I need a discussion for my week 4 class Business Comm Class and a response to 2 other classmates

JWI505Week4LectureNotes.pdf

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JWI 505: Business Communications and Executive Presence Week 4 Lecture Notes

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Team Communication

What It Means Over the past three weeks, you have learned how to enhance your communication skills in face-to-face interactions. Your interpersonal exchanges are perfect places for demonstrating your executive presence, your sense of empathy, and your listening skills. Now, it is time to broaden your audience. It is time to apply your communicative prowess in a group setting. Unless you work by yourself, you interact with a team of colleagues all the time. These are your closest associates, the people you turn to most frequently for guidance. And while you have similar job functions and work toward the same goals, communicating with your team members is not always easy. You have to make your messages understandable to everyone at the same time, and each of your teammates has their own particular communicative style. In this lecture, you will learn about what makes team communication so unique. We will examine how to tailor your communications to groups of people, particularly in meetings. We will also explore how to address conflict when it arises among your team. Why It Matters

• Your team can provide candid insights you would not find anywhere else in your organization.

• Without trust in one another, your team can never truly be aligned and effective.

• The right communicative medium can ensure your teammates listen and develop clear goals.

“Without trust, we don’t truly collaborate; we merely coordinate or, at best, cooperate. It is trust that transforms a group of people into a team.”

Stephen Covey

JWI 505: Business Communications and Executive Presence Week 4 Lecture Notes

What Makes a Team Unique? Let us assume you work for a large corporation with hundreds of employees. You do not all work in the same building, and you do not talk to every single person in the company; you have not even met the vast majority of them. You have a rough idea of what different departments in the company do, but you do not know their exact work processes and functions. Your workday revolves around your interactions with a much smaller group of people. Within this group, you know exactly what everyone’s jobs are, what their schedules look like, what their personalities are, and what they aspire to do. This is your team, the people who are most committed to your success. How you communicate with your team will be fundamentally different from how you communicate with the whole company. For one, you have more flexibility in your means of delivery. You are not forced to hold a massive town hall or a webinar. You can deliver your message in an informal meeting or just standing together in your hallway. It is also a lot easier to schedule a team huddle than a big presentation. In fact, you can poll your teammates to determine what they feel the best means of delivery is! For another, team communication requires you to be completely open. You already know you should be forthright and honest when communicating with people. But when you host a webinar, listeners cannot always read your body language. If you are giving a speech in a large room, the people seated in the front row will have a very different experience from those people sitting all the way in the back. It is easy for you to get away with not being completely authentic. When you are meeting with your team, however, you have nothing to hide behind. To achieve the best results, your teammates have to trust you, regardless of whether you are the leader or not. The good news is that you have many opportunities to build that trust. When you frequently communicate with your group, your colleagues know what to expect of you. You demonstrate that you are reliable and open about everything. Subsequently, your teammates become emotionally invested in having positive interactions with you. They want to help you succeed because that means they succeed, too. The bad news is that effective team communication is fraught with hurdles. Falling victim to one of these obstacles can be devastating for your entire group, and can derail the team from fulfilling its mission.

JWI 505: Business Communications and Executive Presence Week 4 Lecture Notes

A Clash of Personalities In JWI 510: Leadership in the 21st Century, you took the DiSC assessment. You learned what your personal communicative style is and how that affects your leadership prowess. Remember that, even on a close-knit team, not everyone will have the same communicative style. If you do not account for those styles, team dynamics can become frayed quickly. Imagine you are in a meeting with your team. If you identify most closely with Dominance in your DiSC results, you will speak bluntly and confidently. But if you identify more with Conscientiousness, you may not talk as much during meetings because you do not want to say something wrong. Not accounting for these differences can lead to discussions being dominated by one or two voices. That will never result in a comprehensive plan that is wholeheartedly supported by all members of the team. Even if you and your teammates do share the same communicative style, you will disagree about a number of issues. That is perfectly normal. In fact, you should never feel as if conflict is necessarily bad for your team. But because your team is significantly smaller than your organization, disagreements and interpersonal tensions can become amplified very quickly. Team members are constantly working with each other, and if personality conflicts are left unchecked, two negative consequences will emerge. First, the rest of the team may feel forced to “take sides” between the conflicting members, which destroys any chance of group cohesion. Second, if there is animosity among team members, you cannot expect them to be emotionally invested in what they are doing. The team’s workflow and productivity will suffer and, when that happens, nobody wins. Even if you can overcome personal issues and strains, motivating everyone in the group to actually contribute is another challenge. You have probably been part of a group project where it seems only one or two people actually do the work. Everyone else seems content to do nothing, but they will still take credit for the final product. Those people contribute to what is commonly known as the “free-rider problem.” If everyone can get credit for reaching a goal, certain team members may not make any effort to help reach it. Allowing this to happen is a surefire way to spark resentment from your most productive team members. None of this is to say that you cannot trust your team members, or that there will always be

JWI 505: Business Communications and Executive Presence Week 4 Lecture Notes

animosity among them. You can keep everyone focused, collaborative, and productive if you can engage them. The best way to achieve this is to communicate what your expectations are of them. Fortunately, there are several ways to do this. Meetings that Make a Difference Author Jeff Haden once wrote that most meetings are “a complete waste of money. And time. And energy. And opportunities to accomplish great things instead.”1 That is an extreme statement, but his sentiments ring true for many leaders. In fact, according to a poll from the University of North Carolina, roughly three out of every four senior managers surveyed said they thought meetings were unproductive and inefficient.2 Meetings are designed to keep your team aligned and focused on its goals; they are some of your most powerful means of formal team communication. Too often, we let them get derailed by tangents or muddled in unimportant information. The key to a good and productive meeting is that everything about it must be purposeful. Here are some ways to keep your meetings purposeful:

1. Only meet if you need to. Look over your agenda. Is there anything on your list that cannot just go in an email? The meeting needs to provide information or solicit feedback that you could not obtain anywhere else. You do not have to drag people into a conference room if you can just as easily walk by their desks and talk with them. And you definitely should not have a team meeting if only one person will be talking. A meeting is totally pointless if attendees do not have to be there.

