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Blessings from San Diego. I'm Elaine Kung. We are finishing the last session of our 15 session series on SHINE Your Talk! I'm so glad that we can have this journey together, learning the biblical and practical ways to communicate, including our workplace and family. SHINE Your Talk! We have finished the introduction and started with the S in our SHINE. The last next four topics will be in the new series in the future. So S - speak with SINCERE, 8C, REASON,PREPARE to Lead Up, SOAR and one-on-one meeting.
So now we're gonna wrap up this main topic on S - SOAR and one-on-one meeting. And this whole first main topic is all about relationship with your boss, how to communicate. And with all the relationship we have at work, it's most important to align and communicate well with our boss. That way, we have good alignment and expectation and understanding to work with our subordinates and work with our peers.
So with that, we're gonna finish up. How do we communicate with our boss in the one-on-one meetings? These one-on-one meetings are very important to help us have regular discussions, could be weekly or bi-weekly for about 30 minutes, and would be on topics such as people, projects, profits, problems, “politics” or promotion. And with these 30-minute meeting, we want to cover these 3Cs and we have discussed more in depth in the past already. So it's a quick summary. With the completed milestone since the last meeting, current priority and time allocation. And then once in a while, perhaps once or twice a year on your career development plan. So we're only gonna highlight the SOAR how to help construct SOAR stories that would help articulate your completed milestone since your last meeting. It’s a very powerful, yet simple technique to tell a story, to give an example and updates on a project, on your strength or even on your weakness. Because people like to hear stories. What it means is that you're gonna give examples of what you have done to demonstrate your progress or certain strength.
And the SOAR is situation, obstacle, action and result. Just like in Isaiah 40:31 that we’ll soar on wings like eagle; we run and not go weary, and we walk and not be faint. So I always suggest every person should have at least three SOAR story ready to tell people about your strength.
And every project progress can use a SOAR story on his own. And these sore story could align with your resume, align with your performance review, and prepare you for interviews, for elevator pitch, updating your executives and your boss when you run into them, or during your one-on-one. In this SOAR story, you want to tell about why you have this subject. Why is it important? What's the situation? And how did you handle it? What's your action? And how much impact and result did your work produce? And the minimum three story to get ready for is your intelligent quotient-related such as fast learner. Emotional quotient-related such as teamwork and relationship with people and adversity quotient-related, such as very difficult project, aggressive schedule, or failures, and how did you grow from the failures?
So here are some examples that I want to share with you on the SOAR story. Here's one on adversity quotient. And this also has some dependence on intelligent quotient being able to solve the problem and emotional quotient working well with people as well. Here's what you would do. And this story would only be one to 2 minutes. You start with the statement about the strength that you're gonna talk about or about the project that you're gonna talk about.
“I'm good at executing complex projects with excellence, with good team collaboration, on time and on budget. One time, I took over a complex auditing project without proper hand-off from the last owner. I was challenged to complete it in 14 business days, instead of the usual 2 months. I pulled together a cross-functional team, we established very clear team goal that we all agreed on and we worked diligently with a focused effort, managing the timeline, the project plan very carefully. As a result, we finished in ten business days, 4 days ahead of schedule.”
So that's about a minute. If you time yourself and practice, you don't need to overload the story with too much detail. Most importantly is to talk about the why, how and how much. So these are good examples of SOAR stories.
So who are you as a communicator? So when you get to know yourself well, you better know how to manage a communication. It comes back to what is your belief system? Your values, your world view, because that really determines how you communicate. And these values are influenced by your family, where you were raised and your past experience. How do you want to be seen as a communicator? What is the personal brand that you want to convey?
And for us as Christians, of course, we want to convey a Christ-like brand that we want to live out the 6M that we have talked about how to model Christ’s character, mould, the positive office culture, how to minister grace and love, how to be a messenger of truth and justice, how to make good work, and how to be a messenger of the gospel.
So we are able to really live out our values. And how does your geographic culture influence how you communicate, and your organization culture as well, because the culture is determined by the value. So all these driven into how you communicate, so start with our being, and then from our value to determine our doing and our behavior and that determine the culture. So what do you consider to be your strength as a communicator? Remember, always lead with your strength, and what communication skills are you working on to improve? How would you rate your listening skills? Remember, when we communicate it's a lot more about listening than speaking, because God gave us 2 ears for a reason, we need to listen at least twice as much as we speak. So we went through very detail in the past. How do we do active listening? And what are your strengths in giving feedback? What's difficult for you when giving feedback? Because we all could be in a position to give suggestion and input and feedback. Remember, sandwich style.
