The Manager's Communication Toolkit: Tools and Techniques for Leading Difficult Personalities

AUTHOR

Introduction

Why Read This Book?

Do you have difficult people in your life? Do you sometimes feel frustrated by others’ behavior or choices? Do you ever struggle when trying to communicate or work with a colleague, team member, boss, or customer? Do you have problems that remain unresolved despite your best efforts? Do you avoid dealing with issues because of fear of conflict? Do you want to become a better leader?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this book is for you.

Communication is the core of all management and leadership. Effective communication unites teams and provides a framework for a vision and goal to be met. Noted program manager authority Rita Mulcahy states, Project managers spend 90 percent of their time on communication-related activities.¹ I would extrapolate from that and say that all good leaders spend 90 percent or more of their time communicating.

To be a good leader, you must be able to communicate effectively to all different types of people, using different styles and mediums. Keeping your organization or team focused on goals and avoiding the mire of drama and frustration depends on successfully dealing with even the most difficult people. This book teaches you how to present yourself, how to listen and respond to others, how to recognize stress in yourself and others, and how to resolve conflict. You will learn strategies for dealing with the ten most challenging personality types. These include the Manipulator, Gossiper, Naysayer, Controller, Perfectionist, Yes-Man, Drama Queen, Recluse, Whiner, and Liar. You will receive advice on how to adapt your communication to work with these difficult individuals and resolve conflict in a way that fosters greater teamwork and keeps everyone moving forward for the good of the organization.

As a senior executive with thirty-five years of expertise in organizational transformation, I have seen the results of good communication techniques and the consequences of poor ones. The ideas presented here come from years’ worth of notes, gathered as I grew and learned how to be a better leader and communicator. I have worked in environments spanning the cybersecurity, defense, intelligence, government, and commercial industries. The businesses might have differed, but the communication issues I witnessed were remarkably similar from organization to organization. I have tackled dysfunctional teams and made them more unified, productive, and happy. It is an amazing feeling to see how some simple changes in communication make a huge difference in team unity, morale, productivity, teamwork, and happiness.

I am excited to share my knowledge of overcoming personality and communication issues to help you create a better working environment. The communication techniques described in this book draw on wide experience and interviews with leaders in numerous industries. From the information in this book, you will be able to understand and communicate with the diverse individuals in your organization, as well as identify their varying needs, their preferences, and the styles of communication that will be most effective for them.

THIS BOOK HAS ANSWERS.

By reading The Manager’s Communication Toolkit: Tools and Techniques for Leading Difficult Personalities, you will acquire the insight, tools, and techniques to be a good communicator and leader. You will learn how to focus your conversations to make them more productive, meaningful, unifying, and comfortable. Your team and organization will progress quickly toward better conclusions. The communication techniques outlined in this book will help you become a self-aware, compassionate, and fair manager. By reading this book and applying its principles, you will also be able to identify what triggers you have and develop methods to maintain your personal top performance level at all times.

This book is divided into three parts. The first part of the book discusses how effective communication can unite teams and bring out the best in each person. It breaks down the different communication tools, which have advantages and disadvantages, depending on the situation and people involved. Effective communication takes into account the situation, relationship, and personality.

In the second part of the book, you will learn to recognize different difficult behavior types. Not only will I teach you to identify them, but I will also give you techniques to work with individuals who exhibit these behaviors. No matter what difficult personalities you may encounter in your day-to-day routine—your boss, your customers, your coworkers, or your team members—the tools in this book will help you communicate effectively, purposefully, and skillfully.

The third part of the book explores your own communication and management styles. Knowing how you react in situations will enable you to adapt both your communication and leadership abilities for maximum positive benefits. Using compassionate confrontation techniques provides a framework to more effectively tackle problems, remove roadblocks, and move ahead in an environment of respect and open communication. Finally, this book provides five traits of a great leader and steps you can take to become a highly effective leader.

WHO SHOULD READ THIS BOOK?

