12 GOAT Communication Skills That Transform Leadership, Productivity, and Teamwork

In this episode, you'll get 12 specific phrases you can use in all kinds of tough conversations at work to deescalate conflict, improve problem solving, and get results. Welcome to Leadership without losing your soul. A podcast helping human-centered leaders master communication to accelerate your team's performance, reduce stress, and build a career with the respect and influence you deserve. I'm your host David Dye, president of Let's Grow Leaders. Welcome to the show. Today you're going to get 12 phrases. We call them the goats greatest of all time, powerful phrases that will give you more influence, improve the speed and quality of your results, and help you, your team, and your colleagues work better together. So if you listened to the last episode, there are four dimensions of every conflict or collaboration that the more you invest in these, either before or during a conversation, the easier that conversation is to get a positive resolution. So these four dimensions are connection, clarity, curiosity, and commitment. The more of each of those four you have, the better things are. So the goats, these greatest of all time, 12 powerful phrases, they sort out into three phrases for each of those dimensions. So I'm going to start with connection. Powerful phrase number one for connection. The phrase is, I care about you, this team, this project, and I'm confident we can find a solution we can all work with. So when you use this phrase, you're connecting to the people, whether it's the person you're talking to, maybe starting out of a conversation with your boss, you say, hey, boss, listen, I care about you, or I care about the team or I care about our results here. The key with this one is to talk about something you actually care about. So if that's the people, if that's the person, if that's the project, the results, the team, whatever it might be, we're going to go there. The next phrase in connection here is a very simple one, three easy words. Tell me more, such a simple set of words. Why are they so connecting because they're not about your agenda? They're about you listening to the other person. It's immediate connection, trying to understand where they're coming from, listening and hearing. And then the third connection, powerful phrase here is, call this reflect to connect. Here's the phrase. It sounds like you're feeling blank. Is that right? This is an emotional check for understanding. And whenever somebody's feeling a powerful emotion of any kind, whether it's joy, celebration, or the more negative kinds, anxiety, frustration, anger, sadness, whatever those are, it feels like it sounds like you're feeling less. Do I have that right? When a person feels seen, it lowers the intensity of that emotion, and it builds an automatic connection. Like, okay, you get me. You know where I am right now. And then it opens the door, makes other conversation possible. And the key here on this one is you're asking, you're never telling someone how they feel. You're saying, this is what I'm picking up. If you don't have it right, you still were displaying the compassion, the connection that you cared to know how they're actually feeling. So those are the first three, connection, go powerful phrases. I care about you, this team, this project, I'm confident we can find a solution we can all work with. Tell me more. And number three, it sounds like you're feeling blank. Is that right? Reflect to connect. All right. That's connection. Let's go to the second dimension clarity. So many conflicts result from a lack of clarity, expectation violations. We're not on the same page. So the more clarity we can get, the easier everything else becomes. And by the way, it makes connection easier too. So the next go, this is the fourth, if you're counting here, is a clarity question. I love this one. What would a successful outcome do for you? This is not asking, hey, what's success for you? The phrase is, what would a successful outcome do for you? What you're trying to get out here is the other person's actual objectives. What do they need to achieve? So often when somebody takes an immediate position in an argument, they can really dig into that. I need this to happen. Like, let's just take an example that happens to us all the time. Hey, I need a one hour training on management. Okay, well, what would a successful management training do for you? What are the skills they need to learn? What are the outcomes you're trying to achieve? And sometimes you'll discover they don't actually need a management training at all. It might be that they need a conflict resolution program, or it might be that it's really just clarity about a policy that's needed. When you ask what would a successful outcome do for you? You avoid the other person digging in and saying, it has to be one hour. It has to be this because that's where they started. You'll find out what they're actually trying to achieve. Then you can start bringing additional answers to that question into the conversation, and you're set up to start building a solution that meets both of your outcomes. Because of course, there's something that a successful outcome would do for you as well. The next clarity goat, number five