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Tip 662: Use the appropriate tone. |
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Offer your feedback as suggestions, ideas, or opinions. Avoid stating opinions as facts, ultimatums, solutions, directives, or musts. |
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Tip 663: Play the part of coach. |
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If the other person's goals and yours match, you can play the part of coach with the right language. Your most successful gambit will be leading the other person through insightful self-critique to self-motivation. My graduate professor used the approach in my student-teaching days. After each session she observed, she'd pose these three questions: "What did you like about how the session went?" "If you did it over, what would you do differently?" ''What information, help, or direction do you need from me?" Try variations of these questions in other situations where you're responsible for another person's results: |
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"Do you see a problem or difficulty?" |
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"Are you getting the results you want?" |
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"Can you describe the problem, difficulty, and result as you see it?" |
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"What makes the problem worse?" |
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"What helps the situation?" |
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"What needs to change, improve, or happen differently? |
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"What kind of help do you need from me?" |
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"What action do you plan to take?" |
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Tip 664: Make war stories realistic. |
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From those who are successful, war stories are usually welcome. If you're successful, rich, happy, and at the place others want to be, they often want "this-is-how-I-did-it" stories. But they want realistic, not simplistic, ones. Don't look back from your lofty perch and throw out tidbits of encouragement and how-to'sjust enough to tempt the other person. They want hard facts, good approaches, usable information. If you want raving fans, be straightforward and honest, not glib and condescending. |
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Tip 665: Go around the "Friend of Mine" framing. |
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Sometimes people hesitate to present their own quandaries and instead frame them something like, "I've got a friend over in accounting who just |
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