Person-Centered Messages…Revisiting an Important Topic

One of my favorite topics these days is Person-Centered Messages, so I thought I would revisit that topic today.  Person-Centered Messages are those times when you communicate with the other person in mind, and specifically, with how the other person will hear what you are saying.  We tend to communicate like we want other to [...]

Influencing your Boss

How influential are you in your company?  Do people listen to what you have to say? Perhaps one of the tests of that is how influential you are with people above you in the organization.  All Things Workplace had a great post a few months ago on influencing up.  Not surprisingly, it starts before you [...]

Upward Influence

We’ve all been in situations where we need to convince a supervisor to go with one of our ideas.  I’ve blogged before about the importance of person-centered messages and solution-oriented conversations as ways of successfully influencing your boss.  All Things Workplace had a great post on ideas for influencing your boss that included audience analysis, [...]

Dissent Effectiveness

I’m finishing up a research project right now that looked at organizational dissent in a new way.  First, let me remind you—dissent isn’t only the griping and complaining that first comes to mind for many people.  Dissent is what happens when an employee expresses thoughts or feelings that are different from what management expects that [...]

A Reminder about Person-Centered Messages

First, a service announcement: Typically, I use FireFox to work on this blog.  The other day, I was on Internet Explorer and noticed some formatting issues as I was viewing a post.  If you use IE and notice problems on this post, please comment so that I know it is a problem that affects others’ [...]

Person-Centered Messages, Supervisors, and Job Satisfaction

I just read a research article that discussed Person-Centered messages in the workplace (Fix & Sias, 2006). If you recall from my previous posts, person-centered messages describe those times when you decide what to say by accurately predicting how the listener will respond to your message and adapting accordingly. According to the article I read, [...]

One Up, One Down, One Across and Employees

For employees, systems theorists have noted that those employees who express one-up communication have supervisors that understand them more so than other types of communication.  What that means is that if you are trying to take control of conversations, your supervisor is more likely to understand your concerns.  Fairhurst et al. found that supervisors thought [...]

The “I” in Teamwork

We’ve all heard the cliché that there is no “I” in teamwork.  Beyond 3rd grade spelling, the lesson is that we need to be willing to sacrifice our self-interests for the sake of our team.  All Things Workplace has a nice refutation of that myth.  We all have self-interests.  If we’re honest, it’s virtually impossible [...]

Learn to Say “No”

I just read a blog post about how to politely say “no”.  I think that is a skill that all of us know we should be better at.  The ability to say no keeps us from overcommitting ourselves so that when something truly important comes along unannounced, we are able to respond.  We sometimes fear [...]

Conflict With Your Supervisor

One thing that separates conflict in organizations apart from other types of conflict is the idea of status.  By definition, there are some people in organizations that have a higher status than other people.  Most often this is set up by the organization’s hierarchy, where managers and supervisors have more status than the people they [...]