This book is for anyone who has to communicate with others at work. That includes bosses, coworkers, subordinates, and customers. It gives you a framework to have less conflict, better communication, and stronger leadership techniques. In fact, because communication is at the heart of all human interaction, this book will help anyone who seeks better communication skills as a means of improving daily life. The techniques introduced here can be applied to working with all people in every aspect of your everyday routine. It can and will positively influence all of your relationships: at work, at home, at school . . . wherever you go.

In preparing to write this book, I researched troubled projects, teams, and organizations. In all cases, communication was at the heart of the problem. Once the communication challenges were solved, other problems were quickly resolved. Given this understanding, it is clear that managers who expect to perform at the levels demanded by the current professional environment must be, above all, skilled and effective communicators. By reading and applying the ideas found in this book, you are taking the all-important first step toward making yourself the type of communicator your profession demands.

The Manager’s Communication Toolkit shares the experiences of managers from multiple organizations with whom I worked over the years. Their stories are filled with dramatic, encouraging, and sometimes poignant lessons learned. Even though their experiences cross many different industries, the stories have a similar conclusion:

Effective communication is the core of successful management and leadership.

This book will save you, your team, your organization, and your business time and money. In today’s extremely competitive environment, the bottom line cannot tolerate time wasted on internal squabbles or organizational disarray caused by disruptive and difficult behavior. Knowing how to motivate your team members by utilizing their strengths and personality types will help you and your team get activities completed on time, earn bonuses, and economize for your customers or your business.

Ultimately, everything in life is about communication and relationships. By reading this book, you will become aware of your own communication style and the communication style and preferences of others in order to adjust proactively before problem situations become insurmountable. This book provides the insight, tools, and techniques you need in order to become a confident leader capable of running a top-notch organization or project.

PART

Personality Types and Communication Tools

Effective communication is about using the right tool and approach for the situation. In order to do that, you have to understand human relationships and the different communication preferences of the people involved—including yourself. In this first part, you will learn how different personality types—especially difficult ones—require different communication techniques. The more you know about each team member and how they like to communicate, the more effective and efficient you will become.

You will also develop a more in-depth understanding of the different communication tools available in a work environment. These include email, texting, face-to-face conversations, telephone conversations, meetings, presentations, and written reports. Each method available to you offers advantages and disadvantages, depending on the situation and people involved, and we will explore these.

Effective communication not only looks at the personalities and tools involved but also the social relationship and situation. Situations can be formal or informal; the relationship can vary from a new boss to a team member to long-term friendly coworkers and anything in between.

Finally, this part discusses why it is important to know the personality types of each person. Each individual has certain attributes that make particular formats and styles of communication more or less effective when communicating to that individual. It is up to the manager to know what to use, with whom, and when.

This section gives you a framework to motivate your team members. By utilizing their strengths, you can develop a high-functioning team so your organization will meet its goals.

Chapter 1

Understanding Different Personality Types

Most organizations are only as successful as their leadership. As a leader, you have multiple lines of responsibility to your subordinates, coworkers, supervisors, and clients. Balancing everything can be a delicate, demanding, and exhausting task. Success depends on knowing as much as you can about the most important assets your organization has: the people—including yourself—on whom you depend to make everything happen. In this chapter, we’ll take a look at the various types of people you might expect to interact with, trying to learn the most effective ways of ensuring good communication with each type.

Being an effective leader and communicator depends on understanding yourself and others. For managers to communicate effectively, they should understand what motivates and drives each person they encounter, which can provide a framework for rapid assessment of strategies to bring about a successful outcome. It provides a method to observe and understand your own behavior and that of others and to analyze conflicts and miscommunications, enabling you to resolve them in a positive manner.

