HOW to Say it When it's Time to Speak Up
Welcome back to our coaching series on "Using Your Voice Effectively." Last week, you learned what to say. This week we'll focus on how to say it.
Delivering a message that other people will hear requires that you are precise and succinct. If you dawdle and meander, your listener will lose focus and you'll lose their attention. It's important to set the context quickly and get to your point.
An effective technique for doing this is to think about the "change of state." This requires you to explain 3 things:
The current state: how things are now.
The issue: why the current state is not optimal and how to improve it.
The future state: how things will improve in light of the change you're suggesting and/or worse if your advice is not acted upon.
The Change of State technique is effective because it requires that you tailor your communication to your audience or your listener.
As you learned last week, your audience is #1.
The Change of State technique is straightforward but it takes preparation and practice to work effectively. It works for a wide array of conversations, from personal to professional. Here are a two examples.
Example #1
You (to your partner): We need to consider a new refrigerator. Ours is barely hanging on.
Your partner: The refrigerator is working fine - it's keeping things cold so it's doing it's job. We didn't plan for the cost of a new refrigerator this year.
You: I recognize that we didn't plan for this. There are unanticipated expenses that happen sometimes and we should consider this one. Yes, the refrigerator is working now (current state). But I can tell it's struggling to keep things cool. Sometimes I open the freezer and I can tell that the food is thawing - including the meat - and then being re-frozen. I'm worried about someone getting sick or having expensive groceries go bad (issue/problem). If we talk about replacing it now, we can plan for the expense and we will be able to get a higher quality refrigerator (future state). If we wait until it dies, we will be in a bind and we may end up with a refrigerator that is lower quality than what we'd like (future state).
Example #2
You (to your boss, Amir): Amir, I think we need to change our accounting software. From what I'm seeing, our current software won't be as useful for our bigger clients over time.
Amir: Replacing our accounting software is expensive and I haven't heard any complaints about it from our staff or our clients. It seems like a waste of money to buy something we don't need.
You: I understand that it's an investment. Our current software works well for smaller clients and just OK for our bigger clients (current state). But several times over the last few months, we've had to manually pull data for our larger clients because the current software has limited capabilities. Doing it manually is time intensive and slowing us down. Amir, if we have to continue doing it this way, we will have a very difficult time bringing on the additional clients we hope to this year at that level (problem/issue). It will take time finding a new software suite and training our team. If we start preparing for it now, we can better anticipate the costs and our staff will be experienced using it - this will save us time and money in the long run and it will also train and prepare our team to provide the best level of service for the clients we hope to onboard next year (future state).
Okay, now it's YOUR turn. Think about a conversation that you need to contribute to and map it out using the Change of State technique. With this insight, you're ready. Get in touch and let us know how it goes.
