Great leadership requires developing three levels (or sets) of skills: Personal, Interpersonal and Organizational.
In our last post, we addressed the personal level.
Today, we discover three tools to increase your interpersonal skills.
Like the floors of a 3-story building, each set of skills builds on the others. The wall, floors, and ceiling not only form each floor, they also serve as supports for the floors above and completion for the floors below. If the builder insists on only a solitary story, the building will never attain the heights it could reach. Likewise, the leader who determines to only focus on one level limits her impact. And, no matter how well constructed one level is, it will never become two (or three) without additional design and elements and skills.
Interpersonal skills serve as the second floor. “Interpersonal” necessarily means other people are involved. And, those other people don’t see what you see. They don’t hear your internal thoughts. So, it’s categorically impossible for them to read your mind.
Furthermore, in leadership, each grouping of skills demands a new level of adjustment and commitment from the leader. One skill set supports the next, but the next poses unique challenges. Added dimensions and increased height require additional skills.
Unfortunately, many people deny this. Too often, leaders think (and teach) optimizing one set of skills spills over and shows success into the next level. It doesn’t work like that. Too many leaders feel inadequate because they follow this line of thinking, then get discouraged when it doesn’t work. They don’t realize it cannot work, because the skills are different. A lot of a leader’s frustration can be avoided when she realizes this.
Dedication serves as a good example. Your personal dedication to the cause helps shape you personally but has limited impact on the interpersonal and organizational levels. While your personal dedication to your cause helps interpersonally and organizationally, more skills are needed to lead effectively.
“Personal” deals solely with you. “Interpersonal” adds other people.
Your good intentions show us another good example. You know your intent and desire and care for others. But, nobody else sees inside you. To be effective, your intent must be put into public behaviors that others interpret as noble intent. Being snarky or sarcastic means people interpret you as snarky or sarcastic. You may have great intentions, but people can’t see them when they are hidden or when contradictory signals are sent. They won’t see your good intentions unless you communicate them in a way that shows good intentions.
- People perceive care based upon your external actions, not your internal decisions.
- People regard you as sad if you don’t smile, even if you have joy in your heart.
- If you use sarcasm, people experience you as sarcastic, even if you intend to show care.
So, the leader who wants what’s best for the people in his organization must relate interpersonally in a way that others understand.
These three tools will help you do that:
Tool #1: 3PT “3 Person Thinking”
3PT means viewing what and how you communicate from three different perspectives.
People who possess interpersonal skills understand the effect their actions have on others. They fully recognize interpersonal means “existing or occurring between persons”.
What you think and feel and intend is different from what the other person perceives. Using interpersonal skills means you shape your conduct and words so the other person will feel what you intend.
People who say, “They took that the wrong way!” miss this. If the other person took it the wrong way, that means I communicated it the wrong way. If I had communicated differently, they would have felt it differently. Tool #1 teaches us this principle. 3PT is “Three Person Thinking”. People who excel interpersonally make themselves aware of the three people present whenever communication takes place. It looks like this:
1P is you, the speaker. Most people get this. You speak from your mind, your heart and what you want to communicate. Your words come from you. I say “most”, because some don’t accept responsibility for their own words. Have you heard someone say something, then exclaim, “I don’t know where that came from!” Well, if he said it, it came from him, the speaker. Jesus addressed this. He knew where our words come from. He told us in Luke 6:45, “For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” [The words “full of” could be used for a number of things.]
But, 1P Thinking thinks only of the speaker. The 1P Thinker does not consider the impact of his words and has limited effectiveness.
Communication = words + tone + body language.
2P Thinking, on the other hand, considers the speaker, but also considers the listener. This second person is the recipient of the communication. He/she receives what the speaker gives. The person using this first “3PT” tool adjusts her communication to fit where the second person is. The receiver experiences inference, assumptions, and attitudes based on the speaker’s presentation. So, the wise, interpersonally skilled speaker adjusts her presentation.
But 3PT takes this a step further. The person using the 3PT tool understands the role of the speaker and recipient. But, the 3PT communicator also recognizes the spectator.
The 3PT Tool considers the speaker, the recipient and what message gets communicated to a person observing the interaction between the two.
3PT communicators use a level of awareness that considers all aspects of the communication. And, they choose what they communicate based on all those dynamics.
So, this raises the question, “How can you know how a third person interprets your message?” Using Tool #2 can help.
Tool #2: Your Eyes
Great communicators use their eyes. They watch the reactions of the recipient of the communique. Since they want the recipient to understand their intent, they will recalibrate what they say based upon the others’ reactions. If the listener gets defensive, the speaker using Tool #2 knows the listener doesn’t fully hear what is said. So the speaker will retool their words and approach to lessen the other person’s defensiveness.
People who use Tool #2 also watch their own actions. Knowing their tone and body language communicate (even more so than their words), they intentionally move (or don’t move) based upon the message they want to send. Communication comes as a package. Watching (and adjusting) as well as speaking (in the preferred tone) makes this a necessary skill for leaders who excel interpersonally. Therefore, they don’t act based solely upon how they (as the speaker) feel. They adapt based upon the visual clues the listener gives.
There’s one more tool that aids effective interpersonal skills.
Tool #3: The Clock
People who function at top levels interpersonally use the clock as an aid in communication.
Here’s the question: Who talked the most in your last conversation?
In other words, if I clock you with a stopwatch, how many minutes did you speak? And then, how many minutes did the other person speak? Leaders who possess interpersonal skills typically speak fewer minutes in conversations. Are there exceptions to this? Yes. But, the key is that you speaking more is an exception. It should be a rarity. Try it next time. For interpersonal effectiveness, it’s more important to be interested than interesting.
As Dale Carnegie said, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”
How is this a skill? The Clock shows us where the emphasis is. If you do indeed possess interpersonal skills the focus will be on the other person. And, if I’m doing most of the talking, I’m not doing most of the listening. I’m not really caring if I’m doing the lion’s share of the communicating.
How about you? What is an interpersonal skill you use?
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