2. Have a complete agenda. Before the meeting even begins, each attendee should know exactly what will be accomplished and how it will be accomplished. Failing to do so invites people to meander verbally and bring up irrelevant discussion topics. Communications scholar Neal Hartman also suggests that any vague meeting topics,

1 Jeff Haden, “Why 99 Percent of All Meetings Are a Complete Waste of Money,” Inc.com, July 10, 2017, https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/why-99-percent-of-all-meetings-are-a-complete-wast.html. 2 Sébastien Ricard, “Five Strategies to Improve Communication with Team Members,” Forbes, January 8, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/01/08/five-strategies-to-improve-communication-with-team- members/#2eba7c7d4536.

JWI 505: Business Communications and Executive Presence Week 4 Lecture Notes

such as “status updates,” will not be a good use of anyone’s time.3

3. Stick to the script. Once the meeting starts, you must adhere to your agenda and keep everyone focused. If the meeting has a fixed time limit, you do not have the time to spontaneously add new topics. Find a way to remove distractions from the room. If the meeting is going to be long, schedule short breaks every so often. If some attendees are distracted by something on their phones or computers, you can ask attendees to put away these items – but only do this if you absolutely have to. Remember, if only one person is talking the entire time, then nobody else needs to be there. You will not get ”every brain in the game” if only one brain is working. You asked each person there to attend for a reason. Ask for their feedback and comments as much as possible.

4. Keep your attendees aligned. The meeting cannot end until you have established

what everyone’s duties are. You never want to walk out thinking to yourself, “Now what?” First of all, set a date and time for your next meeting. This gives your team a due date, or at least a date by which they are expected to have made progress on their goals. Second, make sure everyone there knows exactly what their goals are. A good meeting should lay out who is responsible for what. Third, follow up with your attendees afterward. Remind everyone what you discussed and what your next steps are. This ensures that all attendees have the same key takeaways from the meeting.

Teamwork: Making the Dream Work Outside of the meeting room, your team members still need to know what their roles are. They have to know what to expect from their colleagues, as well as what those colleagues expect from them. To create strong team dynamics, you can start by establishing a routine with each of your team members. Meet with each member once a week at a time that works best for each of you. Ask what their preferred means of communication is, and use it. It could even be a fairly informal means, such as instant messaging. Reaching out to your team

3 Neal Hartman, “Seven Steps to Running the Most Effective Meeting Possible,” National Community Media Alliance, January 24, 2017, https://ncmagroup.com/2017/01/24/seven-steps-to-running-the-most-effective-meeting-possible/.

JWI 505: Business Communications and Executive Presence Week 4 Lecture Notes

members on their terms shows you are cognizant of their individual communicative styles. If your team holds recurring meetings, make sure they are held consistently. Holding them at the same time each week keeps everyone to a schedule, and reinforces the precept that each team member should have made progress on their tasks from the previous meeting. If you sense conflict brewing between team members, these weekly meetings are great opportunities to defuse any serious tensions. Let everyone know that disagreements are healthy, but the team has to place the group’s mission and goals above any personal quarrels. A well-functioning team is committed to producing strong work, which means each member should be committed to ensuring their colleagues are doing their best. You and your teammates must be able to give and receive candid feedback on each other’s work. If you are working on a particular assignment, ask your coworkers for their input. Remember, though, that their input must be specific. For example, do not just email your colleague a document you have been writing with the subject line, “Thoughts?” That colleague will not know where to begin critiquing your work, and you will both be very frustrated. Instead, ask them if your document is missing any relevant information. If it is a long document, request that they focus on one particular section. If you just want them to proofread, tell them that. Let them know exactly what you need from them. Encouraging your teammates like this builds buy-in and incentivizes them to contribute to your work. That is a strong step in mitigating the free-rider problem. It is also a great way to build trust among you and your colleagues. Just keep in mind that you cannot ignore your teammates. If they send you their feedback, make sure you actually use it. Otherwise, you will have wasted their time, as well as yours. Finally, if your team members work remotely, you should remove as many communicative obstacles as you can. Because you cannot walk by someone’s desk or get your whole group into the same room, it is difficult to pick up on nuances – especially nonverbal ones. To compensate for physical distance, make sure everyone is more open. Keep your teammates constantly up to date on what projects you are working on. If you have to hold a recurring conference call or web meeting, make sure that you hold it at a consistent time and that you use the same format. Always record each meeting in case someone cannot attend. Remember that, when you work remotely, it is impossible to over-communicate. That is how you hold yourself, and everyone else, accountable for each other’s work.

JWI 505: Business Communications and Executive Presence Week 4 Lecture Notes

Looking Ahead In this lecture, we explored how to enhance your communication skills with your team. We learned about the unique challenges that team communication poses, as well as what steps to take to ensure your entire team is aligned, focused, and driven. In the next lecture, we will uncover how to communicate in crises. We will examine how to be proactive in our communications, how to be open with our colleagues and stakeholders, and how to craft intelligent messages to mitigate any type of crisis situation.