Identifying your employees’ communication styles is extremely important for successful teamwork.
I feel that a majority of conflict that occurs in the workplace occurs from the lack of ability for people to get along well and communicate effectively. There are many reasons conflict occurs, but perhaps one of the biggest reasons is the reality of individual differences and, more importantly, failing to recognize those individual differences.
Teamwork, team spirit and cooperation can be enhanced by employers recognizing that those differences exist, and then responding to those differences by flexing your communication style to meet the needs of everyone in the workplace.
Doing so will help ensure better cooperation, better camaraderie, better morale, better team spirit and better productivity. It’s a win-win proposition.
There are two common mistakes employers make with identifying communication styles of their employees:
- Taking a “one-size-fits-all” approach to communication—A “cookie-cutter” approach to communication, assuming everyone is comfortable with the same communication style, may make the employer feel comfortable, but employee-employer relationships will suffer.
- Not listening for cues that will give you insight into which communication style works best for each employee—Whether it’s choosing to use one method of communication over another (for example, e-mail versus face-to-face) or the approach you take to a person in terms of your tone, phrasing and interaction, if you’re not listening for cues, you’re not going to be effective.
There are essentially four communication methods:
- Speaking
- Reading
- Listening
- Writing
So often people are trained in three of the four methods (speaking, reading, writing), but never typically get trained in listening.
I think we can all train ourselves to be better listeners and to recognize that a majority of communication is non-verbal body language. Sometimes people fail to recognize that.
Also, because of all the electronic gadgetry that exists out there, people tend to use electronic technology too much for communication.
For example, how many times have you seen someone e-mail a person who is sitting on the other side of the room from them, when they could’ve just as easily walked over and talked to the person face-to-face?
For the most complicated workplace issues, electronic communication is the poorest choice. People tend to use it because they’re comfortable with it, but it can often make understanding things a lot more difficult than it needs to be.
Listening for cues and watching body language will definitely give you some hints in terms of what the employee’s needs are and whether the message is getting across or not.
One of the best things an employer can do, beyond just watching for those cues, would be to get some formal training in recognizing the differences in communication styles.
Training will not only educate employers on how to identify communication styles, but to also learn how to be flexible and better meet the needs of others.
As a result of training, communication will be enhanced, messages will be clearer and people will feel better about the communication that is taking place at your company. Identifying communication styles may not come easily to people, but through practice and through formal training, everyone can learn to be a better communicator.
An Example
I once conducted training within a sales department to help the salespeople identify the different communication styles. The real goal of the course was to improve the communication styles of the sales people.
It appeared that many of the sales people within this particular company tended to take a one-size-fits-all approach to communication. So whatever the salesperson’s style was, that’s the style they used in every interaction.
Instead of encouraging people to modify their communication styles, the company would choose sales people to go out on prospect calls based on who matched the potential client’s communication style.
My goal in this training was, rather than assigning the sales person to an account based on his/her communication style, to train the sales people to adopt the communication style necessary based on the sales situation. That way each sales person could be successful no matter which account he/she ended up on.
In summary, there are many benefits to learning how to identify the communication styles of your employees (and customers). But it’s not enough to just identify the different communication styles of employees. Employers can maximize their ability to communicate by modifying their approach to each person according to that person’s preferred style of communication. In my next Insight, I’ll discuss methods of flexing your style to leverage the knowledge you have about others’ communication styles.