in the total here, let's start with what we agree on. You can use this one particularly when you're a conversation and it feels like things are very far apart, trying to find that common ground. Let's get clear on what we agree on. Can help establish some parameters, frame the conversation that's taking place and help everyone to see, maybe you're not as far apart as you thought. And then number six, our third clarity phrase. If you've been listening to the show for any length of time, this is one of my favorites. It's a check for understanding, closing that communication loop, making sure the send and the receive match, and it sounds like this. So what I'm hearing you say is blank. So you repeat back what you're hearing in your own words, what you think you've heard, what you think they're saying, and then you clarify, do I have that right? Communication is always a send and a receive. So you're making sure that the send and the receive match. This is one of those phrases that if you can take the 30 seconds or so that it requires, get some clarification. Get that clarity. Make sure you're both on the same page, close that communication loop. You will save hours, days, weeks of headaches, heartaches, and frustration. On to the third dimension. So we've been talking about goats, greatest of all time, powerful phrases for connection, for clarity. Now let's look at three for curiosity. Curiosity again is being open to one another's perspectives and looking for alternate paths to success. So this next one, which is the seventh of the 12, I'm sharing with you. Now they're one of my favorites. It's one that I spend an entire year actively consciously practicing this one, trying to cultivate this as a habit in my own interactions leadership. I have found it so powerful. The phrase is, I'm curious how this looks from your perspective. When you're in the middle of a conflict and you feel your temperature starting to rise. You're getting frustrated. You feel all those things. You're tensing up. Asking, hey, I'm curious how this looks from your perspective. It's an incredibly powerful phrase because it's really hard to stay furious when you're curious. So if you get curious, how's this look from your perspective? It pulls you out of that reactivity and all the hormones that are raging through. It pulls you to the front part of your brain where curiosity lives. And the other thing that happens when you ask this question is, of course, you're going to learn. You learn that the other person's perspective was probably very different than what you'd imagined than the way you were looking at it. And now again, you've got new information you can use to make different decisions. You learn they have a different set of values. Maybe don't fully agree or disagree with those or anything, but now you know where they are. They've got a different experience of what's happening or their backgrounds different. They're bringing that to the conversation. Once you know those things, you're in a position to start making different choices. And of course, you can share your own perspective as well. And factor that all in. Okay, number eight, our second curiosity phrase here, what do you suggest we do next? So let's say you've talked about something for a while. And then you move to what do you suggest we do next? That helps give the other person ownership. It's super powerful. Again, because it opens to different paths to success than the ones that you might have suggested. And you might have a really good one. And you can put it in the conversation. But if you invite the other person into theirs first, even if they suggest the same thing, now they've got ownership of it. And you have a better chance of coming up with the best solution as well as creating that kind of mutual ownership. And then our final curiosity phrase. This is phrase number nine. What can I do to support you right now? This is one of those multi-purpose phrases. Again, you learn what a person actually needs. You learn what their interests are. All of that helps build connection. So you're getting multi-purpose out of this one. It helps you build a better plan because you're getting more clarity. Again, multi-level here. So it's a curiosity question that builds in connection and clarity. And you can use these in so many different kinds of places and purposes. I'm curious how this looks from your perspective. What do you suggest we do next? And then this third multi-layered one. Really great way to move those conversations forward. Alright, we're going to bring it home with the final three. These are the three phrases all related to the fourth dimension, which is commitment. Having a shared agreement. This is how investing in commitment. These are phrases that will prevent you from having that broken record, that Groundhog's Day, doing it again and again and again without actually making any forward progress. So commitment phrase. The first commitment phrase, which is number 10 overall. What's one action we can both agree to as a next step? This moves you out of your intentions into concrete specific actual action steps. And that helps you turn all of those nice and good intentions into reality. And then our second commitment phrase, number 11 overall. To recap, we've agreed to blank. Is that your