How To Create Impact With Your 1-1 Conversations

by Sean Foster | November 17, 2022 | Newsletter

I have a question for you:

What should I include in my NewsBriefs that would have the biggest positive impact on how you manage your business, yourself and your staff?

That’s a simple innocuous question but highly relevant to this NewsBrief edition. As much as the answer to this is valuable to me, so too could it turn around how you manage your 1-1 conversations with your staff (including others you associate with).

Once a business moves past the solopreneur stage, business growth increasingly relies on the contribution of your employees and subbies. To sustain this growth you need to become increasingly effective in what you can do, to ensure that they excel.

In order for your business to thrive, you cannot replicate yourself into mini-me’s, and neither would you want to. You employ staff, or subbies to use both their skills and their “brains”. It is relatively easy to upskill them so that they have access to better ways of doing things, but upgrading their ‘thinking’ is a whole different ball game.

What are you currently doing to upgrade their “thinking”?

Let me guess: You check in with them to see how they are getting on. You have an open-door policy. You do your best to maintain a friendly, maybe family-like atmosphere. You consider their requests with the attention they deserve. +++

All of those are good points, but so are they just minimum-entry, required levels of your input. There is a good chance that your main competitors are doing exactly the same (despite what you want to believe through the grapevine that it sucks working at these other companies). How do you take it to another level such that their level of engagement will create a culture fired up to ensure the success of the company?

The answer is simple. You need to become more effective in coaching your staff. It is only through coaching, not instructing, befriending, or performance appraising, that you will get them to start independently thinking about how they can better contribute to the business, and in turn to themselves as well.

At our last BIG meeting, we dabbled into role-playing this coaching and at our next meeting we will ramp this up further.

You may believe you could be an effective first-time driver by studying the manual, but until you gain real driving experience, your ability to drive a car will suck! It’s the same with coaching. It ain’t airy-fairy or abstract hoo-doo stuff.

Once you can start deciphering “where someone is coming from” in their stories, you will be in a better position in knowing how to respond.

I recently came across a really effective model that illustrates this point extremely well.

Developed by communication scientist Haesun Moon, it makes it very easy to identify in any message/story if someone is referring to the past or the future, and if it is something that they want more or less of. Her simple model is shown here.

If you would like to get a deeper understanding of her work then do a YouTube search on her or grab her book here.

This is just a NewsBrief, not an instruction manual. In a few hundred words I cannot impart sufficient knowledge on this subject to necessarily make you better at coaching. And as I have already highlighted, you need both the theory and the practice.

This is just a NewsBrief, not an instruction manual. In a few hundred words I cannot impart sufficient knowledge on this subject to necessarily make you better at coaching. And as I have already highlighted, you need both the theory and the practice.

Interested to know what the numbers really stand for in the model? If you are interested to know more about how to create more impact with your conversations, by learning from the coaching world, then join BIG.

You could be flat-stick busy, or, you feel maxed out, and you are questioning to yourself: ‘Can I really be more effective in running my business?’ These are normal thoughts, and I can conclusively confirm yes, there is more in you just as there is more in them. You have a tool available to you to tap into this ‘more’.

Kind Regards,