JAL Bath Fittings is an established enterprise in its domain. When Philyra was engaged to train its employees, it was indeed, an exciting opportunity for me.
The team at JAL is a close-knit one and has been working together for many decades. All the members know each other very well, so much so, that they can anticipate each other’s thoughts and actions.
The management at JAL had shared with me that challenges in communication, both within and outside the organisation, were hampering the smooth day-to-day working.
However, once I interacted with the staff I realised that the issues were actually different and they emerged on the surface, as snags in communication. I found that the staff members had developed complacency when they were working on routine responsibilities at work. The patterns of communication with other employees, vendors, and dealers were also affected by past experiences, and at times reinforced the flawed manner of communicating. There were mental blocks to adopting new procedures and processes.
Although all the employees were deeply motivated to work for their organisation, yet resistance to change was palpable when I engaged in the first training session. In fact, the undercurrents of skepticism to the extra work or effort that my sessions would entail were active even during the ice-breaking and acquaintance session.
I had to find a way out, and as has been the policy of Philyra, I worked on the intrinsic aspects to effectuate a change on the extrinsic. I was able to reason out through examples, theory, and practice how the intention to have a quick interaction both within and outside the organisation, to save time, was actually leading to confusion and repeated communication. Once the attention was focused on the intention, the thought was corrected and so was the action. Thus, the participants and I were able to bring home the learning that it is always our intentions that should determine our actions, and if an action is not leading to the desired outcome, we need to retrace our thought back to our intention and think of a new course of action.
Many old employees of the organisation complained of the aggressive tactics of work and operation adopted by the new staff members. Conversely, the new appointees were disgruntled with insistence on tradition and protocol that compromised efficiency in terms of time and other resources. This mismatch in approaches was leading to disruption, at times even stalling of work. In order to overcome this challenge, a simple principle was applied. I asked the participants to again look inward. If their interaction with the other left them agitated and irritated then it was ineffective, rather harmful. Thus, an influential communicator will always uplift and empower the other. The required and desired action is a natural outcome of such communication. This helped to not only improve communication within and outside the organisation, but also remedied poor interpersonal relations and stress at the workplace.
Therefore, whenever we are addressing issues, the effects on the surface should always be treated as symptoms and not the cause. The cause is always in the life skills that are manifested as anomalies in the soft skills. As has been elucidated above, my training in enhancing communication would have been ineffective if I had restricted myself to speaking and writing skills. I had to go within the psyche to correct the outward expression.
Suditi
suditi.jindal@gmail.com
+919988000902