[#BusinessManagement #Career]Listening
and Speaking are both important, Just Don’t Guess! 20230316001
Hi. This is Emily
from Taiwan, finance and accounting work background, the author of Whatsyouridea1996
blog.
Firstly, thank you
for stopping by again.
This article contains my feedback for questions
about things happened at workplace, regarding my work experience of my reaction
as a work owner when work progress being stopped or interfered. Share with you.
Besides Speaking
and Listening in the subject, it contains:
1. It is not your
work responsibility to manage other people in managerial roles, especially when
their work position is higher than yours. Do you agree?!
It is advised you do fully communication about all
are mentioned, as for managing them, please let their manager know what’s
happening, and, letting their managers know doesn’t mean you are complaining or
doing something negative, it is you are informing a situation they need to know
about.
Do not forget that everyone is formally hired for
work, when you encounter obstacles in your work procedures, you should let the
company know what is stopping you from moving forward and they need to help you
to remove it, right?!
2. Regarding all
questions, we need to do the “documentation”, “to gather all of the related
issues before discussion”, and “to discuss it formally and transparently”, this
helps to remove unnecessary problems and obstacles. What’s your idea about this?!
I welcome your
sharing idea, please comment or let me know whether there is extended question.
Thank you.
Please comment;
use the contact form at the upper right side of this web page or click Contact Emily.
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Again, for
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favorite singer #TsaiChin, this video contains almost all of the Taiwanese
songs I like, share with you. I found it when I was searching for the below 10th.
Sorrow at Moon Night：
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AceuUZlLno4
I translate it
into English by myself, please feel free to do the correction if you the better
description of it.
01.
淡水河邊 [詞：葉俊麟 曲：宇佐英雄] 00:00
Damsui Riverside
02.
飄浪之女 [詞：吳影 許丙丁 曲：文夏] 04:20
The Wandering Woman
03.
青春悲喜曲 [詞：蘇桐 曲：陳達儒] 08:04
Sadness and Happiness for the Youth
04.
溫泉鄉的吉他 [詞：葉俊麟 曲：古賀正男] 11:38
Guitar at Springs Town
05.
望你早歸 [詞：那卡諾 曲：楊三郎] 16:02
Expecting Your Early Coming Back
06.
孤女的願望 [詞：葉俊麟 曲：米山正夫] 19:26
Orphan girl's Wish
07.
港都夜雨 [詞：呂傳梓 曲：楊三郎] 23:06
Night Rain at Harbour
08.
阮不知啦 [詞：陳達儒 曲：吳成家] 26:39
I don’t know
09.
南都夜曲 [詞：陳達儒 曲：陳秋霖] 30:45
Nocturne of the Southern City
10.
月夜愁 [詞：周添旺 曲：鄧雨賢] 34:59
Sorrow at Moon Night
11.
最後一封信 [詞：劉達雄 曲：宮川泰] 38:06
The Last Letter
12. 可憐戀花再會吧 [詞：葉俊麟 曲：上原Gento] 41:58
Goodbye, pitiful love flowers
Listening and Speaking
are both important, Just Don’t Guess!
1.「Do
you understand what boss has just said?!」…「It
seems….」
2.「I
thought you know it….」
3.「Why
didn’t you raise the question in the meeting then?!」
4.「Why
did he…」
5.「Oh!
It must be…」
Have you ever
encountered above conversation before?!
1~4. No asking, no
speaking and no direct confirmation, either:
Because
of fear, being introvert or other reasons, people don’t want to or dare not to
speak their mind in some occasion, however, it is risky, if people keep doing
things under some misunderstanding, they won’t achieve the goal and it also is
a waste of time and wasting the invested money, it causes “dare not to ask”
becomes the root cause of risk and waste, do you agree with this idea?!
Unforgettable case1：The President joined
the quiz
There was a VP A doing
the maintenance work performance presentation, however, the responsible
maintenance manager H was absent, A was not able to answer a raised question,
surprisingly, everyone started to guess what the answer should be to assist A
and people who asked the questions to find the root cause, the President was
also so curious and joined the answer guessing…
I was also assigned to
share my opinion, however, I stopped the interaction for seconds intentionally
and said：「………..H is at his seat
now, why not asking him to come and explain directly?!」
It suddenly frozen for seconds, H was invited to join us and
some minutes later the questions were answered by H and everyone was clear.
I’m not sure whether
my reaction caused some impact on others, our next meetings went more
efficiently than ever; before this case, it happened more than once that I
reported to my manager about this situation but being ignored, the only one thing
I can do was to change the way I did presentation (we cannot change others, all we can do is to
change ourselves): regarding cross
departments issues, I’ll obtain opinion from others before meeting begins, and I’ll
also let them know I’ll present their idea in the meeting and hope they will
assign representative to attend the discussion at least, everyone involved
would do sufficient communication before the meeting rather than discussing the
issues for the first time in the meeting.
