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Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. It is so great to have you here, and it's awesome to see more people sending through your feedback and questions to me. If that's you, a big shout out to you. Thank you so much. Hey, I just wanted to address something really quickly. Uh, a couple of people with discerning ears noticed that I changed the intro to the podcast last week.

And that is because unfortunately my 15-year-old cat Pip uh, across the rainbow bridge. And so I had to take her out of the intro, which is really sad. Um, I've had to take her out of a lot of things, unfortunately. But for those of you who did notice and who reached out, thank you so much for your kind of thoughts. And those of you follow me on [00:02:00] Instagram, the same goes to you.

So back to communications. In today's episode, we are going to be delving into the world of tailoring your communication. Now, as you've probably picked up by now from me banging on about it, all of our comms should start with who. Not why or what or how. Your audience is absolutely key to nailing your communication objectives.

But the challenge we have is that there's no one-size-fits-all approach. We are communicating with humans, not robots. And humans, we are a little weird. We're basically squishy fleshy balls with emotions. But every single one of us is different down to a molecular level. You will not find anyone else on this planet past, present, or future who is exactly like you. And that's how special you are. How cool is that?

But it's also a good reminder; why are we just assuming that [00:03:00] everyone will consume information the same way when no two people are alike? So tailoring your communication is really key to getting people to actually hear it, to actually take it on board. Adapting your communication style to suit the needs of your team is also a key element of leadership communication skills.

In my experience, that's, it's not something that comes naturally to leaders or to comms pros either. It takes a lot of understanding, practice, getting feedback, asking questions. But it's well worth it in the end, I promise. Why? Because when you tailor or adapt your communication to the people you're talking to, particularly your team, you get more respect from them. Because they feel well-informed, they feel heard. They understand what's going on and why. And also tailoring helps you achieve your business goals and you can demonstrate some value back to the business. So these are really [00:04:00] good reasons to adapt and tailor, but where do you even start? Very good question.

Number one. Ask your audience. It's really that simple. Just ask them, what's the preference for communication? What channels do they want to hear through from who or how regularly? Okay, what do they want to know more about or less about? Don't make assumptions about what they want, let them tell you or co-create with you, so they have that sense of ownership.

Number two, find out what's currently working. So for example, is there a really active Yammer group that the team uses; are there regular meetings they find useful? Did they get information in a particular way that they really loved that they keep raving about like a booklet or an infographic or a short video?

And number three, understand how people behave. This is what we're going to focus on today because the other two -being asked your audience and [00:05:00] find out what's working -are pretty straightforward. But understanding how people think and how they behave is much, much more nuanced and can really add a lot of value to your communication.

I'm sure many of you have done those personality type quizzes before like Myers Briggs or DISC, or, you know, there was a bird one I've seen like a, a wild animal, one. And those quizzes are great for teams to understand each other's behaviors, a little more. But I do find, they often only tell part of the story and they don't necessarily focus solely on communication.

Now if you haven't already, I encourage you to take a look at my communication personality type quiz. I'll put a link in the show notes. The quiz is based on three sets of preferences that I've observed over the last 20 years in comms and is built on some of that conventional thinking and research around how humans act and communicate.

So, let me try and explain this to you verbally. With the visual. [00:06:00] If that makes sense. So use your imagination. Imagine a Venn diagram with three circles that overlap in the middle. In one circle, we have the notion of extroversion and introversion that Myers-Briggs developed. In the next circle, we have strategic thinking and detailed thinking.

And in the third circle, we have auditory learning and visual learning. Let's break that down. Introversion and extroversion are personality, tendencies. They don't dictate who you are. None of this does. But they help explain some of your behaviors. And yes, I'm very open to the fact that there's, there is research around this that contradicts this idea, but personally, just from what I've noticed, a lot of this is true when it comes to communication. So people with introverted tendencies typically need more time to process information before contributing ideas or asking questions. And they [00:07:00] often get drained by too much talk and too many people. They really get their energy from being alone and being able to recharge.

