5 Voices: How to communicate effectively with everyone you lead by Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram
As a business leader, do you ever share ideas on how to make your teams or business work more efficiently and wonder why most of the time no one will implement them? Do you also feel you do a lot of talking, but your opinions and ideas are not being heard? Perhaps this also rings a bell in your home life.
According to Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram in their new book: 5 Voices: How to communicate effectively with everyone you lead, this is because many of us have not trained our voices to be heard and on a deeper level we do not understand our own voice or those around us.
This can lead to frustration as we fail to bridge the communication gap.
Mssrs Kubicek and Cockram have written a book that seeks to help us gain an increased awareness of our own personalities and to understand what motivates our colleagues, team members and even our family and friends. In their extensive research they have identified what they term the five voices: nurturers, who are the champions of people and work to take care of everyone around them; creatives, who are passionate about innovation and future ideas; guardians, who are hard-wired to preserve and protect; connectors, the masters of relationship building and strategic alliances; and pioneers, who are expert at aligning people with resources to win and achieve the desired objective.
The authors are keen not to position this book as yet another personality test, but it does guide you through a process to identify your dominant voice, which they call our "foundational voice". They also map out what they term as a codebook to help us understand and relate to the voices of those around us.
The authors claim the five voices are useful for anyone who seeks a competitive advantage as a leader. Perhaps they are right, as let’s face it,if we do not understand each other’s voices then there will always be misunderstandings.
Despite being excessively text heavy and lacking in visual aids, this is a book worth persevering with if you are seeking to understand your own voice and have a desire to communicate and connect more effectively with all the other voices around you.
It can also be a useful team-building exercise, as you seek to help your team not only understand your voice, but also their own communication preferences.
John Joe McGinley is principal of Glassagh Consulting