Many different models exist to describe the different dimensions of individual personality. In my experience, the most useful practice focuses on diagnosing and neutralizing negative behavior patterns. When people feel stressed, they may resort to undesirable behaviors as defense mechanisms. The negative behaviors can manifest in any of the following ways: manipulation, gossip, naysaying, controlling, perfectionism, people pleasing, drama, reclusiveness, whining, and lying. The more information you have about a colleague or subordinate’s personality and communication preferences, the greater the likelihood you’ll be able to defuse potential stress and generate positive interactions. As a manager, recognizing the uniqueness of those with whom you work is crucial for assessing, connecting, motivating, and resolving conflict.

When a leader takes the time to listen to and observe those around them, they become more adept at identifying individual motivations. Whether you are meeting someone for the first time or talking to someone you have known for twenty years, shifting your behavior and tailoring the interaction to their personality will lead to more effective communication and better relationships.

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION WITH DIFFERENT PERSONALITIES

Different personality types require different techniques for the most effective communication. How do you communicate in your organization or team? Do you know how much contact the people you communicate with prefer or need? Does your boss need to hear from you frequently to feel comfortable that your tasks are going as planned? Does your customer prefer email, phone calls, or face-to-face meetings? These questions are worth considering, because the more you know about how people like to communicate, the better rapport and relationships you will be able to establish—and the more efficient your organization, tasks, or project will be. An effective manager collaborates and builds relationships at all levels of the workplace community.

Poor communication can compromise your reputation and effectiveness. Any person (team member, boss, coworker, customer, end user, member of another department, someone in the broader community) can either derail or promote an activity, project, or task. To leverage the whole community, you must build relationships with all stakeholders. Good communication skills help build good relationships.

Some relationships will be easy: communication will flow back and forth smoothly. With others, the road to effective communication is bumpy and not much fun. In these cases, already-difficult relationships can be compounded to unmanageable levels of stress during a crisis. To navigate those situations, leaders must be able to manage themselves as well as their teams. Moving forward depends on the manager’s ability to think clearly and rationally.

To be a good manager, you must be able to communicate effectively to all different types of people in a variety of styles and mediums. The good news is that these techniques work no matter who you are dealing with. The subsequent chapters will teach you how to adapt your communication in order to work with various types of individuals: how to present yourself, how to listen and respond to others, how to recognize stressed people, and how to effectively resolve conflict.

To get started, of course, you need to understand yourself. This includes not only your communication preferences but also the tools that are available to you, which we will explore in the next chapter.

Chapter 2

Your Communication ToolKit

Just as different people have differing communication styles and needs, you have at your disposal tools with differing capabilities. Depending on the situation and the person with whom you are communicating, some will be more suitable than others. This chapter will help you establish ground rules for choosing the best tool for a given scenario and communication partner.

We have a variety of communications media available: face-to-face and telephone conversations, email, texting, group meetings, presentations, and written reports. Each can be effective if it is used in the right context, but each can be disastrous if used in the wrong way. People with different personality types are not all equally comfortable with any single given tool, and the higher the stakes, the more critical it is for you to choose the most appropriate method for the other person in the situation. After all, when you are going into a potentially stressful interaction, it does you little good to have other people on edge any more than necessary. It is up to you as the manager to ensure that you and your team utilize the correct communication tool for each situation.

There are four basic groups of communication tools widely used in the workplace:

Face-to-face (including video teleconferencing) and telephone communication are individual meetings with you and one other person. Face-to-face meetings are the most effective type of communication technique for building rapport, collaboration, or confrontation.

Email and texting are written, nearly instantaneous messages extensively used in the workforce. Email and texting are ubiquitous but may help or harm, depending on the message and situation.

Group meetings and presentations involve multiple people meeting together. Presentations are group meetings with prepared information to describe and/or review. Both are great for keeping everyone on the same page but challenging to keep on track.

Written reports are formal written documents. Reports are effective for documenting information multiple people need to agree upon or approve.

Let’s talk about basic communication tools and the benefits and pitfalls of each.

FACE-TO-FACE AND TELEPHONE COMMUNICATION

When it comes to communication intended to foster collaboration, confrontation, or to conduct any other