Digging into Communication Coaching, Upskilling Managers, & Continuous Improvement

Full Transcript

Tom Horne: 

Welcome to All About HR. I’m your host, Tom Horne and I’m on a journey to learn about all things HR. I’m documenting my conversations with thought leaders, HR professionals, and real employees about everything from recruiting, workplace of the future, benefits, you name it. We’re all about HR. Let’s go! 

Welcome back to All About HR. Sitting here at my microphone, my favorite place to be having great conversations, learning all about HR from all the fantastic guests that contribute their time to joining the show. I just want to give a shout out to everybody that listens, to everybody that’s ever joined, contributed, commented, shared. I really appreciate you. This is a labor of love; a labor of learning and we couldn’t do it without you. Thank you everyone for sticking with us. And I feel like I’m saying thank you to a larger audience, every one of our last seven episodes has had more listeners than the episode before it. So, we’re on the growth path, we’re getting more people listening and it just it just puts coal into our furnace here at All About HR. So, thank you everyone out there. 

I’m really excited for today’s conversation. We’re coming at a little bit of a different angle. I’ll talk a little bit about how our guest today, Ron Alexander and I met kind of in a unique way and the first person I’ve met this way that’s joined our podcast. But first, let’s talk about Ron.  

Ron Alexander is a board-certified safety professional with over 50 years of experience in developing and managing safety programs in a variety of environments—for companies having a few dozen employees to 1000+ employees. His employee experience includes heavy industry, nuclear, secondary metals, explosives, and light manufacturing. Additionally, he has performed safety consulting work at and with many of our national laboratories as well as some Fortune 500 companies. Mr. Alexander is co-recipient of the Secretary of Energy’s “Award of Excellence” for innovations in radiation shielding design, as well as Vice President Al Gore’s “Hammer Award” for making government work better and cost less.  

That’s a lot of really cool stuff, Ron. Welcome to All About HR. 

Ron Alexander: 

Thank you. I’m happy to be here. 

Tom: 

So, tell us about the “Hammer Award”. Let’s stay on your bio here for a second. That seems like a pretty cool title, you know, why is it called the Hammer Award?  

Ron: 

Well, I’m not sure why they call it the Hammer Award, but the government costs a lot in case you hadn’t noticed your tax bill lately. I worked for a government contractor, and they were always trying to find ways to cut costs. I was uniquely qualified to work on this project, I was doing consulting at the time, and I got called in to do a floor level project with a bunch of maintenance people. The maintenance team had to go into a nuclear facility and find ways to cut their costs because they were spending an enormous amount of money on maintenance. I had a team of about twelve maintenance guys, and I was the team facilitator. I like that word better than leader in this case because I’m not a maintenance guy. But I knew how to work with people. And so, we went into this organization, and we were immensely successful. We found ways to save money, millions of dollars every year, and the management was so impressed with that that they nominated us for this Hammer Award. 

Tom: 

That’s a great story. I mean, that’s a big change. 

Ron: 

What we did was, we listened to the maintenance guys because guys are the floor level people. They’re out there on the floor every day. They knew what needed to be fixed, but nobody would ever let them fix it. So, who was out to tell them no?  

I said, “Yeah, let’s fix this and see what happens.” And then they sent a team of industrial engineers behind us when we were done to validate that we weren’t just blowing smoke, that we actually did achieve this. That’s how the Hammer Award was awarded to our team. 

Tom: 

I love that story. And Ron, you know where my perspective comes from—employee voice. Yet another example of where just giving your employees a voice, getting them involved in the process and going from bottom up rather than top down can drive some of the best successes and some of the best innovation regardless of what industry you are in. So, that story is music to my ears Ron. 

So, tell us about what you’re currently focused on in your role, and then we’ll expand into some of the details on what and how you’ve done things in your career. But what are you doing right now? Tell us a little bit about your current role. 

Ron: 

Well, my current role is I’m working with a very innovative, very young company and they’ve brought me in to set up all the health and safety stuff. They give me the freedom to do the things I’ve always wanted to do, but I was never able to do because of office politics. For example, this company has no HR person. There’s like nearly 100 employees. We don’t have an HR department. We don’t have an HR person. We don’t have a payroll person. We don’t have a disciplinary action program. One of the things I said is, as long as I’m here, we’re not going to have any safety rules. Safety rules, and we’ll talk about that later perhaps, but they’re negative. So instead of having safety rules, we have safety practices. We follow safety practices; we don’t obey rules. 

