A520.3.5.RB - Supportive Communication

10 Steps to Implementing Supportive Communication (in house full of kids)

I do not at the moment hold a job outside of my home; I take care of my five children fulltime, around the clock.  So when asked to describe ways to integrate supportive communication in my present position I thought, are five kids in one house really that much different than a staff of 20 in one office?  I don’t believe they are.  They both are looking to you for guidance and support, they both compete for any amount of your attention and they both kind of depend on you for survival (so to speak).  Whetten and Cameron (2011) outlined behavioral guidelines to help one practice supportive communication, where they intended the guidelines to be used in a professional setting I will be applying them to my “office” which is my home.

Step one: Differentiate between coaching situations and counseling ones.  Does the person involved need advice and direction or understanding and recognition?  This is a question I face multiple times a day.  Does the child/employee need some input to help them in future situations or do they simply need someone to listen to their issues and nod accordingly.  This is an area I struggle with.  I am a problem solver and that is how I see things, as problems that need to be solved.  Sometimes my kids just want to cry and vent and just want me to listen.       

Step two: Communicate congruently by acknowledging your feelings without acting in a destructive way.  Does what you are saying match what you are feeling?  This can be a tricky one; do you really want to say exactly what is on your mind? Or are you better off thinking of a way to communicate that feeling in an appropriate way.  There are many times a day I want to say what I am truly feeling or thinking, but it would not be in anyone’s best interest if I did.  So I have to take a step back and think about what message I am actually trying to convey and word it in a way that is respectful to all parties, even if the other party is screaming at me about the sandwich being cut into triangles instead of rectangles. 

Step there: Use descriptive not evaluative statements.  In other words describe what occurred, reactions to the event, consequences from the event and suggest alternatives.  You wanted a block, your sister had the block, you hit your sister for the block, you were asked to step away from the situation and now you are without the block.  The alternatives could be finding a different block, waiting for her to finish with the block or find a different toy to play with.  Of course in an office setting I would assume no one is hitting other people over a pen, but you never know. 

Step four: Use problem-oriented statements rather than people-oriented ones.  “Your choice to hit your sister was not a good one” verses “you are a bad person for hitting your sister”.  It is always important not to label people based on their mistakes, but to offer guidance through them.  This can be a difficult task, especially when viewing a situation through anger.  It is not always best to react in the heat of the moment but to step back and think about things with a clear head.  I find myself correcting my kids when they say things like “so and so is so mean”.  I try to point out that what they did might have been mean but that doesn’t make them a bad person. 

Step five: Use validating statements and show your investment in the relationship by demonstrating your respect for them.  Respect goes both ways, and I often hear parents (even myself) wondering why their kids do not respect them.  I have to remind myself that in order for them to be respectful they need to be respected.  The same goes for employees.  A manager cannot expect to have a staff to act a way when they are not shown that same behavior.  This is especially important when giving feedback; positive feedback should always be given first followed by any negative critique.  Kids are the same way, they tend to only be told when they are wrong or misbehaving, it is just as important to “catch them being good”.  This is a big one for me that needs work.  I need to find more ways to point out the positive instead of the negative.

Step six: Use specific rather than global statements when trying to correct behavior.  Focus on what a person can change rather than factors that can’t.  Imagine how difficult it would be to have someone ask you to change an aspect you have no control over.  This happens a lot in my house, I am asked to stop a sibling from doing whatever infraction of the moment towards another sibling.  I have to stop and remind my kids that they can only control their behavior and not that of others.  Managers need to think the same way.  They need to focus on what things their employees have control over and what they don’t and ask tasks accordingly. 

Step seven: Use statements that floe smoothly, ensure equal speaking opportunities and acknowledge what the other people in the conversation are saying.  Managers sometimes have a tendency to think they have all the answers and there is no need to listen to anyone else.  I would call these managers closed-minded.  In a perfect world I would like to think that I imply all these attributes to my conversations with my kids, but sadly I do not always do that.  I need to be better at listening to what my kids are trying to say instead of thinking I have all the answers. 

Step eight: Own your own statements and encourage others to also.  This starts with using personal words instead of impersonal ones.  The “I” statement is the best form of this.  It can be very easy to use the blanket phrase “the company feels” when its actually you who feels that way.  When I am feeling outnumbered I tend to use the statement “your father and I” when I haven’t even spoken to their father about the issue at hand.  I think it makes me feel like I have some power over what is going on if there are two of us that feel a certain way and not just me.  I need to be better at owning how I feel and not bringing others into it. 

