Issue No. 8 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features another book and a bucket on communication. Larry Wilson suggests that you stick this on your bathroom mirror: "80 percent of success in sales is having people believe that you understand them!"
He adds: "This book turns the Golden Rule inside out and upside down. Treating people the way WE want to be treated can be wrong 75 percent of the time, and right only 25 percent!"
Adapting Your Style So Customers and Donors Say "Yes!"
Many pastors, fundraisers, CEOs, senior leaders, sales managers, teachers and parents lead, preach, teach and parent as if every person thinks and acts the same. Wrong!
Students of the four "social styles" understand that Drivers, Analyticals, Amiables and Expressives each have a distinct style of communicating. You can make your customer (donor, etc.) comfortable when you know your own style and learn how to read other people's styles.
Versatile Selling: Adapting Your Style So Customers Say "Yes!" is an excellent resource from the Wilson Learning Library. If you're making a donor pitch to a Driver, stress results and present options and probabilities. "If you’re Analytical and your buyer is Amiable, you dial down your need for facts and risk assessment and work on being cooperative, building a loyal partnership, and offering assurance and guarantees."
Bob Phillips wrote the faith-based version of social styles, The Delicate Art of Dancing With Porcupines: Learning to Appreciate the Finer Points of Others. It’s out of print, but often available on Amazon.
Check out the Wilson Learning Seminar: Building Relationship Versatility—Social Styles at Work.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
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1. How effectively do we communicate to the four social styles: Drivers, Analyticals, Amiables and Expressives? Do our donor letters and newsletters favor one style over the other three?
2. How much of our staff/volunteer interpersonal conflict might be the result of not understanding these four styles?
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Insights from the Management Buckets Workshop Experience
Communication is still king. Typos and bad writing stink up websites, newsletters, emails, memos, reports, donor letters and signage. There’s help!
Bob Kelly, resident wordsmith at Wordcrafters, Inc. (www.wordcrafters.info), introduced me to the “Gunning Fog Index,” a measurement of the number of multi-syllabic words used and the length of sentences. The communication goal: shorter, simpler sentences. The Reader’s Digest is written at a ninth grade level while Atlantic Monthly is targeted to high school seniors and older.
Microsoft Word’s spell check will give you “Readability Statistics.” For example, the Flesch-Kincaid grade level for this week’s eNewsletter is 10.2. Per Microsoft, the Flesch reading ease level for this issue is 47.1 (on a scale of 100). I monitor these levels for every issue and I try to write for all four social styles. It’s not easy!
Read the Wikipedia Article on the Gunning Fog Index.
In our Management Buckets Workshop Experience, we hone in on the seven deadly sins to avoid in The Printing Bucket and offer some friendly critiques on your latest newsletters, donor letters and websites
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
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1. What’s the Fog Index for our latest newsletter?
2. Rewrite this sentence: “I’m writing today to inquire about the possibility that you would be open to come and speak to our hard-working employees here at our beautiful international headquarters on the general subject of How to Basically Write Better Memos and Reports when you Haven’t Had any Training, okay?”
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