medium for the message carefully. If in doubt: talk or travel.

I want to get an idea of how to tackle situations where cultural boundaries are being crossed and I ask him for a top tip on what to do when you are starting out in this new territory of working across national boundaries. He sighs: “I learned a lot from working in Japan. For me the number one thing is to try to understand the local codes and rules.” I prod him for a little more detail. “When I first went out there I just turned up to the regional office and met with all the people at the top of the org. chart for that country. I asked all the right questions and thought I was doing just fine. Then I found out that I had terribly offended the Chairman of the company. He didn’t appear on any chart but what I should have done was to get off my plane and get in the car straight to his office. I would only have needed to spend twenty minutes with him. Word would have gone round very fast that I had done the right thing. My visit would have shown that I had manners – that knew how to behave. Big mistake”, he frowns and shakes his head in self-criticism.

Buehlmann tells me another story, this time about his former top manager in Japan. When Buehlmann first arrived in Japan he recalls that he was keen to show the manager and his own Board colleagues back in the U.S. that he was managing the global business, getting things repaired, helping to make the Japan operation profitable. But after months of doing business with his No.1 in Japan, endlessly going out in the evenings for meals to discuss the business and to get to know the local problems, the manager out-of-the-blue, over dinner one evening, suddenly tendered his resignation. “I was really shocked. I’d had no warning at all. I asked him, of course, what was wrong. He replied with words that I will never, ever forget: Tom-san, you don’t even know the names of my children.”

But not all cultures are so extremely removed from our own Western European way of doing things. I suggest to Tom that there are mistakes to be made much closer to home. He agrees. “France is a good example. In France there is a formal and informal organisation. The informal is arranged according to where you went to university – where you grew up intellectually, really. There are strong bonds between people who share educational experiences and backgrounds. You have to get to grips with these unspoken links and relationships before you can really figure the rest out and get things done easily.”

It seems from my time with Tom Buehlmann that what we say we do and value is not always played out in the office even by someone whom I regard as a seasoned international player; someone who really gets the people bit. Talking about the value of relationships is easy and it’s in all the books. Resisting the temptation to focus one hundred percent of one’s attention on the running of the operation is the tough part, it seems. Buehlmann: “Developing human relationships is critical. No one wants to be a name in a box, a human resource.” It’s an obvious but illusive point: developing relationships is an essential part of keeping people with you, especially when you don’t see them often. They will forgive all sorts of cultural and linguistic transgressions if you have gone to the trouble to get to know them, to show them respect as people. Buehlmann concludes: “Talking about business all day is not developing relationships. That is done separately.”