Clearview® Performance Systems brings you ... ... a Culture of Results & Engagement™
Here's the next in our series of weekly managerial TIPS (Techniques, Insights, and Practical Solutions)
to help you better engage your team in the activities that lead to higher performance.
CORE Bites Issue #41
If the purpose of your communication is to assert your hierarchical position or to remind your team who's boss, you can stop reading now; this CORE Bites isn't for you.
Great! You're still here!
This week I'm tackling a critical component of communication that doesn't get the level of airtime it warrants. I'm talking about the fact that employees may listen to your words, but they react to your cadence, inflection, pace and tonality (and this is also true for customers if you're customer-facing).
Have you ever noticed best friends interacting? They tend to act and even sound alike. This is often referred to as 'good chemistry' but there's a powerful anthropological mechanism behind this phenomenon. People tend to feel most comfortable around those who are most like them and, consistent with the focus of this CORE Bites, they feel that their point of view is understood (making it easier to develop trust and rapport at both a conscious and unconscious level).
The very best leaders pay attention to the paralanguage of the people who they're communicating with—the nonlexical (nonverbal) qualities of speech such as intonation, pitch, amplitude, rate, and voice quality, as well as the pauses and hesitations between words. Why is this important? If your speech patterns are out-of-sync with a person you're speaking with, you're at risk of not being heard; not being fully understood; and—if the difference is extreme—you may not even be believed ... or trusted.
Effective communicators have learned the nonlexical language skills that help them appeal to a wide cross-section of different personalities. I refer to this capability as being chameleon-like because they can change their 'color or stripes' at will to approximate the tone and cadence of the current conversation. It's almost like they use a metaphorical metronome to help them match the pace and timing of the person they're speaking with.
Here are a few 'cadence-matching' HVA TIPS to help you improve your ability to communicate more effectively, build rapport, and earn trust and confidence:
I'd love to hear how this HVA works for you!
Neil Dempster, PhD, MBA
RESULTant™ and Behavioral Engineer
"Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning."
— Maya Angelou —