Business leaders use a number of adjectives to promote their communication cultures — open, honest and candid are among the favorites.
But Arthur Hargate, the president and CEO of Ross Environmental Services Inc. — a hazardous waste management company that generated $35 million in 2008 revenue — would like to add another adjective: connected. And that, he says, is possibly the most important adjective of all. Before communication can be open and honest, you need to establish a real connection with your employees.
“You have to meet people where they are, and people have individual preferences as to how they want to provide and receive information,” he says.
Smart Business spoke with Hargate about how you can build communication by staying connected.
Q. What are the keys to being an effective communicator?
Let me start with the issue of listening. It’s really critical to make a connection with folks, and to do that, you need to establish a level of trust. They really need to understand that you have their best interest at heart. To get there, they need to feel as if they have an influence on you, because the communication is two-way. In order to establish those open lines of communication, you need be very open and honest and listen for meaning. You need to be interested in their welfare, and once you’ve established that, they’re willing to listen to you. But they’re not going to be willing to listen to you until they trust you.
Listening is undervalued, and I mean listening really hard for meaning with everyone with whom you interact. You have to make a connection, and I don’t think you do that until you demonstrate that you can be influenced by what someone is saying to you. People really turn off when you make them feel invisible, and not listening well does exactly that.
Q. What advice would you give about learning to become a good communicator?
You can definitely build the skills. Willingness is a little more difficult. It’s a process, just like any other process. I’m fortunate enough to have had an opportunity to be educated in that area, and I’ve found that you need to study the process. It does require thought, it does require study, it does require analyzing how specific and precise you’re being with folks.
It takes additional things like understanding body language to recognize whether you’re being understood. You as a leader are responsible for the entire communication process. You’re taking the responsibility to make sure that you understand where the other person is coming from, and the second step in the process is that you’re taking the responsibility to confirm that they have understood where you’re coming from. If you have two people in a room who are both approaching communication from this direction, you’re really going to hit the mark. Both individuals are taking 51 percent of the responsibility to make sure that they understand each other.
Those are skills that can be taught. It’s definitely a process; there is a lot of science behind it, many years of business management theory, psychological theory and understanding how people communicate.
