One of the primary goals of this blog is to share our team’s ideas on communication skills, and highlight all of the ways that great communication helps you thrive in the workplace. Great communication contributes to stronger leadership, collaboration, customer service, client retention, brand building, sales success… a long list of important success factors.
We also believe that the way you communicate is often an “output” of the way you are thinking. When you are thinking about situations in the right ways, your communication output is often more effective. For example, when a person has a mindset of collaboration, the communication they exhibit is often collaborative in nature. How? By demonstrating good listening skills, by not being the first one to speak in every meeting, through the use of the plural pronoun “we” or by articulating their care about and understanding of the perspectives of others. Proper mindsets usually lead to stronger communication, which usually leads to better business outcomes.
One of the mindsets we often impart on our clients is: business is not an individual sport. It is not just me vs the competition, or me vs the situation, or me solving the problem. Even if you are the only one in the meeting at that moment, business is almost never an individual sport. No… business is team sport. There are very few things that happen in any business environment that are not the output of a greater team.
In our case at LatimerNext, I can’t think of a single thing we do that is not impacted in multiple ways by multiple people on the team. Even in a solitary coaching moment, when I am speaking to a coaching client, one on one, I am bringing countless things to that conversation that are the product of collective work. Even if my colleagues know nothing about the person I am coaching… even if my colleagues are not even aware of the phone call… no matter how little they know about that assignment, they are still having a huge impact on that assignment.
Why? How? Because everyone on the team is contributing to our content, our style, our service offerings, our brand, our follow-up… our communication to the world. Every element of the way we present ourselves as a business impacted by everyone on the team. And the same is true for you and every company in the world. Everything you do in a work setting is a reflection not only on you, but is an extension of the collective work of the entire group.
Mindsets matter. Your mindset will impact the way you interact with everyone around you. So make sure you are adopting the proper mindsets in your work, and make sure to remind yourself, every day, that business is a team sport. This will have a positive impact on everything you do. This mindset will cause you to be humble, to share credit, to appreciate collaboration, and it will lead to a much stronger team dynamic.
