Getting Results Through Dialogue:
A Facilitator’s Guide
Contents
Purpose of the TrainingPage 3
Preparation:Page 4
Logistics
Self-Preparation
Session Agenda and Talking PointsPage 5
Appendix
Facilitator Tips Page 25
Purpose of the Training
In the communication environment at every company, there are a few key traits that shape how much effort employees will devote to activities with the greatest strategic impact. The most powerful trait is the degree to which a manager’s communication style is “inclusive”—in other words, encouraging employees to participate in dialogue. That’s because dialogue helps employees make a personal connection to company goals and better understand how they can contribute.
Now, there are some managers who are excellent communicators, who naturally create opportunities for open dialogue with their employees, but we all know that many don’t. It’s not that they never talk to their people—it’s just that they’ve got a job to do, and they typically don’t think about dialogue as part of that job.
This course is designed to help managers develop both the will and the skill to initiate dialogue with their teams. In the first half, you’ll be helping them understand the direct connection between dialogue and business results. In the second half, you’ll be giving them a user’s guide to dialogue’s three most important elements: planning, employee interaction, and listening. Following this session, managers should feel far more equipped and confident in using dialogue to get the results that they want.
Preparation
Logistics
Inviting attendees—Provide a brief explanation of how the session will benefit attendees in relation to this business event. Invest some time and effort in making sure that participants will show up. You might consider having a senior leader in the department send the invitation for managers to attend this event.
Potentialscripting foryour invitation:
“New research shows that dialogue is the most impactful tool for motivating employee effort on our business priorities. This session will help you understand why dialogue is so effective, as well as how to use it to your advantage.”
Prepping the room—While any style of room setup is fine, it is ideal to have a round table or series of small tables to create a discussion-friendly environment.
Supplies—You’ll want to have a whiteboard or flipchart with markers on hand for the second portion of the course. Also, bring enough copies of the feedback form with you.
Self-Preparation
This training has been designed for you to role model the type of engagement and audience focus you will teach to the participants.
Get to know the materials well. Aim to reach a position where you are sufficiently comfortable not to have to worry too much about the materials or timings in the session itself. That way, you’ll be able to focus your attention on your tone and style and—most importantly—on the participants.
You will find a way of facilitating that feels most natural to you. However, to begin with, we suggest you work with the materials as follows:
- Use the slides with these facilitator notes to prepare for the training in advance. However, you may find them too detailed to use in the workshop itself. It’s comforting to have them on hand, but it can be hard to keep your attention on the attendees if you have to keep trying to find your place in a set of notes.
- These notes are designed as a memory aid to have by your side once you are comfortable with the content. You can also jot down in the margins any examples, stories, or analogies you’ll use to bring the points to life. Mark them with a highlighter so you can see them easily at a glance.
- This course is designed to last for one hour. However, if you have a particularly chatty group or want to draw out the second half with a custom exercise, you’ll find that this time will fly by quickly! To be safe, it may be wise to schedule the course for 90 minutes and give time back rather than run over.
Remember…to run an effective training course, you don’t need to be a polished presenter and facilitator. People will trust you if you appear human, approachable, and interested in helping them.
In a busy business environment, managers want simple, practical support to make their lives easier. That is just what you are about to give them.Good luck…and enjoy!
Session Agenda
Slide / Title / Approx. TimePart I
1 / Getting Results Through Dialogue / 5 minutes
2 / First, a Quick Quiz / 5 minutes
3 / Aims for Our Time Together / 2 minutes
4 / Internal Communication: Key to Business Results / 3 minutes
5 / But What Do We Mean by “Internal Communication?” / 5 minutes
6 / Dialogue Gets You More Employee Effort / 4 minutes
7 / Dialogue Gets You Better Strategy Execution / 4 minutes
8 / Great Dialogue: The Three Keys / 2 minutes
[30 minutes]
Part II
9 / Planning—What’s the Business Objective? / 5 minutes
10 / Planning—What’s My Communication Goal? / 5 minutes
11 / Planning—What Are My Key Messages? / 5 minutes
12 / Employee Involvement / 5 minutes
13 / Quality Listening / 5 minutes
14 / Dialogue: A Litmus Test / 3 minutes
15 / Closing Slide/Feedback Forms / 2 minutes
[30 minutes]
Facilitator’s Guide (Slide 1)
Do: Introduce yourself. Assuming you aren’t working with a very large group, ask all attendees to introduce themselves briefly, giving their name and role with the company.
Say: We’re here today to talk about employee communication that gets great business results. Can I ask a question of you all to get us started?