understanding? Okay, if you're a stickler, you may recognize this is another type of check for understanding, which is one of our clarity phrases. That's just how powerful checking for understanding is. It's both a clarity and a commitment phrase. We're just a little bit differently. So we've had a conversation. Now we're going to summarize recap. We've all agreed to do this. That ensures that we're all on the same page. We're not leaving that to chance or misinterpretation. And gives us a chance to deal with that right now if we're not on the same page. Also increases the likelihood of follow through, particularly when you pair it with our final goat, greatest of all time, powerful phrase, number 12 overall, the third commitment, powerful phrase. And this goats a goat for a reason. Let's schedule time to talk about this again and see how our solutions working. This is what we call scheduling the finish. The phrase again is let's schedule time to talk about this and see how our solutions working. This is so powerful because there are three different things that happen when you schedule a finish. First, it forces you to pressure test your new agreement. Whatever this commitment is. As soon as you say, all right, can we get together at three o'clock next Friday? That's in 10 days. How does that sound? And we're going to review what we've done. We can both go, oh, wow, is this realistic? It forces us to look at feasibility at competing priorities. Can I actually do it now? Because I'm putting my money where my mouth is. Can I do this in light of all the other priorities and everything else going on? As soon as we do that, we have to wrestle with those competing priorities. And if we need to extend our deadline a little bit or shift other priorities around, it forces us to do that, which increases the likelihood of actually following through on the commitments we do make. And then the second thing that it does is knowing that we're actually going to be looking at each other eye to eye or the virtual eye, it increases the likelihood that we'll follow through and keep our commitment. So accountability improves. And then the third benefit of scheduling the finish is that it gives you a chance to handle exceptions. Say you make a new agreement. And then next Monday, before you have a chance to work through whatever that agreement was, your manager comes in, your boss blows it up with some competing priorities or a fire drill or a customer's upset, something dismantled or broke. If you don't ever talk about that commitment again, you just made a commitment you didn't keep. And now trust is broke and trust erodes. But if you got a built-in chance to talk about it, it's on the calendar. You're going to show up to that meeting and say, yeah, I didn't do the thing. Did you do the thing? No, I didn't do it either. Okay, cool. Let's talk about it. Let's renew our commitment. Let's find out what happened. Oh yeah, was that manager thing, that customer thing? Oh, we had that fire drill. Okay, how can we renew our commitment? Let's try again next week. Or maybe we need to figure out a solution to solve for that thing that happened because it's going to happen again. So that's the final goat, greatest of all time powerful phrase number 12. So there you have it. Those are 12 powerful phrases you can use in almost any circumstance. I'm just going to pick one. If I had to boil down those 12 to just four, one from each dimension. Here you go. I care about you, connection. I care about you, this team, this project. I'm confident we can find a solution. Then let's go to clarity. Curiosity. And finally, commitment. I can pretty much guarantee if you'll commit yourself to use those four in all the different language that works for you. But all the different circumstances you're in, you're going to see an immediate improvement in the level of collaboration and the ease of problem solving. You'll transform your conflicts into collaborative conversations. And I get that these leadership and team conversations that you have at work with conflict. They're not easy. All these tough work conversations. And we've got an entire leaders guide to powerful phrases that you and your team can use to navigate all of these kinds of tough conversations and work. It's got one page with all the 12 goats you can print out. You can give it to your entire team. And that's just one of the many. There are a variety of activities in there that will help you reduce stress, improve morale and productivity. And the guide is yours free. Go to Let's Grow Leaders dot com slash podcast. Download it today. And if you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe. Whatever platforms your favorite subscribe so you don't miss any of these practical communication skills to help you accelerate your team's performance, reduce stress and build a career with the respect and influence you deserve. Thanks as always to our producer and sound engineer Brooke Bradford at Sheep and Space Digital Business Services and Laura over at Brooke Marketing for the work on this episode. Until next time. Use these goats and I'm your host David Dyer reminding you to be the leader. You want your boss to be this podcast is a part of the C suite radio network. For more top business podcasts visit c desuiteradio.com.