Step nine: Demonstrate supportive listening, make eye contact and be responsive nonverbally.  I think we have all had a conversation with a boss where we felt like they were not giving 100 percent of their attention to us, and it is frustrating.  I know my kids get frustrated when I am looking at my phone or watching TV when they are trying to talk to me.  I need to be better at putting stuff down and listening to what they have to say, because you never know when I will be something important.  I think this would hold true for me as a manager also. 

Step ten: Implement a personal management interview program with people whom you have responsibility.  Building positive relationships is very important in business, however I feel that it is often overlooked inside the four walls of a work place.  Lots of people talk about networking and building relationships with outside agency’s or companies, but what about the people inside, they are the ones that should matter most.  I can’t say that I am doing a great job at this but we have been working on it, we have started family meetings to try and bring our feelings and ideas together, help solve problems and generally build better relationships with each other.    

I found these guidelines to be very helpful and insightful.  I have not only realized some things I need to do to make myself a better mother but I also see areas where I could be a better leader.  And not surprisingly the areas overlap.  This has been an eye opening experience for me and one that I will be referring back to often to gage my progress.   

Whetten, D. A., & Cameron, K. S. (2011). Developing Management Skills (E. Svendsen

Ed. 8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

A520.3.1.RB - Decision Making Styles

When it comes to problem solving I am a very logical and process oriented person.  In fact when I read Whetten and Cameron’s (2011) model of problem solving I thought they must have been watching me in action.  They laid out four steps to problem solving: define the problem, generate alternative solutions, evaluate and select an alternative and implement and follow up on the solution.  I very much follow that pattern when it comes to large decisions. 

A few words that I would use to describe my decision-making style would be: logical, rational, active and assertive.  The opposites of these words, as demonstrated in the video “Decision Making Strategies” (2012) would be: intuitive, emotion, passive and quiet.  I can see where leaning more towards passive and quiet may have gotten me further than being active and assertive, and there have certainly been times where following intuition would have been a better option than being logical.  Even though the world may seem to run on a logical and predicable axis, something is always there to throw it off and at that point being intuitive could be most important.

This exercise has made me think a lot about the way I make decisions in my life, mostly in regards to my family.  It has always been know to my husband and I that I am the one that is calm and rational when it come to large crisis and major decisions, and he does better with the day to day routine decision.  An example is that I tend to lose my mind when a change of plans happens at the last minute; especially if it involved something I was looking forward to.  Now with five kids you can imagine how often changes occur.  I had to learn to adapt to the change and learn how to re-plan around it.  One decision we have struggles with off and on for the better part of ten years is whether or not he should leave Florida and move up to Vermont to be with us.  In the ten years we have been together he has only lived with me in Vermont for a little over a year.  The money is much better in Florida and so we consistently play it safe and he stays there.  Every six to eight months I rally for him to find a job up here and move home, but when it comes time to accept the new job I tend to back down for monetary reasons.  I would say that I tend to play it safe when it comes to major decisions.  I want to know all possible outcomes and the risks involved before I make a decision, and most of the time I make the safe choice. 

I also thought back to how I made decisions before I was a wife and mother, and I feel I was way more impulsive and self-fulfilling.  It is much easier to act that way when no one is depending on you.  Experience and possible age have played large roles in changing my decision making style.  I have to think about what is best for everyone not just myself.   

Decision-Making Strategies. (2012, April 2). Retrieved August 28, 2015.

Whetten, D. A., & Cameron, K. S. (2011). Developing Management Skills (E. Svendsen

Ed. 8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

A520.2.3.RB - Conflict Resolution

At my last job, a supervisor of guest services for a ski resort, I faced many conflicts.  The one that will always stand out is the one between Guest Services and Housekeeping.  This was a long ongoing feud which seems destine to continue, so my goal was to keep relations between the evening housekeeping staff and myself as civil as possible.  This was not always easy.  

Now for a little background, our housekeeping department is consistently short staffed.  They are never able to hire enough people to do the jobs they do correctly.  Is this because the upper management looks the other way when it comes to that department, is it because the manager is a less than nice person to work for or is it because there are never any consequences handed down for major issues such as rooms marked as clean when they are really dirty.  Whatever the reason for housekeeping being short staffed it was beyond my capability for resolving so I was left to deal with things as they were. 

One night during an extremely busy checking period one of our guest went to their room to find it an absolute mess.  It appeared that no one had even entered it to clean at all, even though it was listed as “clean” in the system.  My first step in dealing with the situation was to verify the state of the room with housekeeping.  I called them and ask a supervisor to meet me in the room to look it over.  We arrived and sure enough it was a disaster.  This is where the conflict began.  Generally when a room is found to be dirty we simply move the guest to another room and have housekeeping clean it.  The problem this night was there were no other rooms to move them too.  I didn’t even have an upgrade to give them, all the units were either occupied or listed as “dirty” and had not been cleaned that day. 

