When it comes to business branding, we invest much time and effort ensuring that our tone of voice is aligned with our values in the communications we disseminate to the outside world.
Yet how much effort do you put into ensuring this same tone of voice is carried through to your to your internal team when communicating?
Words aren’t anything, they’re everything. They have the power to make or break someone’s day.
One of the first acts we must put in place when addressing our internal teams, is to check in where our minds are at. Assess your internal narrative.
Why? Because if you are having a bad day or are under a lot of pressure, your communication skills are impaired.
Awareness of your state of mind allows you to put in place a few mechanisms such as deep breathing, going for a walk or having a coffee before communicating with your team. This will assist in opening your mind so you can deeply listen to what your team is saying and then communicate with positive intent.
Words have the power to motivate your team and guide them towards cohesive action even in the most stressful of moments.
Frustrations can be rife in the workplace. Expressing them through negative words can inflame a situation. By stepping back and becoming aware of the language you are using, you can diffuse negativity by creating “a positive language bank” where new behaviours around “corporate speak” start to become ingrained across your company.
While there are many ways to safeguard the congruency of your external and internal messaging, there is a highly effective technique you can use to align differences when there is a discrepancy in how some of your team are reacting to your approach.
This technique is called ‘Flip It’. Utilising flip it thinking is a powerful way to provoke creative input while achieving aligned communication goals.
Flip it
Often we are faced with situations where we are working on a project and a team member’s approach is in stark contrast to our own. It can be easy to shut down as an idea if it doesn’t align with your point of view. Being aware of the negative impact your response can have on the person or people you are communicating with is a vital ingredient for team cohesion.
Here is where the Flip thinking technique can recalibrate the input of a team and has the remarkable impact of flipping a negative outcome into a positive one.
For example, if one of your team members suggest they have a new idea for a marketing campaign they would like to launch and you believe it is too similar to a competing brands’ recent campaign, there are a couple ways you could respond:
- Negative response : “Given our competitor recently launched a very similar campaign, your idea would not be effective in differentiating our brand”
- Flip thinking approach: “While this is a great idea, its similarities to our competitor’s recent campaign could dilute the impact of our campaign. Given your positive input thus far, let’s continue brainstorming and explore some alternative approaches?”
In bestselling author, Michael Heppell’s book Flip It, he suggests that flip thinking is a “simple way of thinking, acting and doing that, once learned, will make sure you get the very best out of everything.”
He challenges you “to get curious about how you interpret and handle every situation. It liberates you from the beliefs that have been holding you back and gives you powerfully simple ways to switch your thinking and change your actions so that you can get the very best from whatever life sends your way.”
Replacing ‘Why with How’
Michael Heppell discusses the power of intelligent questioning, starting with replacing “Why with How”
He says, “The word why is often associated with the negative. Why me? Why now? Why Should I? Whereas how is commonly associated with solutions. How can I? How do I? How should we?”
A Small Act that will have a Major Impact is to introduce Flip Thinking into your business.
The next time you are in a meeting or having a disagreement with a colleague remember to put on your Flip Thinking cap. You will be surprised how much it expands YOUR world to new ways of thinking and extracts messages from your team that you may not have realised are lying there dormant.