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of “employee communication,” in your own experience?
Facilitator’s Note: Invite lots of participation here—it’s a good way to warm up the room. Feel free to write their answers on the whiteboard/flipchart. Attendees typically offer up answers such as email, PowerPoint presentations, voicemail, etc. Results typically skew more to electronic than face-to-face communication.
Say: It’s clear that we all depend a lot on electronic communication tools these days. And with good reason…they help us transmit messages quickly and effectively to employees around the world. Good business depends on good electronic communication.
…But we’re here today to get back to basics when it comes to communication.
In the next hour, you’ll get a user’s guide to the most powerful, least tech-y communication tool for business. It’s dialogue. And it’s the key to inspiring employees to work harder on what matters most.
And who couldn’t use a little bit more of thatthese days?
Now, I know that everyone is busy, and I bet that you talk with your staff every day. I wouldn’t blame you if you were sitting there thinking,“I already do this, so why am I here?” But I promise that I wouldn’t take an hour from you if I wasn’t sure you’d get it back many times over by applying what we’re going to cover today.
To get a sense of where we’re starting from—I want to ask you all a few more questions.
[Next slide]
Facilitator’s Guide (Slide 2)
Say: This is a quick quiz to help you do a gut-check on your current state of dialogue with your team. Do your best to answer honestly! We’re all here to learn.
Do: Give them a minute or two to answer the questions. Then, for each question, ask for a show of hands as you go through the answer spectrum.
Facilitator’s Note:Most groups average out at “rarely” or “occasionally” for most questions.
Say: It’s definitely normal that we’re not all on the “frequently” side of the spectrum. And it makes sense, really. We emulate the communication style that we ourselves experience in our own careers. If you think about it, how many managers have you had who could consistently answer “regularly” or “frequently” to these questions?
If you can’t think of many, I’m not too surprised. After all, this stuff doesn’t come naturally to all of us! The good news is: it’s not hard to learn at all.
Let’s turn the page to take a look at our brief agenda.
[Next slide]
Facilitator’s Guide (Slide 3)
Say: As you can see here, we’re going to spend some time talking about why dialogue is such a powerful tool for communicating with your employees. I’ll share some new data that shows what’s going on in dialogue that can make such a big difference in employee performance.
Then, we’ll spend the second half talking about the keys to running a great business dialogue. Now don’t get me wrong…there’s plenty of art to running a great conversation…but the science really boils down to three simple things that we’ll cover in that section.
Then, to wind things down, we’ll talk through a simple framework you can use to identify the specific situations where dialogue can get you the biggest payoff.
Today is really an introduction to building a leadership skill that will serve you well throughout your career. As for today, I hope you’ll leave this session feeling equipped to start using dialogue to get the results that you want. And just as we’re learning about dialogue, don’t hesitate at any point to get some practice by asking a question or sharing your point of view.
[Next slide]
Facilitator’s Guide (Slide 4)
Say:Just to give us some grounding, let’s take a look at why internal communication is so foundational to business success.
The data you see here comes from the Communications Executive Council, a research program of CEB.They ran a major survey of business leaders to understand the role of communication in the successful execution of strategy. The survey drew a response from 600 business partners, including 250 senior business leaders, from all types of companies around the world. You can see the fundamental question here: Given your company'sstrategic goals, which areas of company strategy execution are most importantto "get right"?
These ten categories came out on top. As you can see, communicating with employees about strategic objectives was deemed nearly twice as important as any other element of strategy execution.
Now, there are a variety of ways that employees receive information about strategy.
Facilitator’s Note: Here is a good opportunity to get the room to name some channels specific to your company. When you seem to have good recognition that the attendees themselves are important channels of information, you can use that as a trigger to move on.
Say: So, we’re in agreement that employees have information coming at them from every which way…sometimes more than they can digest on their own. It’s no wonder that they depend on their manager to frame the important stuff in a way that makes sense to them.
On the next page, you’ll get some time-tested—and new—perspective on what makes a leader a successful communicator.
[Next slide]
Facilitator’s Guide (Slide 5)
Do: Give the attendees a moment to skim the page’s content.
Say: So, the question of this page is, “What do we mean by internal communication?” Clearly, Jack Welch has a clear opinion based on his long and successful career at General Electric.
Can we talk for a minute about anything that particularly stands out to you in his statement?
Facilitator’s Note: Some key points include: process, interactive, face-to-face. This is good opportunity to make a bridge to the next point: i.e., what are the implications of Welch’s statement for them as leaders?