Tom: 

I like that. 

Ron: 

And so, instead of using rules and the progressive disciplinary programs that most places have, we’re using best practices and I’m teaching the supervisors how to get things done without using disciplinary action. 

Tom: 

That’s where we’re going to spend a lot of our time today. From our earlier conversations, I love some of the pathways you mentioned for driving performance and upskilling supervisors and managers. For everyone listening, that’s going be our big topic today that we’re going to dig into. I also want to point out something you mentioned—that a lot of your experience is safety. You’re a safety guy. How does safety correlate to HR and how have you been able to connect the dots to some of the lessons? Where’s the overlap there? 

Ron: 

When I became a safety person, I went to all kinds of schools and classes. I spent the first couple of years of my career going to schools and here’s what we learned. The first thing we learned about was accidents. Fifteen percent of all accidents are caused by unsafe actions and eighty percent of accidents and injuries were caused by unsafe behavior. So, what happened was our government in their infinite wisdom, they made up the OSHA program to take care of unsafe conditions, but they didn’t touch unsafe behavior. And so, we wound up with this situation.  

You follow the OSHA regulations, and you go so far at some level in your safety performance, but you hit a ceiling. One of the things I learned as a safety guy is you get stuck at this place called safety culture. You can’t go any higher than your safety culture. And none of the OSHA compliance stuff affects safety culture. So, I spent years—and I’m not the only one. Everybody in safety was fighting this safety culture thing and we were told it takes three to five years to change the culture. But I never succeeded in changing the culture in any of the places I worked until fairly recently when I did something different. 

Tom: 

And is that something different what we’re going to spend most of our time talking about today? 

Ron: 

Quite possibly. 

Tom: 

All right. I love it. Before we get into that, the first official question I ask every guest is, what are you listening to right now? 

Ron: 

I’ll listen to audio books. I have a long drive every morning, about an hour each way. I’ll find something that’s got value in it, and I listen to it over and over and over. One of the main ones is a book called Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, and that’s a book I recommend everybody read if you’re in business. And the other book is a book called Atomic Habits by, I believe the name is James Clear. He has in chapter two of that book, a really good discussion of identity. That’s one of the things I talk about when I train new supervisors, you have to have an identity. You can’t just show up if you want to succeed, you have to have an identity. What is your identity and how do you form that identity? 

Tom: 

I love that. One of our other guests, Jess, mentioned Atomic Habits recently, and I said, “Oh, I’ve got to pick that up and listen to it” and I still have not. So now, I really have to because, I think in two out of my last four conversations this has come up. So, I’ve got to get on that.  

All right, let’s get into the meat and potatoes here. We’ve given a couple of previews, and we’ve given some hints. Ron, you were talking about how you came from safety, and you were never able to break that safety culture ceiling until you were able to do something. And when we first started talking, what came out of those conversations was upscaling supervisors and managers. You talked about not having rules and how you kind of changed the perspective to drive safety. Connect all those dots from where we’ve been kind of tiptoeing around. How did you find to be able to start changing culture? 

Ron: 

Okay, let me give you a very short outline of the big picture. The big picture is a pathway. It starts with communication skills. These communication skills morph into coaching. Coaching morphs into another skill called continuous improvement. Continuous improvement, we probably won’t talk much about today, but that’s the money shot. That’s where the money is. We come to work in manufacturing every day to figure out a way to make money. And that’s kind of the reward for all this other stuff.  

So, let’s back up to communication. Much of the communication in industries is exactly the same way it was in 1970, when I got my first job out of college, which was a safety engineer job. Today, it hasn’t changed, hardly at all. We talked about this in our earlier discussion, we know that the thing that makes some companies better than others is a thing called employee engagement. Remember that conversation? The problem with that is that 80% of the managers and supervisors and leaders don’t have a clue as to how to do that. Most of them can’t even really even define it.  

So, I had an event in my career, kind of toward the end, where we were in a bind in safety. We started off with the worst safety performance in decades. It was horrendous. There were some factors for that that I won’t go into, but there were some horrendous things, pressures going on and I had to do something. So, I came up with this program. I had a program that was forced on me that wasn’t working, that was causing all these problems. And I kind of stealthily changed it out of desperation.  

