You may not consciously think about it, but you have choices that you making every day. Taking the opportunity to consider how you respond is important. How you respond to things creates a perception about you to others.
Imagine this scenario happens to you…
Your wake up to your alarm going off and as you turn it off on your phone, you notice a bunch of new texts. The phone was on do not disturb, so you didn’t get notified. All the texts are coming from your manager, and you can tell by the tone that they are not happy with a situation that has happened. You quickly get yourself a cup of coffee, so you can begin to process what your boss is texting, understand what issue is and respond.
You are dealing with what appears to be a big issue and an unhappy boss. What would you do in this scenario?
- Do you start texting (or calling) your boss to ask a bunch of questions that you have about what happened?
- Do you take all those texts from your boss and start forwarding them to your team and tell them you need answers quick?
- Do you choose to take a breath and look at your options before doing anything?
This is a real scenario that happened to one of my clients recently. He told me that two months ago he would have definitely gone through step one and two immediately. His boss tends to escalate quickly when things aren’t going as expected and my client has always immediately matched her reaction without hesitation. This has caused him to take all those reactive emotions from her and pass them along to his team.
In previous coaching sessions, he said he wanted to improve his communication skills and show up more effectively in interactions with others. We discussed various ways that he could start to do that throughout his day. He decided that this situation might be a great opportunity to put these new approaches into practice. He took a few minutes before responding to his boss to better understand the situation and figure out what he wanted to tell his team.
I created an acronym to make it easy for him to remember. Here is the POINT process that we discussed:
- Pause – Take the time to slow down and understand what has happened. It allows you to think more clearly about what the impacts are and be open to what comes next.
- Observe – Look at the situation from an objective point of view. Imagine that it is happening to someone else which gives you a different perspective. This approach eliminates any need to blame yourself, rush to judgment and any assumptions.
- Identify – Create a quick summary of the situation as you know it. Identify a list of actions, questions, and options so you can communicate in an organized way.
- Needs – Think about who else might be needed to help solve the problem, do you need to pull reports or gather more data to get to the root cause of the issue?
- Take Action – Update your boss (or others who are involved) and let them know that you and your team are working on the issue. Discuss what you know or what you need to know with your team to solve the problem. Get updates from the team as they work on the issue and give regular updates to your boss and other key stakeholders.
Remember that all situations, whether they are positive or challenging, are opportunities for visibility. By leveraging this process, he was able to communicate in a way that was confident, focused and credible. These situations can trigger a lot of uncertainty and anxiety, so being calm and composed is necessary to make the best decisions and impressions as a leader.
Can you see an opportunity to employ the POINT process throughout your workday or even personally? Let me know how it works for you!