Unexpectedly, there
was positive chain reaction: Since people know I’ll present their idea, they also
did well-preparation for questions may be asked in the meeting; this situation
help our meeting goes more efficiently and it became a positive loop in the
meeting. Please refer to above heigh-lighted
sentence in orange.
Case2: You thought you know it: You
thought you know something, however, the truth is not as those in your mind. Did
you also behave this way?! There is less patience for listening to others and
not allowing others to speak?! People have no opportunity to speak
their mind and it causes no explanation opportunity to them and makes things in
a mass?!
It
has happened to me for several times in job search and in the office, the
hiring managers in interviews and colleagues I was working with.
- In
job search, there was a hiring manager B and his communication habit trigging
my worry whether I’ll have no opportunity to explain once I am misunderstood in
the future in his work environment. Finally I sent my gratitude but didn’t
accept their offering when we were discussing about the employment salary
package; the reason was, B would like to know what I don’t like at work place,
and I just shared an example about a work environment that didn’t value my work
responsibility, promoting work documentation in the company, and B interrupting
my sharing ”Oh, then, it must be a very small company”, however, on the
contrary, the company I was talking about is much bigger than B’s company size.
I felt, B made judgement and thinks his judgment was right about other’s
business size when he got only 1- sentence sharing from me about that company’s
situation, I worried if I joined his company and someday B may judge me in the
wrong way and ignore my work efforts due to others’ misleading him about me when
I am still a new-hired person in his company that everyone doesn’t really know
me but he would believe his own judgment toward me and I don’t really have the
opportunity to clarify, in this situation, how can I work in that work
environment with no concern?!
- Something
about my colleagues in different work environment, some consider the offered training course for employees from companies
as a burden to them; in their idea, it was similar to :「The purpose of the training is to increase
our workload or work responsibility in the future, I prefer giving up this
learning opportunity than being forced to change my work in the future.」.
Though, I appreciated them believing me wouldn’t report this idea to boss so
they told me how they felt, in my first time knowing this kind of idea, I felt
shocked; no matter what the purpose is behind the scene of the company
providing the learning opportunity for employees, I have never imagined that
people would consider learning as a burden rather than opportunities of
enhancing themselves. It is a pity those colleagues have no evidence or real
cases to prove their assumptions are correct, it was only their imagination as “It’s impossible the company is so great to
offer us this for free, so, obviously its intention is not pure”. These
colleagues were also curious about my opinion on this, my sharing was -
ü [Employees
can reject improper work arrangement, thus, employees don’t need to worry about
being arranged to do not something not suitable, because, if the company or
managers would like to rearrange their work causing the employees need to do
something they are not familiar with, it would increase more learning time cost
and the managers also need to persuade about the work change to decrease less
work efficiency and effectiveness possibilities. They need to be more careful!!].
ü [I
want to attend the training because I hope could improve my work capability
competitiveness via this provided learning resource, and it’s great it’s the company
pay for us].
ü [Employees
can reject to attend the learning program, they are also allowed to not to
pursue professional work skill improvement; however, if the employees achieve
work targets but their work outcome is the same as what it was before, the
company can surely decide not to offer pay raise every year and invest this
resource to other employees who have made efforts to their work enhancement,
although, their enhancement is not necessarily caused from learning from training.].
What’s your idea about this idea?!
Case
3：Giving up the
opportunity to express idea, revealing only a little to test what others are
thinking! Refuse to talk because refusing to be asked.
In the past, I used to
not speak my mind and what about you?!
- Giving
up the opportunity to express idea. I truly believe “people can identify how
much inner strength a person has by observing the way and the content of this
individual’s communication”. Including myself, there are some people would like
to give up the opportunity to speak up their mind because they want to avoid
the risk of asking wrong questions, showing themselves as less work professions
or lack of self-confidence, or protecting themselves from feeling embarrassed,
and it usually happens when the discussion is held in public, facing to higher
work position persons, so they behave they understand what the speakers were
saying and having no questions; I changed my mind after I read an article
related to job searching advices and it said the interviewer side may consider
the interviewees have less work interest in the job they are hiring if the
interviewees say they have no questions to ask about the work they are
discussing, or, they may think this interviewee is less prepared or less work
experience…etc. causing negative impact, and I agree with its point of view,
and I’ve also encountered similar situation resulting in my work difficulties
and invested too much time in guessing what the superiors were thinking, and I
also figured out that some bosses actually love being asked questions and they
think there is no wrong question but ask- or- not issues. How do you think of
this kind of idea?! Do you also avoid asking questions?!
