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    22 Talk SHIFTs: Tools to Transform Leadership in Business, in Partnership, and in Life
    22 Talk SHIFTs: Tools to Transform Leadership in Business, in Partnership, and in Life
    22 Talk SHIFTs: Tools to Transform Leadership in Business, in Partnership, and in Life
    Ebook231 pages2 hours

    22 Talk SHIFTs: Tools to Transform Leadership in Business, in Partnership, and in Life

    By Krister Ungerböck

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Tools to Build Better Bosses—and Become One

    Strained and estranged relationships are everywhere in business. Salespeople are frustrated by the finance people, customer service and operations people are frustrated by salespeople, and everyone is frustrated by the IT people.

    It's time to shift the conversation.

    In 22 Talk SHIFTs, you'll discover unconventional, sometimes counter-intuitive communication techniques that can make your year, or your career. You'll learn how to:

    Increase employee engagement, leadership communication, and growth
    Become a better partner, parent, and boss using these 10 statements
    Speak like an emotional Einstein
    Lead people to their solutions, not yours
    Cultivate connection, compassion, and commitment at work and home

    Talk SHIFTs create great teams—but here's the bonus—they also create great families. These practical tools include fill-in-the-blank phrases, powerful questions, and provocative exercises that can break the cycle of strained communication and strained relationships.

    The Talk SHIFTs are the result of Krister Ungerböck's real-world experience leading teams in languages and building businesses on 5 continents.

    Learn language changes that make a big difference—in business, partnership, and life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateOct 6, 2020
    ISBN9781544514789
    22 Talk SHIFTs: Tools to Transform Leadership in Business, in Partnership, and in Life

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      Book preview

      22 Talk SHIFTs - Krister Ungerböck

      1

      Part 1: The Essentials

      ]>

      The Birth of TalkSHIFTs

      The beginning of my own communication transformation did not start while I was learning to lead in French and German after establishing the European headquarters of the software company (USI) where I ultimately became CEO. Nor did it start while leading our company from a small team in St. Louis to 3,000 percent growth and hundreds of employees in eight countries worldwide.

      I unexpectedly discovered my own need to change how I was communicating, at both work and home, in the most unlikely of places—the YMCA, while signing up for a gym membership.

      It was a typical, busy day when I found myself at the YMCA.

      A YMCA employee was typing my responses into the computer when she asked the question that changed my life.

      Who is your emergency contact? she asked.

      I paused. And then I broke down crying.

      I had no one.

      You see, in the weeks leading up to that moment, I had initiated a painful business divorce with my business partner. And at the same time, my wife had decided to divorce me.

      My business partner and I had wildly succeeded in business together despite bitter, daily conflict. For 25 years, we argued nearly every time we spoke. He was now 75 years old, and as he got older, the conflict was getting worse. I’d tried coaches, communication experts, psychologists, professional mediators, conflict resolution experts, board members—nothing worked.

      By this time, I’d been CEO for nearly five years and, despite the bitter behind-closed-doors conflict, we had managed to double the size of the company.

      I concluded that the only way to bring the conflict to an end would be to buy the company. So I challenged him.

      Just name your price. If I can’t convince investors to put up enough money to buy you out, then I’m not the right person to be CEO. Consider my offer, and let’s find a solution over the coming months, I said.

      Less than 24 hours later, without asking a single clarifying question about my offer, he called a short meeting and delivered his response: There is no price at which I would sell the company to you. And since I had made it clear that I would move on if we couldn’t come to an agreement, I resigned.

      Twenty-five years earlier, my business partner had dangled the carrot of taking over his business someday and lured me away from a dream job in Chicago at one of the most prestigious strategy consulting firms in the world. The allure of becoming CEO upon his retirement spurred me to take a 50 percent pay cut and join him. Within a year, we’d turned around his struggling ten-person business. Within three years, we’d grown 300 percent. Ultimately, we grew the company together into a global software company, winning five consecutive Top Workplaces awards, achieving remarkable employee engagement levels of 99.3 percent, and becoming a dominant player in our niche—event management software.

      Our 25-year business partnership ended overnight. To consider my offer, he took less than one hour for every year that I’d worked 60- to 100-hour weeks growing his business.

      As I calmly left the meeting, one of my father’s favorite phrases echoed in my head: With friends like that, who needs enemies.

      Except my business partner wasn’t my enemy.

      He was my father.

      ]>

      The Secret Sauce of TalkSHIFTs

      Like many business leaders, I was laser-focused on achieving success. I began reading business books as a teenager because I wanted to make my father proud.

      Ultimately, it wasn’t in business books that I would find the secrets that I was seeking. I went to workshops where I learned the insights that, frankly, I would have dismissed as touchy-feely and woo-woo psychobabble back in my CEO days.

      And it was there that I discovered the secrets that had eluded me all those years as a CEO.

      The strikingly simple secret that I learned was this: little language changes make a big difference. I finally understood that compassionate communication isn’t just a pain to be tolerated only when necessary; it is THE universal secret to leadership that works equally well in business, in relationships, and in life.

      A Leader in Relationships

      As my business relationship with my father ended, my marriage of nine years was ending as well. I became fascinated by the work of Dr. John Gottman, renowned for his research on marriage and divorce. Dr. Gottman is known for his ability to predict divorce with 94 percent accuracy after observing the communication patterns used by couples during an emotionally charged conversation.

      While his work was specific to marital relationships, it struck me that the same communication patterns that he used to predict divorce would also have predicted the breakup with my father, as well as every other business breakup in my career—executives I’d fired, salespeople who’d left, taking customers to the competition—every one of these breakups would have been predicted by Gottman’s framework. I began to study the many ways that our communication leads to unintended consequences. What became apparent to me was how often dysfunctional communication patterns are tolerated—sometimes even celebrated—in the workplace.

