The Secret Sauce of TalkSHIFTs
Like many business leaders, I waslaser-focused on achieving success. I began reading business books as a teenager because I wanted to make my father proud.
Ultimately, it wasn’t in business books that I would find the secrets that I was seeking. I went to workshops where I learned the insights that, frankly, I would have dismissed as “touchy-feely” and “woo-woo psychobabble” back in my CEO days.
And it was there that I discovered the secrets that had eluded me all those years as a CEO.
The strikingly simple secret that I learned was this:little language changes make a big difference. I finally understood that compassionate communication isn’t just a pain to be tolerated only when necessary; it is THE universal secret to leadership that works equally well in business, in relationships, and in life.
A Leader in Relationships
As my business relationship with my father ended, my marriage of nine years was ending as well. I became fascinated by the work of Dr. John Gottman, renowned for his research on marriage and divorce. Dr. Gottman is known for his ability to predict divorce with 94 percent accuracy after observing the communication patterns used by couples during an emotionally charged conversation.
While his work was specific to marital relationships, it struck me that the same communication patterns that he used to predict divorce would also have predicted the breakup with my father, as well as every other business “breakup” in my career—executives I’d fired, salespeople who’d left, taking customers to the competition—every one of these “breakups” would have been predicted by Gottman’s framework. I began to study the many ways that our communication leads to unintended consequences. What became apparent to me was how often dysfunctional communication patterns are tolerated—sometimes even celebrated—in the workplace.
I asked myself, “What if marriage research could be used to create great working relationships, and business best practices could be used to create great families?”
And this was the inspiration behind the TalkSHIFTs.
Now, you may be wondering “Why does the world need a business book to bring families together?”
We often don’t invest time to recover relationships until the other person says, “I’m leaving.” What the marital research shows is that the person who leaves often decided to leave years before. By the time they say, “I’m leaving,” they’re already mentally gone. Isn’t it often the same with employees? After all, most unhappy employees don’t quit and leave, they quit andstay. Unfortunately, quitting and staying is quite common in marriages too.
What Are TalkSHIFTs?
TalkSHIFTs aim squarely at people who aspire to lead in the broadest sense of the word—those who lead teams, and those who don’t; those who lead organizations, and those who aspire to…TalkSHIFTs are a collection of simplesay-this-not-that rules,fill-in-the-blanks phrases, and powerful questions that can make your day, your year, or your
