Using the worksheet below, ask participants to record a few words or phrases they can say to themselves — and to the others involved — when they feel a conversation heating up and moving in an unpleasant and unproductive direction.

Worksheet

Many of us hear advice that suggests something like this: “When you get angry at a co-worker, and before you fly off the handle, take a deep breath.” 

Disagreement is not something to be avoided; a definite advantage in diverse workforces is, in fact, diversity of opinions and perspectives. Yet discussions that include disagreement require a bit of extra care. If not respectfully managed, these conversations can easily create tensions that become non-productive and have effects far past the initiating conversation.

In the space below, record a few words or phrases to actually say to yourself — and to the other person(s) involved — when you feel a conversation heating up and moving in an unpleasant and unproductive direction.

Share your results with a colleague.  See what questions or statements they use, and compare these to your own.

 Excerpted from the Leader’s Guide to The Respectful Communicator.

Recommended Training Resource: The Respectful Communicator. With the increased diversity present in today’s workplace, the potential for miscommunication has never been greater. This program shows how taking a few extra steps can keep misunderstandings to a minimum.  Onscreen hosts and dramatic vignettes demonstrate five respectful communication guidelines that participants can put into practice immediately.

Steps

1) Listen attentively. Communicating with others is as much about listening as it is about talking. When you listen closely to another person, you learn about his needs and views on life. Learning about the person you are talking to allows him to feel understood and leads to more effective communication.

2)  Gather information. When a person comes from a different culture or background, she may speak in a way that does not resonate with you. Even if you speak the same language, she may be from a different region that uses different terminology or speaks more rapidly. Learn more about her culture or background to improve your ability to converse with her.

3)  Ask for clarification. If a person speaks rapidly, uses unfamiliar words or leaves out important information, ask him questions. He may be accustomed to people who speak just as quickly or technically and might be unaware of your confusion. Asking for clarification will also show him that you are listening.

4)  Speak clearly. Use language that others will understand. Avoid mumbling or using unfamiliar lingo. This is especially important when speaking to people of different cultural backgrounds, ages, professions and personalities.

5)  Confirm that your message is being understood. Watch your listener’s body language. Look for signs that she understands what you are saying. A furrowed brow and other body language indicating confusion or disinterest are reasons to slow down or speak more clearly.

6)  Watch your body language. Be sure that you are approachable. Looking down at the floor or away when talking to someone will communicate a lack of interest. Maintain eye contact and nod to indicate that you are listening.

7)  Acknowledge similarities. When in conversation with someone from a different age group or background, focus on your similarities and acknowledge them. For example, your listener might enjoy the same flavor of ice cream as you. Commenting on the things you have in common helps to build a connection.

8)  Appreciate the differences. Being able to talk to anyone means sincerely appreciating diverse beliefs and cultures. For example, you might notice that the family near you at the park is dancing to music from a different culture. To break the ice, you might ask them for the name of the instrument, artist or song.

9)  Express genuine interest in others. People enjoy speaking to others who genuinely care about them. Ask questions that show you care and want to learn more. In some cultures, it is customary to spend time discussing family or lighthearted topics before diving into serious or professional matters.

Recommended Training Resource: Designed for maximum flexibility, The Communication Toolkit provides you with a library of video vignettes that depict various aspects of communication, including speaking clearly, active listening, nonverbal communication, conflict and difficult conversation, group communication, and presentation skills.

Group Instructions: Attempt to fill in your sheet by finding a person who can say “yes” or can respond appropriately to each question. Write their first name in the space provided. You may use each person’s name only once.

1. _________________________________________________ speaks more than one language. What languages are they?__________________________________________________

2. _______________________________________________has traveled abroad in the last year.

3. _________________________________lived in another country for a significant period of time.

4. ___________________________________________________ has experienced acupuncture.

5. ____________________________’s ancestors come from the same country as one of your ancestors. Which country? ____________________________________________

6. _______________________ likes to watch TV shows about science and/or nature.

7. ______________________________________comes from a family of 4 or more children.

8. _________________________________________ attended private school as a child.

9. _____________________________________________ reads one or more books a month.

10. ____________________________________________has an LP (vinyl record) collection.

11. ____________________________________________________ has more than 2 children.

12. ___________________________ enjoys gardening.

