Finding common ground

I’m in the throes of reading “Surrounded by Idiots” by Swedish motivator, author and public speaker, Thomas Erikson, recommended to me by one of my coaching clients. It highlights the necessity of finding a language that we both speak, when confronted with someone new or someone we haven’t been able to connect with.

This first came home to me many years ago when the management team at KPMG Leicester and Northampton (where I was Marketing Manager at the time) had an awayday: we’d all filled in Myers Briggs questionnaires ahead of time, hoping that the results reveal on the day would catapult us forward in doing our jobs well. For me, it worked! The facilitator plotted our MBTIs on a quadrant – the HR Manager and I were sitting in the bottom right (ENTP) while all our tax and accountancy peers were top left (ISFJ)! A real eye opener – it wasn’t quite as clearcut but there was a definite split and we non-numbers folk were miles away from the others.

This was an early lesson in stakeholder management for me - my takeaway that day was to work out what interests the fee earning team, what they like to talk about and what they don’t want to hear about. Once I’d mastered that, my pitches and presentations to them were much more quant than qual and I got to do more of what I wanted and believed the business needed from marketing! I just had to work at it a bit harder.

I experienced something similar recently when my daughter-in-law’s mum paid us a visit from Hong Kong. She speaks only Cantonese and my Cantonese is restricted to less than two words…but we went out for coffee together and found a way. Google Translate came to my rescue (I was hoping it was sufficiently accurate and that I wasn’t saying anything rude) and she used a similar Cantonese-English translation app. It must have been a funny sight to other coffee drinkers, two women tapping on their phones, showing each other, smiling, laughing, shrugging and laughing some more but not saying a word!

The book is worth a read - if you don’t speak the same language, you can still communicate, it just means working a bit harder. In coaching, we use various psychometric tools to help people with self-awareness and awareness of others, to help with relationship building and understanding how others tick.

Google Translate came to my rescue (I was hoping it was sufficiently accurate and that I wasn’t saying anything rude) and she used a similar Cantonese-English translation app.