Part 4 of the Transforming Communicaiton interview is here…
…Richard: So, you know, that’s in that setting. Another group I work with in New Zealand is the Retailers Association. So, there I’m working with sales people. It may surprise people who are not in the sales game to realise that actually sales is about cooperation. It’s not about one person twisting someone else’s arm. Because when that happens the other person wants to leave as soon as they can.
It’s actually about creating a cooperative relationship with with someone. One that they end up feeling good about, one that they please with the results of.
And so, those people from the Retailers Association wanted my skills for two things: the first thing is, they want to use this with their clients. They want to build a relationship so that the person doesn’t just buy from them once, but becomes a regular customer and comes back.
The second thing is: they know themselves that it’s not just them who are going to work in their shop. They are retailers, they have other people coming in and working there, and the quality of that person’s relationship with clients depends on how the manager gets on with them. So, there’s kind of a flow and effect.
Let me give you another example. I run this training as well for teachers and people in the education system. There again, the quality of the relationship from the centre of the organisation affects the periphery of the organisation. I did a research study one time, in a high school. What we did was, we ran the Transforming Communication training for a group of teachers in this high school. We did a careful questionaire before. It was a questionaire for all of the students, and we ran a questionaire with all of the teachers as well.
Then we followed up 3 months and 6 months later, and found out what was happening.
Now the interesting thing about this was that we didn’t just get results with the teachers, we expected that, we were training the teachers. At the end of six months one of the things they said was that there was a group of students that those teachers all identified at the beginning were their biggest problem. They said: the most we want to get out of this course is to deal with those students who don’t do what we ask them, who are not interested in education, who don’t want to be in the room.
At the end of six months, when we asked them: so what things are happening in your classroom, what things would you want to change, that group of students had simply disappeared. There were no students in the class anymore who fitted that description. We expected that…
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And what was the unexpected thing that happened there? Find out in part 5 of the Transforming Communication interview…
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