What I did was, we went to all of our supervisors, and we had each one of those supervisors go to ten of their employees every day and ask about a safety issue. They’d go to the ten different employees and say, what do you think we can do better on this safety issue? We did that every day. Every supervisor, every salaried person in the facility did that. They would go out on the floor, and they would find ten employees and they’d ask them, “OK, what are you going to do?”  

We started off with slips, trips, and falls. And every day we would find however many hazards we could find. We fixed as many as we could and we kept a kept a log of them and we charted them. Every day we would start fixing all those problems, and every day there were fewer. Finally, it’s in physics you learn that all things in nature are logarithmic. When the curve goes down so far you reach diminishing returns, you find another hazard and you start on that. So, we had our supervisors communicating with our employees. Instead of telling them what to do, we were asking them what needed to be done. That was the flip. The supervisors and employees, we flipped that and they weren’t being bosses anymore. 

They were asking their opinions and getting things done just like that other situation we talked about with the Hammer Award. These people on the floor—they may be crazy, but they’re not stupid. They know what needs to be done, and if you ask them and you’re sincere, they’ll tell you. And we did that over and over and within 90 days we went from the worst performance in the company’s history to the best performance in in decades.  

Our OSHA rate was an average of over twelve for the previous 20 years. We got it down to around two or below. It’s been that way during the four years since I left there. It stayed low and I call that a culture change when I can hold that for four years after I’m gone. So, we changed that culture. The way we did it was, we didn’t do it from the top down. We did it from the bottom up.  

Now, right after that, I read another book. It was by man named (Mike) Rother. It was on Toyota Kata. What Toyota Kata does, it’s about continuous improvement and he was talking about the struggles he had in continuous improvement. What they finally figured out was if you wanted to make continuous improvement work, you had to do the same thing. You turn it upside down and you start at the bottom instead of the top. 

Tom: 

I love that. 

Ron: 

So, I wasn’t the only one that figured this out, and what I did figure out was senior managers are smart. They don’t always understand everything that goes on the floor, but they’re really good at figuring out when something’s really working, and they will latch on to it. In fact, they’ll even take credit for it sometimes. But once it starts working, you start getting converts and then you get the people at the top of the ladder involved as well and it goes even faster. 

Tom: 

That’s a great story. I think that really sets the outline for what that culture is and how you get there. So, kind of the baseline is to start at the bottom and work your way up. It sounds like instead of managers telling the team what to do, they were asking. It’s almost more of a service model where they’re servicing the needs of the team and flipping the pyramid upwards.  

So, let’s take that another step. How do you create a system to upskill these managers? You mentioned that a lot of these managers don’t know what to do with engagement. At People Element we provide employee surveys and engagement and all that, but you’re right, when you give that data to managers, they go, “Yeah, I don’t know what to do with this.” 

How do you create a system to drive that performance consistently at the manager level? Because that sounds like a key component for you. 

Ron: 

Well, there’s a couple of things I do. The first thing I do is help the lower-level managers determine their role, their basic role. Their basic role is one that I’ll call stewardship. They’re there to protect and up level the company and their employees. So, anything that you do needs to be to the benefit of the employee and the benefit of the company. That’s your job. To look after the company and look after the people.  

Now, going back to our situation about rules versus practices. If you have a safety rule, it’s “Okay, Joe. You’re not wearing your seat belt. That’s an official warning. I’ll have to put a letter in your file because you aren’t wearing your seat belt.” OK, that’s the way it works, right? 

Tom: 

Unfortunately, in a lot of places, yes. 

Ron: 

Yeah, that’s the way it is. Especially if you’re in a union shop, which I usually was. What’s that guy going to do? He’s going to go home. He’s going to go back out on the floor, and he’s going to complain to his people as to what a jerk that the supervisor or the safety guy is. And he’s going to take half an hour of his time and half an hour of everybody else’s time complaining about it. Well, that’s not beneficial.  

What’s worse than that is if you look at what causes engagement, the companies with the most engaged employees make the most money and from a safety perspective you have over 60% fewer injuries than if you had low levels of engagement. As a safety guy, why wouldn’t I want to go there? So, what you learn to do is define and figure out what engagement is.  