Now it's a good way to give feedback in a positive way, professional and setting boundary. What are your strengths in receiving feedback? Are you open minded and humble to say, “Tell me more. I understand where you're coming from.” And if you may not agree with those, again, you can have boundary and clearly explain how you understand where they coming from. And here's your point of view and have some discussion. What is difficult for you when you see their feedback. Be sure, not to be defensive. It's okay to be assertive, but don't just knock it down and discount what people are sharing with us.
So we want to be objective and all that, most important is to pray to any of these discussion, pray before your discussion, during and after as a follow up. And what excites you about public speaking?
Or conversely, what do you find challenging about public speaking? In America it’s said that public speaking is the second greatest fear after being afraid of death. So public speaking indeed could be intimidating. Yet. It's a very powerful tool you need to learn how to communicate. And what are your communication preferences? what channel do you prefer to communicate? For example, would you prefer sending an email or talking person? Eventually, in this whole series, in working with your boss, what do they prefer? When we went to the 11 types of bosses, we know some prefer meeting, some prefer email and text. So they're different. And what language do you prefer to communicate? And is there anything about you that your colleagues or your boss would know when communicating with you? So you want to let people know ahead of time, and that's especially including your subordinate. So they do a better job of Leading Up with you. So these are six different types of communication channel with your boss.
These are examples. Email, phone, video conference, brief Ad-Hoc meeting, memo, formal meeting. No matter how you communicate to your boss, be sure to avoid any surprises, make sure your boss is aware of any critical information. Your boss would prefer to hear from you. Including the good news it’s best to hear good news and bad news from you directly instead of with someone else.
Email. The purpose is to record communication for non-urgent questions. Because if it's urgent, you don't want to use an email. You want phone calls and meetings. When is it useful? If your boss already uses email and that's a habit, and they have time to deal with it. Use it when you need a response to a question or non-urgent issue. When you write emails, since we all get so many emails and get buried, be very careful with your subject line that is very specific to the subject of the content. And also, just like reading a newspaper, the top half is what people may read. They may not go to the second half of the email. So be very clear up front. After an informative subject, you put what's the key take away. What is the key points that your email is about to tell you. And then is there any particular call to action? Is it an FYI or is it a decision you need to make or something that we need for certain growth? The caution is to keep email to minimum, be aware of confidential material, keep them short and sweet, and don't say, did you see my email.
Phone calls. The purpose is to address issues quickly and can be dealt with verbally. It's useful when your boss does not mind interruptions, or they do well with quick verbal exchanges. Some people may not like that. So depending on your boss, only phone on important issues to minimize and limit interruptions. Don't just call about anything. Make sure you prioritize. So be cognizant of your boss schedule, have to find the right time, the right place to have that right conversation on the phone.
Brief Ad-Hoc meeting. The purpose is to discuss some urgent issue, so this is not the regular one-on-one. Something come up quick and we need to have an ad-hoc meeting to discuss and get immediate attention. It's useful when your boss is happy with some quick face-to-face interruption. So perhaps a more extrovert boss would be open to that, but introvert boss may not like this as much. Use it when your boss needs important information or needs to be made aware of.
So it's something to bless them and to help your boss. Remember, we want to communicate in a way that really helps and bless our boss and the people we talk to. So caution is trying to avoid interrupting your boss during a meeting. If they already have a meeting going on, don't just say we need an ad-hoc meeting, so we need to, again, be diligent and wise. Take the right time and right place in the right mood.
Memo. The purpose is to explain why a document is being sent. So it clearly lay outs and act as a quick reminder. When is it useful? When your boss would prefer sort an in-tray of papers rather than deal with email. Because paper for traditional people may still feel more visible and easier to handle. It's a balance, right? Most things are going digital. Use a memo to make a point for the record. The caution is do not replace the needed face-to-face communication, and then just only rely on memo. So be sure to balance those.
Formal meeting to discuss issues face-to-face with pre-plan agenda, like the one-on-one, like project updates. It's useful when your boss responds well to the planned one on one meetings, use them to keep your boss updated on progress so that you're proactive to communicate, and for coaching and two-way feedback.
So as it’s our final session, I want to share our ministry named CalledtoWork.org that we started in 1996. We share all these resources to help you, hopefully to say, thank God it’s Monday, because we have resources to encourage you with practical tools, like the SHINE Your Talk! series, to equip leaders, to grow workplace ministry that you can encourage people and help others as well, not just being encouraged and then expand. We have a lot of other partners that we can expand and partner together. These are the different groups that you can join us and our Youtube Replay QR codes. We have resources in English, in Chinese. And going to the Youtube or on our website, you can see different text, video and audio resources. So in closing, I hope all the sharing that we've done, all these 15 topics and sessions can help you change your life in your work communication. With this 4H, your head, heart, hands and habits. And that you knows what you're gonna start doing with the baby steps, stop and do more and do less. Hope to see you in the second series. Thank you.