As I have discussed several times this week on the
discussion boards, supportive communication at my job is both good in some
areas and bad in others. While I would
describe interaction amongst my peers as highly supportive, I will fully admit
that I am no expert at it and have only been accidentally communicating in a
supportive manner without knowing it. Luckily
I have a large group of people to practice my supportive communication skills
with – midshipmen. We have to do a
counseling session at least twice a semester so this provides an excellent
opportunity to specifically practice it in preparation for having to deal with
communication at the higher levels of the organization where supportive
communication isn’t the strong point.
Supportive communication is an outstanding way to move
people towards behavior that is either more efficient or more correct than what
they are doing now. From Whetten and
Cameron, supportive communication is congruent (meaning your verbal and
non-verbal cues match what you are actually thinking), is descriptive of
problems, is problem vice person oriented, validates individuals (i.e. provides
positive feedback), and is specific vice global (247-253). In other words, it provides an easily
understood, factual, objective, non-personal feedback to another individual in
order to change behavior. While it
sounds easy, it is something that must be practiced and consciously thought
about to ensure you do it properly. From
a working with midshipmen standpoint, this means that I will use supportive
communication in order to coach them towards better performance or counsel them
when their performance is substandard (either militarily or academically). When reviewing the behavioral guidelines, I
think I already do a pretty good job using them with the exception of maybe one
– owning statements. When talking over
things with students, I often refer to the standards as being the Navy
standards; what I should be saying is that they are not meeting what standards
I have set for them. While these
standards will be directly in line with the Navy, it makes me own the comment
and the standard. Hopefully this will
add a personal effect to the conversation and allow the midshipman to more
fully understand both the problem and the solution. Ironically enough, I think owning the
standards is exactly why my CO on the ALASKA was so effective. Rather than holding us to Navy standards, he
held us to his standards, and when you didn’t meet them, he would let you know
he was disappointed but that we will correct the problem and get better. I am 100% positive that hearing that he was
disappointed was worse than any yelling or dressing down that he could have
done – I don’t think it would have been near as effective if it was the Navy
standards we weren’t meeting. This idea
is exactly what I am going to try to work with my MIDN on.
Moving on to dealing with the upper chain of command, I
think one thing is very important to understand – just because you are
subordinate to someone doesn’t mean that your opportunity to lead them
diminishes. In fact, this can be one of
the most challenging but rewarding aspects of being a leader (Beaman). This process known as upward leadership is something
that I should definitely work on in my current situation. Specifically, I need to help my supervisor
using supportive communication. How I am
going to do this without specifically calling him out on it, I’m not sure; but
I do know that I will repeatedly use supportive communication explicitly when
communicating with him in the future.
While I don’t think I have necessarily ever not followed supportive communication,
as with the MIDN I will definitely keep it in mind when discussing things with
him when I think he could have done things differently. Hopefully this will lead to better
communication coming from him down to us and also result in a little less
tension in the office as most of us are on edge with what he is going to do
next. While I’m not going to hold my
breath, any increase in the communication methods from him will be seen as a
win across the office.
Whetten,
D., & Cameron, K. (2011). Developing management skills. (Eighth
ed.). Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education Inc.
Beaman,
L. (n.d.). Upward leadership: Lead up to your leader. Retrieved from
http://lisabeaman.hubpages.com/hub/Upward-Leadership-Leading-Up-to-Your-Leader
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