13. __________________________ works as a volunteer more than 5 hours a month.  The volunteer service they provide is ________________________________.

14. _________________________ plays more than 10 hours of sports per month.

15. __________________________ has more than 10 apps on their smart phone.

Recommended Training Resource: A Peacock in the Land of Penguins.  Diversity in the workplace is sometimes met with intolerance of those who are different, or unique. Using parable and animation, this entertaining program shows how an appreciation of everyone can help the organization move forward in a positive way.

TMI at work (opens clip on YouTube)

Training Resource: Working With You is Killing Me teaches employees how to handle needy, talkative co-workers and other difficult colleagues.

Instructions: Below is a short case study depicting a common problem that might surface in an organization. Read the example and then circle things in the following list that a person could do to show initiative in getting the problem solved.

In doing your job, you find that there are times when it takes way too long to get things done. You have some ideas for streamlining certain procedures, but no one has ever really asked for your opinion.

What are your options?

- Quietly begin complaining to your co-workers that certain procedures are inefficient and hope that one of them will bring it up to their boss.

- Before the next team meeting ends, say that you have an issue you’d like to discuss about perhaps making some adjustments to certain procedures.

- Send your supervisor an email, asking to talk to her about some ideas you have for streamlining procedures.

- Send the President of the company an email, asking to talk to her about some ideas you have for streamlining procedures.

- Leave anonymous sticky notes with jokes about the inefficient procedures on the printer by your boss’s office.

- Begin changing the procedures yourself and see if your streamlining ideas work before you suggest them to anyone else.

- Ask 3-4 people on your team to try your streamlining ideas out; if they get good results, then you will bring the streamlining issue up at your next team meeting.

- Let it go; it’s not worth the effort to change things and the risk to bring it up and appear unhappy with the way things are, or stupid if your ideas don’t work.

- Talk with a mentor or veteran employee about your ideas; see if anything like what you’re proposing has ever been tried before and ask their advice about what to do next.

Excerpted from the Leader’s Guide to the video program Can We Count on You?

Training Resource: Can We Count on You? is a common-sense program designed to put people–especially those entering the workforce for the first time–on the path to becoming highly valued employees. It provides a basic overview of what it takes to be seen as accountable, focusing on 10 specific day-to-day workplace behaviors.

Anyone with decision-making authority needs relevant, timely, and accurate information that can be acted upon – the right information at the right time.   

But how do you identify the measurements that matter most? According to the Data Warehousing Institute*, an effective measure should:

• Monitor critical business processes or activities…by using metrics of business performance that trigger alerts when potential problems arise.

• Analyze the root cause of problems that surface…by exploring relevant and timely information from multiple perspectives at various levels of detail.

• Effectively manage people and processes…by improving decisions, optimizing performance, and steering the organization (or department) in the right direction.

Brainstorm with your team potential organizational/team/performance measurements that meet these standards. Be sure to discuss how important each is to the success of the organization (or department) and then cull the list down to 5-7 important indicators.

For these indicators, break into smaller groups and have each group complete the following for 1-2 of the indicators:

• What specific information needs to be gathered? By whom?
• How will it be gathered?
• Where will it come from?
• How often can it be gathered?
• How often should it be shared/communicated?
• Who should communicate the information and with whom should it be shared?
• Are there any obstacles to gathering or using this information?

*Study referenced in Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business by Wayne W. Eckerson, Wiley (2005), page 27.

Excerpted from the Leader’s Guide to the video program The Dashboard. ©2006 Franklin Covey.

Training Resource:  When searching for ways to measure effectiveness and build success, today’s organizations have access to vast amounts of data. The Dashboard will teach your staff what information is truly meaningful, and how to get it quickly in the hands of those who can act on it.

Planning for every eventuality is one of the leadership factors taught at West Point. While it might sound contradictory, the best planning allows the greatest flexibility. No plan survives contact with the “enemy”— whatever form the “enemy” takes — be it time, budgets, competitors, or changing conditions. Planning for all contingencies establishes the competitive edge.

Communication and planning go hand in hand. A plan is only as good as the leader’s ability to communicate it to the team, and to receive information from the team as to whether or not things are going according to plan.