- Revealing
only a little to test what others are thinking! This happened when I was doing
internal work improvement project in a company I worked for, some department
heads who were asked for department work enhancement, they tended to ask
questions again and again after everyone has made consensus on improvement work
objectives in a meeting: For example, there was a Finance VP R refusing to make work efforts toward the meeting
conclusion that Finance department needs to stamp “paid” on payment request
document after it was paid accordingly, especially stamping on those original
external documents, such as invoice or receipts to control and reduce the risk
of duplicated payment and this idea came from the meeting conclusion we’ve already discussed, however, R asked direct
and indirect questions again and again about issues of their work load and not
enough manpower for doing this, saying their worry of not knowing what to do if
this stamp works would cause their original finance work delay, otherwise, they
hope to know whether Accounting work responsibility also contains managing duplicated
payment request?! (It was not my responsibility to answer his questions,
however, all the questions were already answered in the meeting and
well-discussed.), R tried to do anything to cancel the meeting conclusion for
their own work interest. Now and then, in my opinion, as a high work level
superior, R should not raising no work issue in the meeting but later working
against our meeting conclusion that caused big mass, I also feel this case was
testing my work resilience. It spent lots of my time in dealing with R’s
behavior, however, in my opinion, I was
not his manager, I was not in the
work role to manage his work attitude and behavior. If you were me, what
you would like to do to this situation?!
(1) I told R to build up a
list of all his concerns by a specific date and I’ll answer all his questions
accordingly.
(2) R’s manager is the
President; including the content and documents format of above (1), I sent a
carbon copy to our President when I sent to R and said I’ll also do this timely
update in my response to R later.
Suddenly,
R accepted the original meeting conclusion and asked no question again.
In another work
environment, there was a senior employee, Y, my team member, she was also a
team leader that our boss trusted her a lot, however, our boss also considered
her as a person not able to lead the team to achieve or support the company to
complete our work systemizing project; our boss reminded me that Y would like
to work against work systemizing objectives and he will approve my work
decision if later I would like to lay off Y when it is required, however, I
hope our boss giving me more time to know what Y was really thinking…; in my observation, Y always tempted to raised issues in public
and hope could grab attentions from others to know her familiarity and her value
in this company, expecting others to be aware of questions she asked were
difficult to be resolved, and more than that, hard to answer, however, she didn’t know this made it obvious
she has less work experience in system implementation and not helpful to our
work achievement. In another meeting, Y asked again (e.g.: What if we input the
wrong number after system is implemented?!), actually she knows the answer, so
I asked:
(1) Is it because you feel
the training program and number modification mechanism we were discussing in
last meeting cannot resolve your worry? Is there any other concern we’ve not
discussed yet?!
(2) Because you are senior
in this company and you have the capability to look into detail and have a wide
and complete range of thinking, please let us know what kind of risk and
problems we have not considered yet, the potential root cause, your advice or
other idea.
Regardless
the format, please make a list about all you are considering.
(3) At the end of the
list, please let us know your opinion about this systemizing project, such as: Keep going, I’m happy to see its completion
someday, or, It’s better to stop and keep status quo and the reason of it.
Finally, Y didn’t
create that list because she thinks her concern won’t become any big risk or
cause any failure in our systemizing works.
My thoughts on these 2
things are: In discussing things, obviously, if we utilize documentation,
discuss in a transparent way and formally, and we allow others to speak their
mind, this can stop people who try to cause work progress procrastination or
raise meaningless issues no matter they finally make a list of their idea or
not.
- Refuse to talk because
refusing to be asked. It happened when the companies I worked for were doing
written management policies implementation. I met twice in 2 companies, my work
involved policy controller role of the company; it was interesting that these 2
cases both happened to our HR Heads, and cases were, we think differently about
policies implementation and its fulfillment; at that moment, The General Rule of Policy Implementation
was formally announced, it said, all policies owners need to hold meetings for
policies users’ understanding and discussion about the contents, and, at
least, the explanation need to be held before policies’ first- time
announcement because everyone needs to understand it before doing it and make
it become more suitable for everyone, however, we didn’t expect the most
difficulties we will encounter would come from HR Head of the companies, J1 and
J2. J1, she used her anger to work against the need to hold policy explanation
meetings, in her mind, it is HR’s work rights to define HR policies and she
wanted to announce it for activation and I stopped her. Regarding J2, she knows
our President is not familiar with policies announcement procedures, so she
skipped my policy control work steps that she got policies approval by our
President and did the announcement on her own, everyone disagreed her behavior. Things I can do were to report to our
President to solve this problem; he needed to make the decision between
revising the general rule of policy implementation or solving our complaint
about J2’s disobedience the rule. After an overall work assessment, both J1 and
J2 left their work role, one was changed to another work department, the other
left the company due to overall work performance target not achieved.
Although, not all the
companies would agree this explanation meeting before policies announcement,
however, what’s your idea about ensuring policies are useful if there is no
communication with policies users before they are used?! Don’t guess! What’s
your answer?!
In
above stories, if it was you, how would you deal with them?!
Please
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