A man named Pink—I can’t remember his first name. He wrote a book called Drive. And in that book called Drive he defined engagement as a combination of purpose, autonomy, and skill. Although he used the word mastery, I like the word skill.  

For example, in this forklift disciplinary thing we just discussed. Mastery, skill, and autonomy—was any of that promoted the way we did that? No, none of that was promoted. In fact, you really damaged that person’s autonomy. Well, that’s not profitable. So why would we do that? Well, we do it because nobody has ever told anybody how else to do it.  

Here’s how you do it. You go to the guy and say, “Joe, it looks like you’re not wearing your seat belt. So, what can you do to help remember to wear your seat belt next time?” And you go into this coaching scenario—the GROW—grow coaching model and you help him understand or find a way to get his seat belt fastened.  

So, when that that process is over, you haven’t damaged anything and yet you’ve upgraded his mastery because now he has a tool for getting his seat belt fastened. So instead of pushing everything down, you’ve picked everything up. And the guy is not going to go spend half an hour telling everybody what a jerk you are because you wrote him up for a seat belt. 

Tom: 

Yeah, and I think that is universal. As a parent, I’m taking my kids to the pool and taking them to sports. I’m going lots of places. The number of times I see a parent doing something wrong or breaking a rule, and then when they’re told that, they just completely lose their minds. Like adults do not want to be corrected. Even really good, successful, smart, coachable people just don’t like that redirection. So, when you can avoid telling them they’re wrong, and you can give them tools and offer suggestions, I think that’s going to hit a lot better at work and anywhere. 

Ron: 

Yeah, it does. I had another example, and this was this morning. I have one of my senior managers here where I’m at, and I’ve been trying to get him to put guards on some of his heavy machinery that he should have. And he’s not been getting that done very quickly. So, I said, “Listen, we let’s go to your office and let’s talk.” And he says, “I bet you want to talk about the guards.” I said, “Well, yes. That’s part of it.” So, I just said you know it’s it seems like we’re not making any progress here. What can you do to move this forward?  

Okay, did I accuse him of anything? No, it’s just a collaborative approach. But these are skills that most of us don’t have. For me in particular, I didn’t have these skills. I am a very left-brained person. I spent the first few years of my adult career locked up in a laboratory with a bunch of test tubes and scientific machines, and I didn’t learn those skills. There are people who have them naturally. Maybe that’s the 20% of the people who are helping get their people engaged. But most of us don’t have those skills. I had to learn those skills. 

Tom: 

I want to take a break in just a minute here, and I want to get into teaching and coaching those communication skills. I want to talk about that because I think that’s an area where you’ve really done your homework and you have some expertise to dig into. But before we take that break, I want to sunset this part of the conversation about coaching, and upskilling managers and supervisors. 

I know you’ve got some deep process, but at a high level, can you outline some of the other specific steps you take when you’re coaching these line level managers for success? I think you’ve given some great stories, but can you talk a little bit more about maybe a process that some of our listeners might be able to start digging into? Or just a process that you can implement across the organization to do that as well? 

Ron: 

Well, individual identity and understanding your role is important. I mentioned that, but beyond that, there are some specific skills that even a klutz like me can learn. Anybody can get these skills and the way I learned them is I discovered Chris Voss in that book. Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. I recommend every manager, and every parent read that book. And if you can’t read, Chris Voss has hundreds of videos on YouTube that you can watch for free, and you can learn that stuff. But I’ve been through that book at least three times, and it’s a list of simple skills that anyone can learn. You don’t have to learn all of them or really be good at all of them to be better than everybody else around you. If you upgrade at all, you’re going to be ahead of where you were. So. we’ll talk about those skills when we get back. 

Tom: 

Let’s take a quick break and we’ll come right back. Thanks Ron.  

. . . 

Alright, it is time for the HR Hot Sauce with Ron Alexander. Ron, Are you ready? 

Ron: 

I am ready. 

Tom: 

Ron, what is the best job you have ever had? 

Ron: 

The one I have right now. 

Tom: 

Always our favorite answer. We’ll talk about that in depth.  

What’s the one phrase at work that drives you nuts? 

Ron: 

“That’s it’s not my job.” 

Tom: 

Do you like working on rainy or sunny days? 

Ron: 

Rainy because I don’t like to be outside in the rain. If I’m inside, I can concentrate and I get to hear the rain and I like that. 

Tom: 

I love that.  