Also, learning from Failure is a key skill that must be understood and mastered by the cadets at West Point. A strong leader understands and uses the value of mistakes as a learning tool. He or she manages failure not by running from it or avoiding it, but by chasing problems and seeing how they can contribute to future success.

Activity Instructions:

The first part of the activity should be completed individually. The second part is a group activity. Tell participants they will have 15 minutes to complete the individual and group activities on the Worksheets. Ask them to choose a discussion leader for the group activity part of the Exercise.

At the 8-minute mark, suggest to the groups that they move into their group discussions.

Debrief the Activity (10 minutes)

Ask for volunteers to share any insights gained on the questions they reviewed individually. Prompt one or more participants to share how one or the other of the skill points makes a tangible difference in their department or organization.

For the group activities:

Ask one of the groups to discuss the relationship between Planning and Failure:

• How do they depend on each other?

• Is it possible to discuss one without the other?

• How do they connect in this organization’s environment?

Ask one of the working groups to share their ideas for a learning experience focused on Planning or Failure. If time permits, ask one of the other groups to share one of their ideas for a development experience on the other skill factor.

ASK:

When you think about it, discussing a failure with peers and subordinates is extremely difficult for any of us to do. Have any of you had experiences where discussing a failure has provided noticeable benefits to yourself or to the organization?

Worksheet: Planning & Learning from Failure

On Your Own

As a Group

Work together in your group to complete the following activities.

Excerpted from the Leader’s Guide to the video program Leaders of Character: Leadership - the West Point Way

Training Resource: At the US Military Academy at West Point, cadets are taught to lead with honor and character. Leaders of Character: Leadership - the West Point Way documents how it’s done and visits the workplaces of West Point grads who now apply these skills in the public and private sectors.

1.  When you say “I’m stressed out” or “I’m under a great deal of stress”, what do you mean?  What is the difference between stress and a stressor?

2.  Is stress always a negative thing?  Name some of the positive aspects of stress.

3.  Describe your own personality.  Do you recognize characteristics in yourself that cause you undue anxiety such as perfectionism, obsessiveness, competitiveness, fear of failure, etc.? How do you deal with these anxieties?  Is there a way to channel these personality traits into positive action?

4.  What jobs do you think are the most stressful?  The least stressful?  Why?

5.  Think of one or two situations that have recently occurred in which you felt “stressed out”.  Was it the situation or your own personality traits that caused the stressful situation?  Analyze if it was worth getting upset about, or if there was another way to react to the event.

6.  Are you able to control the pace of your work and choose how you will approach your tasks?  What steps can you take to bring more control to your job?  If you’re not able to change your job situation, what steps can you take to cope more positively with the inevitable stress?  (Time management, communication, assertiveness techniques, etc.)  Have you used these techniques or others to manage your stress level?

7.  Think about a situation when you were so fearful of the consequence that you were unable to act–missing a deadline to make your project better, changing your job, discussing a problem with the boss.  Then make a list of the worst possible scenarios that might have occurred.

8.  Have your multiple roles at work and home increased your stress level?  How might you resolve this conflict?

9.  Evaluate your style as a manager.  Examine the way you communicate, the demands you make, the expectations you convey, the nature of your criticism, the tasks you delegate. Do any of these create stressful situations for your subordinates or fellow team members?  If so, what can you do to reduce the stressors in their work lives?  (Regular meetings, more realistic deadlines, role clarifications, support system, etc.?)

Excerpted from the Leader’s Guide for the CRM Learning video, Managing Stress.

Training Resource:  If you want to help employees make stress management a lifelong habit, the Stress Management Series will get them started in the right direction. Comprised of 5 programs, including Recognizing Stress and Resilience: Mastering Stress.

There is a better way to handle disciplinary issues, based on the organization’s need for top-level performance by all employees. When discipline is approached in a logical, positive framework, focused on bringing performance up to par, the emotion can be taken out of the equation and real improvement can be made. Every workplace is different, but the relationships between employees and their supervisors, and between employees and the organization as a whole, are based on a fundamental requirement: wages are traded for performance. When performance is not up to standards, it is the manager’s job to work with the employee to bring them back up to the required level.

