Oh Say Can you “C”?
A majority of people who are familiar with Empower U are graduates of Leadership Awakening.
Those that have attended are aware of the emotional connection to the song America the Beautiful. Unfortunately, UP UNTIL NOW, only about 5% of our graduates went on to attend Leadership Adventure. At Empower U we have created what we call, The Leadership Experience. Part one is Leadership Awakening and Part 2 is Leadership Adventure. It was created as a two-part process. Much like Star Wars was created as a 6, or 9, part “process/movie-going experience”. One completes the other, it tells the story.
Although Leadership Adventure picks up right where Leadership Awakening takes off, the classes are conducted very differently. Leadership Adventure is a team class; the team actually runs the class. We give a series of challenging processes, where you must work together as a team to accomplish the task at hand. The team members have to trust each other with their lives and choose to “Live”.
Leadership Adventure is a fun class and we build the process around what we call the 4 C’s of Leadership:
- Commitment
- Communication
- Clear Vision
- Consensus
Throughout the entire process of Leadership Adventure as your team takes it's journey, you come upon obstacles that you must work together as a team to accomplish. Actively applying the 4 C’s of Leadership is the only way for successful completion of the Adventure. Today I want to focus on what I see as the biggest failure, as well as, the biggest point of contention, and, probably, the biggest point of frustration, the C of Communication.
Communication to be done effectively must have 2 smaller “C” components. Those two other C’s are:
In Leadership Adventure the frustration of the journey can start to build by the second day. Lack of Commitment, Clear Vision and Consensus make for some interesting situations and some interesting interactions. However it is the other C which truly wreaks havoc on the emotions and minds of the team members and that is communication. The reason for this dilemma is that there is not a lack of communication going on, there is a lack of “Clear” and “Concise” communication taking place.
Our Leadership Adventure class is finally taking off and we have been doing many classes lately. We just did our first few classes at the HBS Ranch in Fernley, and we have now done two classes at our new facility outside of Dallas, at Nancy and Larry Wassell’s, Fish Creek Ranch. Nugget Markets just did a private class with 21 of their leaders and Avail Medical will be doing a private class in Dallas on June 9-11. So I have been “in Leadership Adventure” a lot lately. From the looks of the rapidly growing list of attendees, it looks like many people are finally starting to finish the process they began in Leadership Awakening.
On a personal note, some of you might know that the last two years of my life, I have had the opportunity to learn a lot in the classroom of life. A divorce, becoming a full-time dad to a 7 and 3 year old, a tight economy, cleaning up a lot of mistakes from the past... it has been an incredible growth opportunity. It has been challenging, and yet, at no point have I ever experienced, or “been forced” to LIVE, what “I train” more than in the last 2 years. During this process I have learned about a lot of things that did not work well. That is now changing. However, in the past our office has not run efficiently. We have, in the past, made it difficult to do business with Empower U. Our mission for the operations side of Empower U is: To honor what we do in the classroom, with what we do outside the classroom. We are doing much better today than we were 6 months ago. We will be doing much better 6 months from now, than today.
Like the movie Groundhog Day, except the situations and the personal are different, the frustrations are the same.
During this entire time, I have been restructuring the “inner workings” of Empower U. Because of where I have spent a majority of my time lately, in Leadership Adventure, I have been viewing and experiencing the “office” process through a different set of filters. I have been living Leadership Adventure over and over and over in my day-to-day office life. Like the movie Groundhog Day, except the situations and the personal are different, the frustrations are the same.
During this process I have become so aware of the three culprits of miscommunication. We mis-communicate well as a race, we human beings. There are three main filters that allow for mis-communication… They are:
- Deletions
- Distortions
- Generalizations
Just like most things in our lives. These three items are actually great tools to help us as we grow and learn and become the “Best Possible Us”, to become the George Bernard Shaw, we could have been. However they also allow for some terrible results when not properly monitored. Any strength can become a weakness.
Deletions - When we leave out information
In the book, The Magic of NLP Demystified, we learn that the human central nervous system is being fed more than two million pieces of information every second. Just in terms of efficiency, if every bit of this information had to be processed and used, the time and energy necessary would be astronomical! So we filter… we delete. We do the same thing when we communicate. “Hey Sue, how is it going?” Sue responds, “Great!” What are they talking about? How is what going? Where is it going? Are you talking about today, yesterday, or tomorrow? Are you talking about her personal, professional or spiritual life? We are talking to each other but we are not communicating. We are answering questions that weren’t asked; we are not concise.
The brain thinks six times faster than we can talk/communicate. So by the time our words are coming out of our mouths, we are six blocks (mentally), down the road. We must, at times “filter and leave some things out”. Remember, nobody responds to reality, we all respond to our own map of reality. And the map is not the territory!
Distortions - The process by which we alter our perceptions
By changing our experience of sensory input - We distort! “She never appreciates anything I do!” It always works that way. Fantasy is a form of distortion. Have you ever heard the phrase, “Blowing things out of proportion”? We can play victim well, at least, I know I can.
Generalizations - Assumptions and normal “patterns” can be considered generalizations.
Assumptions probably comprise a large piece of the Generalization pie. Or at least they allow for the greatest misunderstanding. Nominalizations allow for us to be talking about the same things but with different definitions. As one of my many NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) trainers have told me, a nominalization is something you can’t put in a wheelbarrow. Success, happiness, joy… sometimes maybe even, close, we're doing pretty good, we are almost there… could also fall into that category.
What is required to move beyond these “filters” and into the proper level of clear and concise communication? You need to ask the right question. We must be talking the same language if communication is to take place. Some might say, “We need to be on the same page”. They way you get on the same page, speak the same language… is to ask the right question, or questions.
How far to the left? To my left, or your left? When you me to send you 20 journals to Dallas, did you want the small ones or the larger ones? Did you need those for this class or the next class? I remember in journalism class the 5 W’s of journalism: Who, what, where, when and why? Well in Leadership there are 4 w’s and an “h”!
Sometimes life is about asking the right question. Asking the right question just might bring out the right answer.
When we ask the question “why”, we can open a Pandora’s Box of infinite problems. “Why”, has the tendency to get into values and judgments? Which is wonderful if you are playing victim or philosophizing, however, if you what change and progress, a better question is…how specifically? How did that mistake take place, what are the steps needed to do it better, to reach our outcome?
How? When specifically? Where? and with whom, and in which situation? Sometimes life is about asking the right question. Asking the right question just might bring out the right answer. Right answer for whom…and in what situation…where specifically and when? I don’t know…what do you want?
…As we have been working on the process of putting the right people in place, I have had the opportunity to hear and see many different people working in our office. As I have listened to the instruction process and interaction… at times I can hear clearly how there are so many things that have not gone the way they should have gone. As our team is coming into form, I realized I was just looking for someone that will clearly and concisely communicate. To follow directions and to ask the right question if there is not complete understanding. As I look back at the interview/hiring process…Some times I just wanted to ask my job applicants, one simple question…
Oh Say, Can you “C”?
With Passion—HBS
Scott V. Black
The Empower U Leadership Team
June 2003
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