76. Communication Pain Points

Foreign Kenny Chapman here, your host of leadership in a nutshell where we're cracking the code of the driven mind in the blue collar industries. I want to welcome you to episode 76, communication pain points. Oh man, Kenny's gonna talk about pain today. Here's reality. Pain is a decision and it's a choice of information that you have. I kind of wrapped up last week talking about acceptance and allowance. And here's the thing is you've got some things to accept and one of those is you might have a communication opportunity. Right. So it shows up as pain. But I want to just talk through some things that might help you here today. You know, you might pass this to some of the other leaders on your teams and even frontline team as well as we're kind of working through and talking through how we communicate through the business. Many of you have experience, some if not massive growth in the past 12 to 18 months. And through this we have an evolution that takes place of communication, platform styles, skills, ability. Obviously we had our in person taken away and it may come and go periodically for the rest of time, who knows? But the old days of communicating, that ship has sailed. That is an absolute fact. Now we're figuring out in the wake of that ship what that means to us moving forward. And a lot of us have scaled our businesses as communication platform shifted and changed. We don't always see each other face to face as much as we used to or because of the new technology. Even if we're in offices together, we're utilizing technology and not getting face to face. Whatever these are, here's where I want to go today. The number one question that your entire team has is this, where are we going? That's the main thing. As a leader. You constantly, you wake up in the middle of the night, for crying out loud thinking about like, oh man, what if we did this? What if we added this, you know, what if I added this line extension? What if we went in this other market? What if we changed our trucks and started carrying this? What if we offloaded our warehouse and did drop ship on everything? What, whatever those different types of things are. We've got to continue to ask like, where are we going? And then communicate it to the team. And the challenge is we want so much certainty in our lives. We want to know exact path, exact situation, exactly what we're going to do before we're willing to share that with the team. And the fact is, we can't do that. We can't take a moment and wait until I know everything. Why? Because, I mean, heck, a few weeks ago, we talked about setbacks coming up as a part of the process. What we do is we kind of paint a picture of where we're going, and as it changes, I'm going to let you know. I remember there's a few other questions that come in, and I think there's a lot to learn from kids. And though the lovely Christy and I don't have children of our own, I'm fascinated by kids. Obviously, I coach a lot of people with kids I'm around. I've got nieces and nephews and different things like that. But there's a lot to learn. And as adults, sometimes when you decide you want to eliminate some trauma that you carried a long time, you end up going back and. And having some conversations with your previous self of when you were a kid at times to rewrite that ship and rewrite history for yourself, for how you feel now. And I think about my sister and I when we were little kids, and we lived in San Diego in Southern California, and my grandparents lived in Phoenix, which are outside of Phoenix, which is kind of fascinating that I live in the northern part of the Phoenix area in Scottsdale now. And Grandma's grandpa's been gone a long time, but I ended up here anyway, so who knows if I loved it as a kid and just didn't even know it. But we would hop in the car and my parents will leave at, like, 4 in the morning. And so by the time Lynette and I'd wake up, it'd be like, hey, where are we? Wait a minute. Sun's coming up. And we were driving from San Diego to Arizona. It seemed like we were going from New York to San Antonio or whatever. It's just like, oh, my God, it's so far. So what would we always ask? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Why are we going there? Who's gonna be there? And I look at teams now, and I hear the same thing from frontline teams. I'm not saying frontline teams are like little kids. I'm saying as human beings, we've just have more years on the planet. We're still little kids. We just have different years. And so now, through unconscious conditioning, we've trained ourselves to not ask some of the questions, the global questions that we had back then. Nobody gave us a good answer, and now we've got them, and nobody's given us a good answer. One of the big questions is, why? Why, mom and dad? Why are we going to Mesa, Arizona? I like it in San Diego. Well, Grandma Mary's there, Grandpa Roy's there. That's why we're going, huh? Okay, well, is Grandma Mary gonna make me some of that great food that she makes? You know, I was a fat kid, so, you know, it's like the why behind it. And now we grow up and we're all adults and we're building businesses and creating teams and executing for clients and we forget that people need to know why. We need to know why we're doing it. And some of us might still have some good work to do around that. But the easiest thing that helps your team know that is when you do the work on your mission statement and your core values and you've got that clarity. So then you know why you're doing it. The challenge is most of you do it because you've gone through an exercise or some workshop seminar. I mean, heck, we teach it at my company, the Blue Collar Success Group. We teach these strategies and different things. The challenge is you've got to keep it alive and you've got to lead with meetings with it and reminding people of why we get up and do what we do. And it feels odd as a leader. It feels like all I do is just share this thing over and over and every time it hits somebody in a different way, reminds somebody of something that they may have already known and helps them go, oh yeah, that's what we're doing. Oh, grand mom, dad, oh, grandma, grandpa. That's why we're going. Okay, okay. That's the mission. The mission is we're headed to go see grandma and grandpa. What kid doesn't want that? Right. What team member doesn't want to know why we get up and do what we do every day? So there's a big communication pain point that happens when we stop sharing that we do the work, we think it's good, we over wordsmith it, we try to make it fancy where it's going to look good on a wall and we don't frickin talk about it. It's time to make sure that we keep that alive. And we've got to constantly be sharing. I encourage you to develop a culture of constant sharing. And sometimes we get frustrated, like, oh my gosh, I don't want to talk about it. This and that. Here's the challenge. Especially as you scale, if you grow and you scale if you go to multiple markets. Even if you don't go to multiple markets. One of the great lessons that we learned from COVID is the difference between formal and Informal communication, right? And so as people scale, we kind of make some of a shift. And when Covid happened, we made this shift from informal. A lot of people didn't have zoom meetings and just get on and, you know, BS like you're by the water cooler, right? So now everything was all formal communication. Like, oh, okay, well, let's see. I've got a zoom meeting at this time, and let's get on and we