How can someone make your day at work? 

Ron: 

I, like most people, like expressions of appreciation and I had one of those today. If you don’t mind me sharing it. This is kind of a new gig I’m working on right now and I had one of the senior managers I’ve been working with come in this morning and he said he needed a hug. I’ve never had that happen before, so he got a hug. To me that was an expression of appreciation. I’ve helping him out with some stuff, and he’s got a lot on his plate, and so I’ve been helping him take stuff off his plate and he appreciated it. 

Tom: 

I love it. Thanks for sharing that story. Everyone needs a hug. 

Best useless skill, Ron? 

Ron: 

Lognormal probability distributions. It’s a statistical technique that safety people can use to tell how many variables there are causing an accident.  

Tom: 

I’m going to say that’s not a useless skill, but we’re going to count that.  

Mild, medium, hot or nuclear? 

Ron: 

I’m going to say medium. I’m more of a plotter than a sprinter. 

Tom: 

What’s your favorite interview question to ask or be asked? 

Ron: 

“How does that make you feel?” 

Tom: 

Good one.  

And then finally, what’s your favorite song to bring you out of a funk? 

Ron: 

The theme from Rocky. 

Tom: 

That is a great one. We’ll add it to our list. We are done with our Hot Sauce. Let’s get back to the conversation.  

. . . 

Alright, we are back. That was a great HR Hot Sauce.  

Ron, we’ve been talking a lot about connecting some of the cultural aspects to actual actions, upskilling managers, and how to coach and create this culture to get you the right business outcomes, engagement, all those great pieces. One of the things Ron really seems to have a great hold on is communication strategy. I want to take the second half of this conversation to pick Ron’s brain and understand some communication tips and how to create coaching strategy. When we look at our employee engagement data at People Element, communication is always on the list. If you go to any company and sit in a meeting and go, what can we improve on? Somehow communication is always a topic.  

So, Ron talk to us about communication coaching. Where do you start with enhancing communication? 

Ron: 

Well, we talked about identity. The second thing that you learn is actually going to be a skill. It’s an easy skill to learn and a very important skill. It has to do with becoming the adult in the room. If you’re the supervisor or manager, you’re expected to be the adult in the room. Now, how many supervisors do you know that can’t hold their temper, they talk when they should be listening, et cetera. So, learn to be the adult in the room.  

One of those tools that’s easy to learn is how to use a curious tone in your voice. An employee comes in and they bang on your desk and say, why wasn’t I on the overtime list? Instead of getting huffy with them, you say, you’re not on the overtime list? That does two things. That’s why this is a skill. It gives both you and the employee a second or two for those adrenaline levels to taper down. Once those little adrenaline levels taper down, people’s minds can start talking.  

So, what you’ve done is you’ve injected a pause in there, and that curious tone and the pause that you injected gives both you and the other person time to collect your thoughts. Now you can have this conversation without it getting into a verbal match. That is a skill. That is a skill that anyone can practice and learn, right? 

Tom: 

Yeah, absolutely. 

And I feel like it also shows that you’re listening. It’s also kind of repeating back that, hey, I’ve heard you and instead of just saying, I’ve heard you, you’re acknowledging that you heard them and coming at it with curiosity. So, I really like that kind of twist on that. 

Ron: 

Now the next thing you need to learn is, you need to learn to take yourself out of the equation. No more using the word “I” because that other person who’s come into your office wondering about why he is or isn’t on the overtime list, doesn’t care what you think, so there’s no point in going there. So, there’s no point in putting that “I” into any of those next sentences.  

The other thing you want to do is, don’t go into it with an accusatory tone. An accusatory tone is like this, “Why are you concerned about this? Why do you want to know?” or “Why did you do this? Why didn’t you do that?” That is an accusatory tone, and that dampens this engagement thing that we were talking about.  

So, don’t do things that hurt engagement. Take the “I” out of these things and don’t start sentences that use the word “Why”. That’s a skill anybody can learn to do. You don’t have to have this wonderful right brained intuition. Just say, okay, I just won’t start sentences with “why”. And you take the “I” out, for example phrases like, “I don’t think you should be concerned about this” or “I didn’t think you needed to be on the overtime list” or “I wanted you to rest and not be on the overtime list” or whatever. They don’t care what you think. 

