John said to me: “I love everything you taught us about listening and acknowledging others. Really, I do! But you don’t understand. I go into 30-minute meetings with eight people and they all want to talk at once. If I listen to all of them, they’ll never stop talking. If I acknowledge them, I know they’ll talk more. It’s just not practical with the kind of meetings that I have.”

I hear this a lot.

Everyone also tells me, “I know that listening and acknowledging are ‘the right thing to do’” and they wish they could do it because, “A good person does it.”

But, there seems to be a big split between “The right thing to do” and GETTING THINGS DONE!

Of course, people want to do the right thing and be a good person, and the people I teach really are good people already. But more than anything, they need to GET THINGS DONE!

And they get into these frenzy meetings and think “I don’t have time” and that starts to kill their ability to be a really great communicator.

Listening and acknowledging in those meetings looks like a weakness not a strength. Especially when they’re in the heat of the moment.

I’ve written a lot about the effectiveness of listening and acknowledging. Today I want to talk about EFFICIENCY.

Efficiency is generally defined as “Getting the most done with the least amount of effort”.  I am sure you want your meetings to be efficient, the shortest, fastest, easiest meetings with really great outcomes.

Here’s what you need to know:

What happens to people when they’re not acknowledged, is that they repeat themselves and don’t hear what you have to say. Now you are talking to someone who is NOT listening to you, and you are going to have to say it MORE times, with MORE volume, with MORE words … and with more frustration.

When I coach people in these frenzy meetings situations, I always find that the reason their acknowledgments are not working is because they’re not really listening. They’re too wound up with time pressure and getting out what they have to say to listen to anyone. In the beginning, as I coach them, it positively pains them to listen. They feel they’re losing control.

That’s the first skill they have to master. Being there comfortably and really listening.

The next thing they have to learn is timing, exactly when to jump in with that great acknowledgment. This is a skill. If you don’t get it right, you will irritate the other person or worse, make them go on even longer.

The third thing they need to learn is how to give an acknowledgment that really satisfies the other person, and to do it very quickly and effectively. And efficiently.

Becoming really sharp with getting the precise timing of the acknowledgment, and becoming really sharp with giving a powerful acknowledgment that satisfies, takes a bit of practice. It’s worth it, though, because it makes you EFFECTIVE and EFFICIENT. You get lots of affinity coming back to you from people who feel heard, who feel that you really understand them.

The payoff is huge.

John, the gentleman I started this article with, initially didn’t believe me. Luckily, he was willing to give it a try.  Ever the engineer, he pulled out his stopwatch to measure efficiency.  This is what he wrote me:

“I had immediate success: The day after the training completed, I used the acknowledgement practice during a conference call with ten people in different time zones and continents to explain a series of complex ideas on how to transform our business. This significantly reduced the ‘back-and-forth’ and confusion that often results from the people in the meeting not fully understanding each other and not fully understanding the message/idea I’m presenting. As the meeting progressed, the questions and challenges became less frequent. We ALWAYS run overtime with our meetings.  This time we ended 13-min earlier than scheduled with solid actions for next steps to implement the main ideas. I concluded that acknowledgements really work!”

That’s what being a causative communicator is all about. It’s about control. It’s about efficiency. It’s also about understanding and affinity.

When you master these skills, you truly can “have it all.” You can have control. You can be efficient. You can be a good person… and you can get things DONE. 

Be the cause!