talk business. We talk. You gotta leave time for some having some informal. Because what happens is, as informal communication that used to happen in the office space, or if you do run your entire team, if you're not running a hybrid model, you have that, but you still probably have technicians, don't come to the office, installers, so on and so forth, but depending on your industry or your model. But the reality is we can turn into what we call and been talked about a lot in different ways, shapes and forms, but death by meeting. Anybody ever had that situation? Like, I'm going to shoot myself if I have to go to one more meeting today, this week, this month, whatever. It's like, oh, my gosh. And the other thing that we see that I want to caution you on is who is the meeting for? And as a leader, it takes certain awareness. Last week I talked to you about elevating your awareness, and I would remind you that it takes a certain level of awareness to really recognize who is the meeting for? Oh, the meeting's for the install crew. Oh, the meeting's for my leadership team. Really? Is it for them or is it for you from your leadership role, to be able to be filled in for you to feel connected to the business, for you to understand what's going on in every decision, every thought, everything that's being handled, all the reasons that you said and thought you wanted to build a team. I talked about that last week, too. It's like, hang on, wait a minute. Am I doing this so I feel better, or am I doing this so everybody feels better? Challenging thing, but it takes awareness. Because what happens as we scale and more informal turns to formal, we can turn into almost what, you know, I would call it a leadership broadcasting station. Right? All of a sudden, now it's like, I get on the radio and it's your podcast. And think about how many companies I know, my own team. I've got several of my team at Blue Collar that eat up this particular podcast. Every week I get texts from team members that are like, hey, man, great episode this week. I liked. I never saw that. When I launched this podcast, I didn't realize I would make a positive impact on my team and our coaches at blue collar because I'm speaking truth and it gives them another insight and reminds them and gives them things to work with clients and whatever. I didn't see that coming. That's what we call a strategic by product. Right. But it turns into, are you just, you know, whether you got a mic in front of youryour face or not, are you going into a meeting and you're a broadcasting station versus the old two way radios? I'm old enough that I had two way radios in the truck before Nextel. I'm talking about the repeater. It was even, I know the name of it. The repeater antenna up on top of the Grand Mesa in western Colorado where I would click and it would send a signal up there and then it would come back to town. Right. It there used to be two way communication. I could go, hey, you know, to the office and the office comes back. Now there's a lot of this. Email's one way, text is one way. You're like, oh no, Kenny, they can respond. It's different. Make sure you're aware that can be a communication pain point. So what do we want to do? Let me give you some action items before I get you out of here today. Number one, share the why. Always consistent. I'm talking about sharing that mission and the why of what you do, you know, why you do what you do until they're rolling their eyes at you because they hear different things at different times. And let me remind you that we don't see with the eyes and hear with the ears. We do both of those activities with the brain. And what we're looking for is what we'll find. And if we don't have things put in front of us, sometimes we're not aware that we need it. So sometimes, team, you know, you've probably had this in your career where they go, man, I didn't even realize I needed that meeting today. I didn't even realize I needed that one on one. Thank you for taking the time changes the life, changes the game changes the world. That's what you're here to do. So number one, always keep on sharing that why. Number two, find your own balance for your culture, for your team. Find the balance between the formal and the informal. A couple months ago I just had a feeling inside and I've got a team that's spread out between different. I mean, what are we in five states? I think in the United States and Then I've got some people building on projects in India and Africa and we're all over the place. A team as we continue to grow and build together. But I do a really good job. I think, or I should say I do the best that I can with communication. But I just felt that I needed to get with my president and spend a little bit of one on one time and just having face to face and just felt that in my gut. So I hopped on an airplane and I just flew to Florida and spent a couple days and actually one day and then I hopped right back and off we went. And so I found a balance. Like there's a lot of formal and I went down without an agenda, hung out, went to dinner. His wife's my ops manager. We had some great communication. May have changed the course of the business. Didn't know what we were gonna do, but that's exactly what it's about. Find the balance for you between formal and informal. When's the last time if you have team in different areas or you've got technicians you haven't seen in a while, you just FaceTime them on the way home. Hey man, what's going on? Just want to check in on you. No, I don't want to care, I don't care about your calls that ran today. Just wanted to check on how things are going. Find that balance for you. Number three, kind of tied to that is implementing a good solid mix mix between one on ones. What your group meeting and communication is. Is it done by teams? Is it done by trades, is it done by locations, whatever that is. I see a lot of office hours kind of coming back where hey, I'm, I'm just gonna be open, I'm gonna open up my, my Zoom and it's just gonna be on between two and four. If you have remote loc, remote locations, you can do that. And if somebody wants to pop in and chat for a bit, you can. And then don't underestimate, make sure you write this down or capture this. Company wide meetings are mandatory. Communications been challenged more and more since COVID hit way back when. And it's going to continue to evolve our communication and so getting everybody on the same page, so to speak, but letting them hear and it doesn't if you know it's during a flare up or different time and you can't have people all together. Do it by zoom, do it by a different communication platform, whatever it is. There's no excuse not to have company wide communication in today's world. And last ask, listen and repeat. Just keep on asking people what they think, what they're seeing, what they're feeling and listen to them and then ask some more, ask some more, ask some more. Listen, listen, listen. Keep on repeating that. Share the why. Always find your own balance. Implement a mix. Ask, listen, repeat, my friend. That's what it's about. As you eliminate more and more of these communication pain points. This has been episode 76. I would encourage you, love yourself, love your team, love growing together and life's going to continue to scale for you. Kick this over to somebody, share it with somebody, give us a rating, a review, a like whatever platform you're on that allows you to do those things. Until we talk next week, my friend, make it a better than fantastic week. Talk to you soon. Thank you.