Say: Notice that Welch isn’t talking about communication tactics that senior leaders use to communicate with large groups…like a speech or a video. Instead, he’s emphasizing the human element—the face-to-face element—that only a manager can cultivate with a team. He’s talking about dialogue.
Now, let me touch on the second statement on the page, again from the Communications Executive Council. In 2009, they ran a major study, called Mobilizing the Workforce, to measure what makes an employee work harder to support the business goals that really count.
Well, what they found is that the degree to which a manager’s communication style is “inclusive”—in other words, encouraging employees to participate in dialogue—is the single biggest driver of employee effort on key business priorities.
On the next two pages, I want to show you some highlights of their data, to make this whole notion of “dialogue” a bit more concrete. We’ll start by taking a look at the employee effort side of things.
[Next slide]
Facilitator’s Guide (Slide 6)
Say:To get started, let’s see if you can picture a common scenario…you have something you want people to do, and you’re strapped for time, so you just tell them what needs to be done and move on to the next urgent task on your list. After all, if you tell them what to do, hey, you’re the boss—they do it.
But ask yourself: to what degree are they really invested, giving that discretionary effort that makes the difference between a fine result and a GREAT result? The answer may surprise you…and even scare you a little.
In their 2009 research, CEC found that employees are far less interested in giving that extra effort than they were just one year prior. In fact, discretionary effort is down by 40 to 60% by a variety of measures.
Let’s take a closer look at the “reactive effort” bars on the left. A typical “reactive” situation is responding to a manager’s request to focus on a particular task. These days, you’re not getting the same effortas you did when times are good—in fact, you’re getting 17% less.
Now, let’s take a minute to get real. You don’t have enough hours in the day to tell people what to do all the time (not even if you WANTED to). You count on their judgment and self-motivation to get those great results. And that’s where the story gets worse.
Look at those three bar charts on the right, under proactive effort. By any measure, employees are far less likely to choose to work harder to get the best results that they can. Bottom line: they just want to get the job done.
So. Clearly, we can’t take employee effort for granted. But dialogue can help you reverse this trend, as you’ll see in the box at the bottom of the page. The key here is that dialogue helps employees make a personal connection to what they’re being asked to do.
Why is this so important? It’s because all employees share a number-one (and usually unmet) need: to feel personally recognized and important for their contributions to something with a
larger purpose. It’s the “ME” principle, and it’s a particularly powerful need when conditions are difficult and uncertain.
Here’s the good news: dialogue makes it very easy to meet this need and, as a result, get more and better effort from employees. Through a good discussion, you can help employees make the connection between their efforts and a meaningful outcome—as well as recognize the efforts of standout employees who others can follow.
Facilitator’s Note: This is a good time to engage attendees in a brief discussion about a relevant strategic initiative where extra effort made a big difference…or where lackluster effort really hurt the cause. Where could dialogue have made a difference? With which audiences?
[Next slide]
Facilitator’s Guide (Slide 7)
Say: So, clearly we’re not talking about effort for effort’s sake—we’re talking about extra effort on key business priorities, on what matters most. And by that, we’re generally talking about the effective execution of strategy.
Now, when we talk about having a strategy dialogue with employees,we don’t mean a conversation about whether the strategy should be adopted. That’s typically a done deal by the time you’re ready to have a conversation about it. But here’s the question to ask yourself now: do your employees truly understand what the strategy is, and what they need to do to execute it? Sad to say, your odds aren’t very good here, either.
Let’s take a look at the data on the left side of the page. We all know that a great strategy is only as good as its implementation. But according to the heads of 200 companies, more than one-third of the potential value of a given strategy typically goes unrealized. That can translate to millions—or even billions—of dollars down the drain.
Now ask yourself: why, in your experience, does strategy implementation fall short? Look at the clipboard on the right side of the page. You’ll see some important elements that fall outside of communication…like resourcing…but it’s probably no surprise to this group that communication—or rather, lack thereof—is often the culprit.
Facilitator’s Note: You may want to pick back up on the prior example about a relevant strategic initiative where information sharing—or lack thereof—had a big influence on the outcome.
Say: So, can you see how dialogue can help you get the right results? In even a brief conversation, you can convey the most pertinent information to employees, clarify their roles, and draw out what information they still need in order to execute successfully. Through dialogue, you can also get a better sense of performance gaps and have a fighting chance at smoothing them out through good information sharing.
In short, dialogue gets relevant information out in the open and gets people what they need to be more successful at the things that matter most.