Start Every Conversation with a Personal Question
Win-win communications can foster great work relationships and promote trust between partners. Sometimes that’s easier said than done; what’s a good tactic for starting business conversations on the right foot?
Watch Digging Deeper this week as Dennis shares insight from one of our roundtable members about how to cultivate great work relationships.
We look forward to hearing the ideas you’ve incorporated in your workplace to better connect. Please share your thoughts with us in the comments section. Thank you!
Also, the early bird pricing for FBI’s Contractor Business Boot Camp ends in 2 days! Please contact Charlotte at ckopp@familybusinessinstitute.com if you’d like to enroll your future leaders to learn the business of construction so that they can help you work ON the business, not IN the business.
Good morning everybody. Dennis Engelbrecht with Digging Deeper, our pod series hopefully digging into specific
construction issues and situations that you see day to day and hopefully it can give you some help in improving your
construction company and improving your day at work.
In one of our recent roundtable groups, one of our members came out with, I guess we always get these sort of great
wisdoms from our members and you never know where it's going to come from, but he said one of the things he adopted
since our last meeting was to start every conversation with a personal question. If he's got a call, he's a general contractor,
so if he's calling a subcontractor to rather then get on the phone and talk about how many people are you going to have
on the job today, or where are you with this, where's your submittal, and all of this to just start with a personal question,
which may be, how are you doing today? How's your family? Whatever it might be, but just to make sure that you're really
having a relationship before you ask people to do something for you.
What he had found in the time he had been doing that, and of course I think he's also encouraging his team to be doing
that as well, is that he gets more done. He gets more done because people want to respond to somebody who has shown
some care and that it's a very small thing to start each phone conversation with a bit of personal before you get to the
business and maybe takes an extra 30 to 60 seconds to complete that part of the conversation, but it sure curtails the
time that it takes to try to push a rope and to try to get things done with people that maybe aren't as concerned about
you and what you need. But by bridging that and being a little bit more personal, I think you'll find that you'll get a little
more success.
We had a pretty short one today, but keep tuning in. By the way, FBI’s bootcamp for future company leaders and rising
leaders, we're starting our next session in February and be on the lookout for more information about that. Thanks a lot.