Tom: 

Right. And the examples you gave seemed common. Like that’s the that’s how most people I think would answer that kind of situation. 

Ron: 

Now the other thing about this—this is probably the most important thing I’m going to say today so this is something you want to save somewhere. When the other person understands that you have actually understood them, they will not only begin to listen to themselves, but they will also begin to listen to you.  

You don’t convince the person that you’re understanding them by saying, “I understand where you’re coming from.” That does not work because it’s got that “I”. Or saying, “I’ve been there too.” That does not work because it’s got the “I”. That’s what I mean when I say take the “I” out of that. It’s about them, it’s not about you. And once you’ve gone through—and there’s some more tools we can talk about—and convinced them that you have actually understood them, this communication thing is like magic. It begins to happen when they begin to open up. They will consider new ideas. They will consider your ideas. They will think their way through it and find their own solutions. 

Tom: 

So, you’re talking about listening. But it’s not just listening, it’s applying these tools and this approach to how you listen that can create that connectivity and a baseline to actually move forward with what both teams are trying to accomplish mutually. Am I summarizing that right? 

Ron: 

Well, let me twist that just a little bit. More specifically, you’re getting them to believe that you’re listening. You’re convincing that other person that you’ve actually understood the basics of what they’re doing, what they’re thinking, and what their concern is. 

Tom: 

That’s huge. Thank you for that twist. It’s not rocket science, but it is nuance, and the success lies in the execution of these nuanced items. And that’s why I think so many people miss this. People may think they are great communicators, and maybe 90% of their communication is good but the nuances that are missing devalue 75% of the good communication they’re doing. So, I really like that. It really resonates with this small twist you just put on to get those results. So, once you’ve established the listening, where do you go from there? 

Ron: 

Once you’ve established some listening skills, then you morph into coaching. The coaching part is pretty easy because we’ve known about the GROW coaching model for decades. That’s the model we use. There are some small nuances in there, but it’s basically the same model. In my teaching, I have two versions of it. One version of it uses the GROW coaching model for addressing behavior issues, and the other part of the model addresses productivity issues.  

Now in most HR applications, they don’t touch productivity issues. But I touched on those issues because they morph into this continuous improvement thing and that’s the money shot. So, when I talk to a manager—production manager or manufacturing manager—about using this, they want to know if there’s some dollar signs at the end of the rainbow. We go into business to make money. Maybe some people have plenty of money and they do it for their ego. I don’t know any of those people. For me, if you go into this, you’ve got to have some kind of payoff at the end. You can get that payoff if you take it to continuous improvement. 

Tom: 

I love that. So, I’ve heard you say continuous improvement, and I’ve also heard of continual improvement. Is there a difference there? 

Ron: 

They are not the same. 

Tom: 

Yeah, I’m starting to feel that. 

Ron: 

Continual improvement is basically a backwards look at what you’ve done. In every ISO standard, there’s requirements for continual improvement, and you’re supposed to document this. 

Continuous improvement is a forward-looking thing. It’s a tool for generating the kind of improvements that you would eventually document in a continual improvement. So, it’s proactive instead of reactive. 

Tom: 

All of the best approaches seem to be proactive over reactive.  

I want to tie this together in the communication conversation with one big topic where I feel like HR doesn’t get as good of a rap as they should. I think people in general can benefit from this. 

You’ve outlined some great structures for communication and listening, but can we talk specifically about communication in negotiations? Is there anything above and beyond what we’ve talked about to help people negotiate better?  

In HR, the conversations are that it’s going from an administrative function where it was, we’re going to post payroll, we’re going to hire people, and we’re going to do our progressive discipline. Now HR has got a lot more input and they’re having to defend. They’re starting to say, we need to buy these resources, or we need this, or we have to negotiate that. Or salary negotiations, which have been going on forever.  

How can we take some of this communication structure and specifically point it into negotiation type of conversations? 

Ron: 

Well, the people skills that I talked about come from a guy named Chris Voss, as I’ve mentioned in that book, Never Split the Difference. Chris Voss was the head FBI hostage negotiator for a number of years, so all these tools come out of what they’ve learned in terms of hostage negotiators. 

Now, when Chris Voss talks about this in his book, when using the skills, their record went from about roughly 50% to over 95% success in terms of convincing this person to walk out of that building without hurting anybody and go to prison. It takes pretty good negotiating skills to do that. That’s where these skills come from, and that’s the main part of what he does. He teaches negotiation classes because businesses will pay him a lot of money to teach this stuff.  