      I asked myself, What if marriage research could be used to create great working relationships, and business best practices could be used to create great families?

      And this was the inspiration behind the TalkSHIFTs.

      Now, you may be wondering Why does the world need a business book to bring families together?

      We often don’t invest time to recover relationships until the other person says, I’m leaving. What the marital research shows is that the person who leaves often decided to leave years before. By the time they say, I’m leaving, they’re already mentally gone. Isn’t it often the same with employees? After all, most unhappy employees don’t quit and leave, they quit and stay. Unfortunately, quitting and staying is quite common in marriages too.

      What Are TalkSHIFTs?

      TalkSHIFTs aim squarely at people who aspire to lead in the broadest sense of the word—those who lead teams, and those who don’t; those who lead organizations, and those who aspire to…TalkSHIFTs are a collection of simple say-this-not-that rules, fill-in-the-blanks phrases, and powerful questions that can make your day, your year, or your career.

      Simply put, TalkSHIFTs are tools to build better bosses—and become one—by shifting our words. The TalkSHIFTs are a collection of communication shifts that impact how we relate to others. A shift is different from a change. Change is slow and, often, temporary. A shift is immediate. When someone shifts, you’ll see it in real time as your conversation, transaction, and interaction progresses. The TalkSHIFTs are practical language tools that help you shift not only the words you use, but also your perspective. Many of them can be used to spark a perspective shift in others as well.

      TalkSHIFTs are universally effective in business, in families, and in life. In business, they can increase productivity, employee engagement, and business growth. Collectively, the TalkSHIFTs cultivate commitment, connection, and collaboration in personal or professional relationships.

      The World Needs a TalkSHIFT (and we have the data to prove it)

      Strained and estranged relationships are everywhere in business. Salespeople are frustrated by finance people, customer service and operations people are frustrated by salespeople, and everyone is frustrated by IT people.

      We have thousands of data points on the TalkSHIFT Assessment, a tool that we’ll explore more in TalkSHIFT #2. The data is clear: 72 percent of people have a frustrating relationship at work or at home. Most importantly, people who score in the top 50 percent are twice as likely to report that they have no frustrating relationships than people who score in the bottom 25 percent.

      Consider the possibility that the words we use to inspire long-term commitment to our companies and coworkers are similar to the words that inspire long-term commitment in families and in marriages.

      A New Leadership Language

      Learning the TalkSHIFTs is like learning a new language. When I opened our business in France, I sought the help of the best business French teacher in Europe according to the Wall Street Journal Europe. His name was Jean Luc. I asked him, How do you learn a new language quickly?

      Practice the new language everywhere. On the street. At work. At home. Everywhere.

      And so it is with the TalkSHIFTs. Jean Luc shared another tip with me. He told me to watch movies I love with the subtitles turned on because it helps us translate the words we hear in our head into a new language. Naturally, if you’re going to watch a movie a hundred times, choose a movie that you enjoy. I chose The Usual Suspects because I have always been fascinated by books and movies that have a twist at the end. The twist makes you want to watch the movie again because you’ll see the same movie from a new perspective.

      The TalkSHIFTs are similar. When you read this book the first time, read it as a business book. When you’re done, go back and read it again with someone in your personal life: your wife, your husband, your children, or a parent. What you’ll likely discover is that learning this new language together will transform your relationship.

      TalkSHIFTs create great teams—even when those teams are families.

      After all, as Jean-Luc said, If you want to learn a new language quickly, practice it everywhere. At home. At work. Everywhere.

      Tools to Fuel ‘The Compassion Revolution’ in Business

      A culture revolution has been brewing in business—Glassdoor’s transparency is taming toxic workplaces, LinkedIn is making it easier to find a new workplace, and millennials are demanding a new breed of leadership.

      And then, the COVID-19 crisis crashed companies worldwide.

      My meeting yesterday was interrupted when a ten-year-old boy popped onto the video window and whispered to the VP of operations, Could I have a hug?

      As the VP hugged him, I was touched, thinking, Would this have been okay before COVID-19? It probably would have been okay in that team because the leader had cultivated a culture of compassion.

      Would it have been okay for someone to hug their child in your team meetings six months ago? More importantly, will it be okay in your team meetings tomorrow, or six months from now?

      Zoom invited our coworkers into our living rooms and our lives—tearing down the walls between our personal and professional worlds.

      Will you put the walls back up?

      By the time you read this, many will have already had to make the choice: will I go back to the aggressive way of leading, or will I forge forward to master a new, more compassionate language?

      My sincere hope is that we will look back months and years from now and credit COVID-19 as the catalyst for a new era in business—The Compassion Revolution. To sustain this revolution, people will need tools to lead in an unfamiliar way. Without tools to lead with compassion that also result in financial success, many will revert to the primitive, aggressive communication that sustained the last business revolution—The Industrial Revolution.

      Compassionate communication is going to be uncomfortable for many people—especially so for aggressive businesspeople like I once was. Those who have the most difficulty will be those who are impatient for change and those who have achieved remarkable success with an aggressive style.

      For me, shifting from an aggressive style to a compassionate one was revolutionary. The TalkSHIFTs changed me. They changed my father too. If I can change and my father can change, can’t your father, your mother, your husband, or your wife change too? What about your boss? Could your boss change?

      That is the real Compassion Revolution—the revolution that will ripple out from your team meetings, bouncing off the walls and down the halls into the family rooms of the people in your care.

      Here’s the thing about revolutions. When you join one, you never know if you’re on the edge of something or on the ledge

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