How Do You Talk To Your Team?
The way you communicate with your team determines how well they’ll perform for you. Never talk down to your team; talk up to them. What I mean by “talking up” is building them up with your words. Treat them based on their potential. Speak to them with high expectations. Always be stretching them to the greatness they have within, just begging to be released.
My wife, Erin, and I have two beautiful daughters. When our youngest daughter was little, she would sometimes get an attitude when asked to do certain chores. Instead of obeying, she would work herself up to the point of getting upset. We would then have to discipline her and let her know that her behavior was unacceptable, but we didn’t stop there. We wanted her to know that having a bad attitude was not true to who she really was. You see, our daughter was (and still is) a sweet and loving girl who truly wants to do good, but she was letting her emotions get the best of her. So, we would remind her that the attitude she was displaying was not like her.
We began to give her positive reinforcement by telling her how sweet she really was and that her current attitude did not reflect that. What were we doing? We were giving her an expectation to live up to. We could have simply said, “Why are you so angry when you have to do something? All you do is get upset when we ask you to do chores! Stop being an angry kid!”
But that would not have given her a good reputation to live up to. It would have given her the wrong expectation. She would have grown up thinking she was an angry person, and that could have turned into a perception of herself that she accepted. We made sure we spoke about her positive traits and not her negative ones. The great thing is that as she has grown older, she’s started living up to the expectation we kept reinforcing in her. This positive expectation was so engrained in her over the years that now when she has a slip-up and starts to get upset, we can just look at her, and she will say, “I know, that’s not who I am.”
If you want to give someone hope, give them an expectation they can aspire to reach. German writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, said, “Treat a man as he is, he will remain so. Treat a man the way he can be and ought to be, and he will become as he can be and should be.” When you communicate your belief in someone’s potential, they will do their best to meet that expectation.
The best leaders are the ones who give people a great reputation to live up to. Call people up to a higher level, and the ones that can make it…will.
