If Your Team Isn't Listening to You, This Hard Truth Might Be Why

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Key Takeaways

- All communication modalities, including the environment where communication happens, affect the whole team’s performance and leaders’ positioning.

- Be conscious of where the conversation happens and when the best time would be. Try to put phones away, if possible.

- Create the right environment for your employees.

Bringing back your authority as a leader doesn’t have to come with a conflict. You can position yourself wisely and create a thriving business setting once you are fully in charge of where and how communication happens.

Most business owners aren’t even aware of where the communication happens. When an issue pops up, you discuss it right away, regardless of where you are and with whom. Right? Wrong.

Hallways and public places with customers and patients are the worst places to talk business. Not only are you compromising your authority, but you’re also compromising the outcome of the conversation.

Don’t solve issues or discuss goals in the hallway or, worse, in front of the clients. Why? Addressing mistakes in public causes staff to close up and defend their egos, and they don’t comprehend the importance of the conversation. Stop.

Environment importance for the office dynamic you dictate

All communication modalities, including the environment where communication happens, affect the whole team’s performance and leaders’ positioning. In most businesses, there are two environmental communication frames:

- Home advantage: Environment with clear authority

- Collaborative: Friendly setting, public and less private

Both have strong implications for your business, whether you’re aware of it or not. Modern businesses nurture the narrative that values open, accessible environments to ease communication. But research doesn’t support this.

A Harvard Business School study found that open-plan workspaces reduced meaningful face-to-face interaction by 70%. Lack of structure doesn’t help strengthen work relationships. It just produces more noise. Your staff doesn’t need more access to you. They need the right environment to understand their roles and expectations.

First, take back your authority by acknowledging that you’re in charge of the communication environment. Second, bring back the significance to your meetings by choosing the environment that allows you to establish your authority instantly. You’ve got the option to use home advantage. Don’t miss it.

How to signal significance

Does this sound familiar? You start chatting in the hallway during a break, while the person you talk to casually looks at their phone, and you bring up the issues with the performance for the third time, yet nothing happens.

There are two reasons for that. Your environment and distractions didn’t signal to your employee that what you want to discuss is important enough. Second, you’re talking in a public space, which can trigger a defensive response in your employee.

Your task: bring significance to your conversation. You can do it in two ways.

Remove distractions: Cut the phone out of your conversation and reduce buzzing. Even though your employees don’t check the phone at every buzz, their mental state will acknowledge that there’s a new notification they haven’t checked. Without phones, your staff is more likely to comprehend the consequences of the meeting and its crucial points.

Be conscious of where the conversation happens.

Stop people-pleasing

When you’re not used to consciously approaching the place where your business conversation happens, you’re often at risk of misinterpretation of the signals. These misinterpretations lead to confusion on both sides and not only undermine your authority but also directly impact the performance.

For example, when you’re bringing up missed goals in the lunch room, your staff may nod or give you vague acceptance to fulfill the social convention and avoid conflict in public.

You will think that they understood, but they may use your casual approach to interpret the subject as not that important, and the task will remain undone. Why? Because you haven’t set the environment for your team to understand the consequences of not completing it. The public setting and people-pleasing culture you accepted led to this.

Researcher and scientist Edward T. Hall offers scientific arguments for this thesis: Environmental boundaries can signal that the conversation is of high importance or the opposite. This supports the main idea of Proxemics, a science that deals with how external factors, such as environment and body language, affect communication.

Businesses balance collaborative conversations and serious ones, especially when the stakes are high.

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