Others like myself, you may have noticed, have more extroverted tendencies. We process information out loud. A lot of the time. Spontaneously offer up ideas and questions without actually thinking through first, I'm guilty as charged. And we tend to get a lot about energy from being around people. Yeah. Remember these aren't completely binary concepts. You can have a bit of both or skew really far in one direction, or maybe you're more of one than the other, depending on whether you're at work or at home.

I mean, I am very extroverted, but I still need a little bit of time to recharge after I've run a workshop or when I've been teaching a class at the gym. And so I've been talking nonstop for like an hour before and after class I've been chatting to people. I get home and I just need five minutes of quiet and once I have my five minutes, I'm good.

But for [00:08:00] introverts, they need a lot more than that. But again, not completely binary. I still need that little bit of time.

And while they're not completely opposites, they do help to explain some of our behaviors. So let's move on now to the next circle, detail and strategic thinking. Not that I can see you, but put your hand up, unless you're driving and keep it on the wheel, put your hand up if you're a detailed thinker. You're the type of person who gets a lot of comfort out of getting into the detail, the logistics, the who, the what, the when, the how.

But the strategic thinkers is, well, we like the bigger picture and might get a little bored of the detail. Or we're not interested in it until we understand the why. Or until the detail actually matters. So that's the other pairing. The final pairing of third circle is our learning types. You might've heard of these before.

Auditory learners, visual learners, kinesthetic learners. Now kinesthetic learning, that's when we learned by doing. [00:09:00] It's usually not a requirement of most corporate comms work. Although, you know, there might be things like setting up AV equipment or using a piece of technology. Um, certainly you really only have to be, have to use your kinesthetic learning when it's doing something like riding a bike, you know, you can visually watch that on a video. You can hear somebody talking you through it. And even if you are predominantly a visual or auditory learner, you still don't really, you have to predominantly switch to kinesthetic learning to ride a bike, right? So again, these aren't set uh, tendencies or personality types, we do sway a little bit. But for the purposes of comms, we focused primarily on auditory and visual learners. And for some people, they are predominantly an visual learner, which means that you're more likely to remember what you've seen. So you may have seen a picture or a diagram. Maybe you saw a slide on a presentation. [00:10:00]

Those sorts of things. Or you're more likely to be predominantly be an auditory learner. So you're more likely to remember something that someone said to you. Or something you heard on a podcast like this one. So when we mash up those three circles, we get eight different combinations that each provide insights into your own communication preferences.

Remember these are just preferences and you might differ between home and work or even change from one to another, as you progress through your career. So I won't go into detail here on the eight different types, because we'd be here all day and you can read about them yourself once you take the quiz and I'll probably break them down sort of one by one over the course of a series of podcasts. But what we will talk about is what they mean for your communication. So essentially you need to be aware of these different preferences in order to be able to adapt or repackage your communication in different ways. It's about meeting people's needs and communicating in ways where they're more likely to take in [00:11:00] the information.

So, for example, uh, let's say most of the team are predominantly visual learners. You wouldn't send them a podcast link, but you might provide an infographic or a diagram. If you've got strategic thinkers, we need to stay away from the detail first and focus on the bigger picture, the why, the context.

For our detail thinkers, we allow time for them to ask all the questions, provide detailed FAQ's, detailed plans that help to meet their needs. For those of you who are predominantly introverted um, in your tendencies, those people need time to process. So instead of throwing information at them for the first time in a meeting and expecting questions and contributions, my advice is try sharing as much information as possible before the meeting. That way, they've got some time to mull over it and they'll come in prepared. You can also provide like some structured time after the meeting, [00:12:00] like for example, open door time for people to ask questions once they've had time to think about everything.

For the extroverts, they need time to brainstorm, to think out loud. So having some of that time available to them to just really throw their thoughts out there and see what sticks to the wall. They love that stuff. So again, providing some time for them to do that, thinking out loud and to process out loud is really important to meet their needs.