So, negotiation is actually the main part. What some people don’t realize is that every employee interaction is actually a negotiation at some level. It works up level and down level. As a safety guy, I’m usually negotiating with a manager or an employee to follow some kind of safety practice. 

Tom: 

I can see that, yeah. 

Ron: 

But I’m also negotiating with my boss, the Vice President, and the CEO of the company. I’m negotiating up, and I’m negotiating down. You use the same tools. 

Tom: 

I love it. Everything you’ve said this entire podcast has made sense. It’s also created more questions for me than answers, like it’s really got the gears turning. Because you’ve made me question myself. I do podcasts. I’m in business development. I work with HR. And yet I’m now having to go back and question a lot of my approaches on these things in areas where I can make a slight difference and get a massive increase in the positive outcomes that I’m that I’m trying to get. 

Ron, I appreciate you spending time with us here. 

Ron: 

That is the magic. Now, there is a hazard in this that I will point out. These skills are so effective that there are people who will use them inappropriately. And when you do that, the word is called manipulation. Manipulation is not a formula for long term success. This only has long-term success if you have the best interest of your company and the best interest of your employees in your heart. If you if you’re doing this in a manipulative way, it will eventually come back and bite you on the rear. 

Tom: 

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. In the employee engagement space, when we talk about collecting employee feedback and employee voice, intention is one of the biggest factors of successful employee initiatives or it should even be a part of the culture. But the intention of why are you asking your team? Is it so you just get data for the company to take advantage of different areas? Or is it to give them a voice and find some of the stories you started this conversation with to create a better workplace to help those actual employees?  

So, I agree you can take all of these tools. You could take employee engagement, employee surveys, and use them wrong. But if you have the right intention, which you need to have, you can get some great things out of it. That’s a great point.  

Ron, where can people find you? Are you on LinkedIn? I’ll add all this into notes, but I want to connect you. 

Ron: 

Well, I’m on LinkedIn. It’s like Ron Alexander at the Safety Tribe. I’m probably not the only Ron Alexander. I have some videos on YouTube. If you put Ron Alexander and the Safety Tribe together and search, you’ll get my YouTube videos. Ronalexander@thesafetytribe.com is one of my emails that I check regularly so that you can e-mail things to me if you so desire. I have a little bit of time for helping spread the news like I am right now to help people get started on this if they want to learn. I had kind of an “aha!” moment when I started that I’ll share, and you can decide if you have time for it. 

Tom: 

I think so. 

Ron: 

What happened when I got into this is, I was doing consulting work. I had a company in Mississippi that was getting pretty far behind on paying my invoices and as a self-employed person at that time, you know you need to get a check every now and then. They were getting pretty far behind. I had called and I had emailed but the accounts receivable people don’t answer their phones a lot of times. They don’t answer their emails whether you send it personally or to accounts receivable. They were just not replying.  

One day I was listening to the recording of the book by Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference, and he had an example in there. He said that if they’re ghosting you, do this. What he said was, you send them a simple one line, no-oriented question. That no-oriented question goes something like this: Have you given up on paying my invoices as agreed? It was a one-line sentence. After two weeks of hearing nothing, within 30 minutes I had an e-mail back.  

It said, “Ohh, we’re so sorry. We must have just forgotten about this. I’ll make sure you get a check by Friday.” I was like, oh my gosh. And so, I went back, and I bought the book and the whole thing. I read it and I started practicing all these skills. 

But you have to practice them. That’s the other thing I should have mentioned before. You have to practice. That’s one of the things that I that I have to work with on my people. Just hearing about them isn’t enough. You have to practice, practice, practice, practice. 

Tom: 

I don’t think we could end this conversation with anything better than that thought right there. Thanks for joining us and everybody thank you for listening. Whether you’re in the car, out for a run, sitting at your desk having lunch. Thank you for tuning in and learning all about HR. It’s been a great episode and we’ll see you back again soon. 

Take care everyone. 

. . . 

Understand, engage, inspire, and retain your people like never before. People Element’s employee experience and engagement solution delivers powerful intelligence, giving you the confidence to act. To learn how you can gain a better understanding of your employees, please visit us at peopleelement.com.