Watch Your Language!
From my office in the USA, I was remotely mentoring a Chinese manager who worked for an American company in China. One day he asked about the most effective ways to provide coaching feedback to his team members, so I shared tips from my experience (a topic for another post). At our next call he thanked me for the good advice and casually mentioned that it was much easier for him to give coaching feedback in English than in Mandarin. I had to learn more about this!
At that time, the Chinese business culture tended to be somewhat top-down directed (bosses telling employees what to do), while the American style was to empower the employees to make their own decisions. He told me that it sounded awkward to provide American-style coaching in Mandarin – the concepts were awkward to express in the language, so they sounded insincere. Ever since, I have remained aware of the effect that language has on thought and perception.
This concept applies even to the effect of word choice within a language. One time, a customer was complaining about device failures where a thin protective layer was disappearing from a product in use. Knowing that the protective layer was chemically inert, everyone began referring to “the erosion issue”.
After spending months unsuccessfully attempting to re-create an erosion mechanism, it was finally discovered that the protective layer itself was not failing, but an adhesion layer attaching the protective layer was being chemically attacked via tiny pores in the protective layer. By naming the issue “erosion” after the speculative cause, the thinking of the entire team was biased away from the true cause – it was “corrosion”, not “erosion”.
Lesson-learned: language and word choice influence thinking and behavior!
Networking and communication build and sustain the relationships that make business work. Avoid these bad habits immediately or people will dislike you immediately.
Mastering these 5 missing skills quickly maximizes your productivity and influence, which in turn enhances both job security and advancement potential.
I explained the goal in designing any component. Overly tight specifications would make it harder to find suppliers and would drive up costs. The engineer's entire approach changed.
Preparing for a presentation is vital in enabling team members to convey critical points, and influence outcomes with customers. Here are the steps involved.
When customer tensions rise, the right approach can turn friction into collaboration. At CAEDENCE, we call it the 3C’s: Calm, Clarify, Control. Here's more detail.
Will AI Replace Direct Customer Communication? Absolutely Not! In an age of chatbots and algorithms, the highest-impact discussions still happen person-to-person.
B2B customer relationships are not a breeze. We’ve navigated hundreds of challenging accounts and distilled five secrets that consistently turn friction into forward progress.
Ever notice how a quick fix from the top can feel like a shortcut, but it ends up stunting your team’s growth? When managers rush to answers, they inadvertently affect team development.
Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
Your team is marching through the tools of your company's chosen problem-solving approach. This is time not spent on growing your business or delivering cost reductions. Yet your customers are suffering, and they're not shy about letting you know it! Why isn't it working?