Remember, it's important to note there's absolutely no right or wrong in communication personality types. It's just who we are. What is important though, is to understand those behaviours. And know that how you want to communicate may not be what your audience needs in order to receive the communication.

So let's say you are sharing an, a, some information about a new process that's coming down the line. [00:13:00] What might that look like to cater to those different needs? Well, you could have a meeting and before the meeting you've, as I said, sent out some information about it so that people have are prepared, you might even open up some sort of way for people to submit questions before the meeting. So those people who are really introverted or just quite shy would have some opportunity to ask questions beforehand.

And you could just read out the questions either with names or you know, a non anonymously. Say that word again. Anonymously. Um, Yeah, during the meeting itself. So they still have a chance to be heard. But it's much more comfortable for them than speaking up in front of other people. Now in that meeting, you might have some extroverts, who like me, I have been known to do this, suck the oxygen out of the air. Let's be honest. They just talk, talk, talk that just, and really, they're not actually saying anything that just processing. So you may want to put a bit of a timer around that and just say, right, we've got five [00:14:00] minutes to, for everybody to have their say, we're going to go around the room 30 seconds each timer on. And that is so okay. And honestly, I think the situations I've been in where people do that, it's actually been quite, um, I think appreciated really because it just moves things along as well.

You need somebody to chair that meeting who has the ability to do that in a way that's fun and doesn't get on people's nerves as well and can actually speak up and, you know, rein in the conversation when you need to.

Okay. So you've had the meeting. Maybe you want to provide some written information as well. So as backup either before or after? Definitely after. Uh, so that could be something like, okay, here's a quick email, here's a visual. Then it may be a roadmap of how this process is going to work. Um, maybe some links off to some more information for the really detailed thinkers.

And that roadmap is probably a good idea for your strategic thinkers as well. You remember they want to know how [00:15:00] it all fits together. Your detail thinkers, provide them with some FAQ's and, uh, again, links, just take links off to other information. So it's not all going in one email. That's really hard to digest.

So we've covered off our strategic thinkers, our detailed thinkers, our introverted personalities, extroverted personalities, a bit of strategic thinking. Ah, yes. Sorry. I said that strategic thinking.

Uh, auditory learners. They would have uh, remembered a lot of the bits and pieces from the meeting you had. So that's why it is good to have conversations as well. But they may, may need a bit of more time to talk through that with you. So just keep that in mind. And our visual learners will love having that infographic sent to them or the visual roadmap, or even just a short fun video can be really useful.

So just to recap. When we're talking about tailoring our communication, we need to understand how people [00:16:00] think and behave and learn in order to be able to tailor our communication. We want to tailor our communication because it has a better chance of resonating with the people we're communicating to; we're meeting their needs, not what we want to communicate in the way we want to do it.

We do that because we get more respect from the people that we're talking to and it will help us achieve our business goals. Start with asking your audience. Find out what's currently working in terms of the channels they use or how they receive messages or how something's explained. And then understand how people behave and absolutely use the quiz that I've put in the show notes as a good way to start that conversation with your team.

And then when you are looking at those behaviors, remember there's those three pairs of concepts. So there's introversion and extroversion, there's strategic thinking and detailed thinking, and then there's a visual learning and auditory learning. And again, as I said, this isn't about [00:17:00] who you are. It's just about your preferences, but it can really help us understand how to communicate better together.

So that's the overview of tailoring your communication and understanding why we need to do that. Again, check out the quiz. If you haven't already, it's a bit of fun, but, and it's only nine questions. But it will absolutely help you understand how this works in practice. And I will absolutely, in some of the following episodes, be delving more into what that means to visual learners, what that means auditory learners, how you can communicate with strategic thinkers. So do stay tuned for that.

Hey guys, as always. I'd love your feedback and I'd love you too. To subscribe and rate to the podcast as well. So please go ahead and do all the things. As always it is a pleasure having you here on Less Chatter, More Matter, and I will see you next week for another fresh episode. Keep doing amazing things.