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Communicating Your "A" Priorities to Your Teamby Mary Ann Vande Linde, DVMVMC, Inc. Evergreen, CO 80439 It's time to communicate our A priorities to the healthcare team. How you deliver the message is extremely important, and you can only deliver information clearly if you understand how people hear you. We all have different communication styles. You could be an "advocator", enthusiastic and receptive, wanting to share ideas and opinions. But if you're talking to an "analytic" who prefers written communication and detailed results, you've got a problem. "Advocator"... "analytic"... these are two of four recognized communication styles. Let me introduce you to all four. If you'll learn to recognize and understand the way people communicate, you'll see more clearly what other people are saying. Communication Styles - The Categories There are four different styles of communication: controlling, facilitating, advocating, and analyzing; and there's a test you can take to see where you fall in these categories. Click here for a PDF version of the test. I recommend that every hospital give this to all health care team members. It's critical to know everyone's communication style in order to understand how to effectively deliver information, tasks, and praise. It's unlikely you'll give the test to your clients, but as you come to understand the styles, you'll learn the clues that help you understand where your clients fall within the spectrum. Controlling is the category for someone who wants to deliver information in a certain way. Controllers do not want questions, they want to tell you what to do, "Just do what I tell you". Facilitating is the category for people who want to ask questions. Facilitators want to know the why and they want to know "How will I make people happy if I do this?" Advocating is a category that holds people who are enthusiastic and conceptual. Advocators are open, optimistic, and impulsive. Our last category, Analyzing, is a style requiring precision and completeness. Analysts prefer written communication, listen critically, and dislike exaggeration. These folks are task-oriented and ask lots of questions. How to Communicate with People of Other Styles If you're communicating direction with a Controller, tell them the task and the time in which it needs to be done. They don't want stories and they don't want fluff. Go straight to what's important, and what you will do to achieve the goal and what they must do. Remember when working under a controller that they want their timeline met. If you're not going to meet their timeline, let them know immediately. They'll react better if they know you're not going to make their timeline than if you don't tell them. For Analytic team members, ask them about the task and the time. They want to have input to whether they think it's a good idea, whether they can get the job done in the time you've given them. They want to know they're going to accomplish something and they're the best person to do the task. They don't want stories, but to be asked if they want to do it. If you're communicating with an Advocate team member, you need to tell them more about the story, more about how they're going to make a difference to their pet or to the hospital by doing it. You'll need to explain what the task is, that you need it done by a certain time, and that you appreciate that they're the person that can do it. You're also going to have to check in with them periodically because they like to do a lot of things at one time, and they're going to be busy helping people, and they may forget their task, not on purpose, but because other things seem more urgent. If you're working with a Facilitator ask them the story about the task, and help them with the time. They want to have input and use their creativity. They want to know they can please, that they can do it well, and that they won't disappoint you. They want to be helpful. They also want to avoid conflict, and they will also go to help whoever asks them. That will sometimes make them late on other tasks because they'll be focused on other people and forget a task that needs to be done. All communication is complicated. Karl Jaspers said, "Man's supreme challenge is communicating personality to personality." In order to be sure others can see what you're saying, you must understand communication styles, yours AND theirs. It's the key to operating a more successful and less stressful practice. |
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