When the housekeeping supervisor asked me to move them to another room I had to tell her that all of the vacant rooms I had were “dirty”, to which she took offence.  We went back to our offices to search the computer to see what we could find.  She called me and agreed that all the vacant rooms were in fact listed as “dirty”; this is where the negotiating began.  She told me she could have it clean in about 90 minutes, however this was not going to work for the poor people who were at my counter expecting to check in.  I asked if she could have it done sooner, she replied that she did not have the staff to get it down sooner.  As I could not give up any of my staff to help I quickly realized that the only two people who may be able to help out were she and I.  As much as neither of us wanted to go clean a room at 7:30pm, I didn’t see any other choice.  After a little back and forth we agreed it was the best option and we went to clean the room. 

Was the outcome ideal for either of us, No, but it was what had to happen.  She didn’t have the staff to help and I had an angry customer in front of me.   As Berman (2008) pointed out in negotiations everyone has to give up some thing for the greater good of the company.  I could have played the “its your department you figure it out” card, but what would that have solved?  In fact that probably would have made the cleaning time greater out of spite alone. 

One thing I would have changed within the conflict is that I would have had a bit more compassion for her.  She had just started her shift and I was not directly her fault that the room was not clean.  She was having to deal with her department’s own shortcomings as well as whatever I was piling on top.  In the end it all worked out for the best and it may have even brought the departments closer, at least those on the night staff of each department.        

Berman, J. (2008, February 10). Conflict Resolution - Part 1. Retrieved August 22, 2015.

Berman, J. (2008, February 10). Conflict Resolution - Part 2. Retrieved August 22, 2015.

A520.2.6.RB - Time Management

I would say that my time management skills are amazing on paper and terrible in practice.  I am a person who loves the idea of organization but has poor follow through.  Whetten and Cameron (2011) talk about the most prescribed solutions for time stress are calendar or planners, to do lists and saying no.  I have a planner and a family calendar, I write to do lists and say “no” when I truly don’t have the time.  My problem is distractions.  I have a difficult time not veering off my projected path to follow tangents that have no value to my day what so ever.  When I fill out my daily plan sheet the night before I wake up feeling prepared for the day, but usually by 8am things have become derailed.  When this happens I feel my locus of control shifts from internal to external, which leads to my frustration and a downward spiral at times.

As a stay at home mom I have been trying for the past few years to set a more structured schedule to the day.  I want to fit more into the day with my kids but can never seem to find a way to do it.  Once I read the five questions Whetten and Cameron (2011) described I started to see where my errors were occurring.

1.     What do I stand for? What am I willing to live/die for?

2.     What do I care passionately about?

3.     What do I want to be remembered for?

4.     What do I want to have accomplished 20 years from now?

5.     If I could persuade everyone in the world to follow a few basic principals, what would they be?

After answering these questions I see that I have been spending too much time trying to find the time to be with my kids and not enough time just doing it.  They are the most important part of my life.  I am not currently working so they are my job, and I should give them the same attention I would give to an employer, but I don’t.  I find myself saying things like: “Just a minute”, “I will be right there” or “Hold on”.  Most of the times the things the kids need are quick and reasonable, but I am too wrapped up in something less important that I cannot even respond.  I want my kids to remember all the fun things we did together not that I was always too busy to respond to them. 

I know I need to be better at organizing my tasks and only working on them during the allotted time, which is a lot like the Urgent vs. Important that Whetten and Cameron (2011) talk about in Figure 2.4.  I need to be better at realizing that the soccer club I volunteer for is not as urgent a priority as I sometimes make it.  I would say the high importance/high urgency thing in my life is my family; the soccer club, friends, running and school are high importance but low urgency.  Housework for me would fall under low importance/high urgency, there are five kids living here and sometimes clean up is urgent.  All the other things in my life are on the low end of both urgency and importance.

My new action plan is to incorporate the use of Whetten and Cameron’s (2011) Importance vs. Urgency chart into my planning of everyday.  While I currently make a detailed to do list I am not sure the priorities I give each task are in line with the way I want to live my life.  I will also take into consideration the 20 Rules of Efficient Time Management (Whetten and Cameron, 2011), when planning not only each day but each week and month.  Some things that I once thought were a priority in my life may not be after this assignment and the readings associated with it.  I have a new outlook on my life and my kids; hopefully it will be what I need to be the mom and person I want to be.

Whetten, D.A., & Cameron, K.S. (2011). Developing management skills (8th ed.).

Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.