Have you ever hit send on an email and immediately wished you could retrieve it, for fear that the recipient would misconstrue your actual intent? In a world where the words we use represent a mere 7% of communication effectiveness, this happens all the time.
Humor me for a minute, and read the following sentence six consecutive times, each time putting the emphasis on the word in BOLD.
I DIDN’T SAY YOU WERE PRETTY
I DIDN’T SAY YOU WERE PRETTY
I DIDN’T SAY YOU WERE PRETTY
I DIDN’T SAY YOU WERE PRETTY
I DIDN’T SAY YOU WERE PRETTY
I DIDN’T SAY YOU WERE PRETTY
How is it possible that a simple, six-word sentence can have six dramatically different meanings/interpretations? Regardless of our intended meaning, the recipient’s perception becomes their reality.
We see this play out in the workplace on a daily basis, and not just in email threads.
We work with hundreds of organizations throughout the country, and we now kick off all of our engagements by having our clients complete a brief talent assessment. The assessment is comprised of 31 questions centered around: Overall Talent Strategy, Talent Attraction, Talent Development, Talent Retention and Culture and Vision. We start by having each person on the leadership team complete the talent assessment separately. Additionally, we have the rest of the employees take the exact same assessment (anonymously) and the system automatically aggregates all of the responses.
Once everyone has completed the assessment, we can compare the results side by side. Very rarely do results from the leadership team and the results from the rest of the employees dovetail with one another. More often than not, the aggregated responses are significantly lower than the responses from the leadership team. Whether the leadership team agrees with the company-wide responses is inconsequential. It is imperative that the leadership team accepts the employee responses as their version of the truth, and truly views the feedback as a gift.
We start with this process because we cannot provide our clients with a road map toward their final destination without knowing their starting point.
Whether you lean on a third party or utilize similar internal resources, we do NOT recommend going down this path unless you are committed to doing what it takes to move the needle in the areas where your employees are clamoring for things to get better. You will absolutely do more damage than good by asking what you can do to get better and then not doing anything with the results.
If you are interested in benchmarking your organization compared to the other organizations that have completed our talent assessment, please take our FREE talent assessment:
https://www.edsitalentassessment.com/