Traditionally, we have focused on punishment as the most direct way to deal with performance problems. But this approach can backfire when applied to adults on the job, because it can be humiliating to the employee. And, if it is humiliating, the manager’s actions will lead to anger, resentment, and reduced performance – not the improvement they were hoping for. Every disciplinary action is different because you are working with unique individuals who have life experiences, expectations, and emotional needs you know nothing about. Managers need a process that allows for these circumstances, and for the employee involved to play a key role in the resolution of the problem. You also need a process that focuses on the issues, not the personalities involved.

The first step in a disciplinary process – and the only one this article deals with – is identifying the performance gap. By focusing on the gap between expected behavior and actual behavior, supervisors can take an objective approach to the problem, leaving the subjective and personal issues out of it. Emotional responses to employee problems cloud the issue and inhibit reaching the true goal: improved performance.

Activity: Identifying the Performance Problem

The most important part of identifying and understanding a performance problem is separating the facts from your judgments and opinions.

Listen to the difference in these two ways of describing the same problem:

• You are expected to complete and submit your daily production reports before leaving for the day.
• You’ve caused a lot of screw-ups on the second shift because of your lazy attitude toward production paperwork.

What is the difference between these statements?
• The first approach deals with the facts – behaviors that are observable.
• The second statement is loaded with judgment and opinion – subjective statements that attack the person, rather than focusing on the problem.

Looking at this situation, why might these production reports be important?
• They may affect other shifts, customer deliveries, the ordering of new parts, or other downstream processes.

So what is the real purpose of discipline in this situation?

Look for the following answer:
• To improve performance!

The purpose of employee discipline is to close the performance gap between what you need the employee to do and what they are actually doing.  Let’s see how we can apply this to our own employee disciplinary problems.

REFER to the Worksheet. Participants will work individually on this activity.
(Allow 3-4 minutes)

SAY:
The best way to identify an employee performance problem is by comparing the desired performance with the employee’s actual performance – what you expect versus what you’re actually getting.

Think about a current disciplinary problem in your department and the employee associated with it (no names please!).

• Describe the performance problem in section 1.
• List a few bullets or key words that describe what you expect from the employee in the left column of section 2.
• List what the employee is actually doing in the right column of section 2. In effect, you are performing a gap analysis.
• Think about the situation objectively when you fill in section 3. If the employee is not aware of the problem, you need to understand why. If you haven’t set expectations properly, your meeting shouldn’t be about discipline, it should instead be about making your performance expectations clear and then monitoring the results.

DISCUSSION
Go around the room, asking for examples of the participant’s disciplinary incidents.

WORKSHEET

Excerpted from the Leader’s Guide to the CRM Learning video program, Positive Discipline.

Training Resource: Positive Discipline.Users are consistently thrilled with this program’s ability to help managers overcome their reluctance to addressing performance gaps, engage in productive performance discussions and end up with positive outcomes.

The following activity not only brings this truth to light, it leads to discussion around writing an organizational message that everyone can buy into and easily articulate.

What We Do Training Activity

Start by saying that successful organizations typically have one thing in common: they are clear about what they do and they are able to present what they do in a way that is both consistent and compelling.  (Conversely, organizations that try to be all things to all people can struggle with brand recognition.)  Ask the group to name organizations they think are good at communicating what they do.  What makes them stand out?

Explain that the activity the group is about to do will help them pinpoint what’s important about their organization and agree upon how they’ll talk about their organization going forward.

Divide the training group into small groups of 3-4 people.  Have each small group come up with an answer for the following questions:

1.   What business are we in?
2.   Who do we serve?
3.   Why do we exist?
4.   What do we create and/or what value does our organization bring?

Then ask each small group to craft a “what we do” statement they feel represents these ideas. (Remind them that the best statements are both concise and compelling.)

Bring the groups back together and have a representative from each group share their group’s “what we do” statement.  Capture them all on a flipchart or whiteboard.

Discuss the merits of each; perhaps you can mix and match parts of each to make a better statement.  See if you can come to consensus on one statement. For fun, ask everyone to turn to the person next to them and practice saying the statement out lout so that it feels natural and conversational.

Excerpted from the Leader’s Guide for The Clarity Imperative.

Training Resource: In The Clarity Imperative, host John Jenson uses a variety of inspirational stories to introduce viewers to the importance of “consistent messaging”. This program provides a simple but powerful methodology for getting people “on the same page” so that clarity and cohesiveness can emerge.