The top 10 things to remember when communicating

now moved to my new website 

Alison Smith

The Purchasing Coach
Unlocking Procurement Potential Using Unconventional Tools.

alison@alisonsmith.eu +44(0)7770 538159

A selection of postcards written to procurement from your soft skills have been brought together in the Purchasing Coach Soft Skills Toolkit. You can find more about buying the Toolkit here - for personal use (at a cost of only £4.99) or organisationally (cost on request).

The aim of the postcards is to bring soft skills development out of your subconscious, and into your conscious awareness. Doing that enables you to start an exploration about what the soft skill is all about, what the benefits might be if used effectively, what your level of competency is with respect to that skill, what good and not so good looks like, and how you might develop the skill further.

Other postcards shared on this blog have covered an introduction, change management, emotions, confidence and there's also a post on how to use the postcards to develop your soft skills (on your own or in groups).

A toolkit entitled Dear Human, with love from your Soft skills has also been developed, and is available for non Procurement professionals wanting to develop their soft skills.

© Alison Smith 2017

Dear Procurement, with love from Confidence

POSTCARD

Dear Procurement,

We were thinking about the postcard that emotions sent you earlier in the week, and were wondering whether many people would even consider their emotions to be a soft skill. Perhaps they're not in the truest sense of the definition.

What emotions do have though is a huge impact on the outcome of your behaviours. You can be an expert at doing something, but if fear, sadness or anger take hold, your ability to use those expert skills may just go out of the window.

Confidence may not strictly be a single emotion either, more an amalgamation of a number of emotions, but we're certainly something that if you don't manage well can significantly impact the outcome you achieve.

We'd love to help you achieve your goals, and yet we're often taken for granted or ignored. There's so much you could do to access us more often, and yet you act as if you have no control over our appearance or disappearance.

We've sent a picture of tree roots because they remind us that when you're grounded in the moment (some might say the NOW), and authentically yourself (with no 'shoulds' 'oughts' or 'musts') you are confident.

What can you do every day to ensure the relationship between us supports your goals, rather than prohibits success being a reality?

With love from your Confidence


Other posts using the theme of postcards written to procurement from their soft skills have covered an introduction, change management, emotions and a post on how to use the postcards to develop your soft skills (on your own or in groups).

A selection of postcards from others of your soft skills have been brought together into the Purchasing Coach Soft Skills Toolkit. You can find more about buying the Toolkit here - for personal use (at a cost of only £4.99) or organisationally (cost on request).

A toolkit entitled Dear Human, with love from your Soft skills has also been developed, and is available for non Procurement professionals wanting to develop their soft skills.

Alison Smith

The Purchasing Coach
Unlocking Procurement Potential Using Unconventional Tools.

alison@alisonsmith.eu +44(0)7770 538159

© Alison Smith 2017

How to use one of the Soft Skills Postcards

"How do we use the Soft Skills postcards?" was one question arising from a discussion about the newly launched Purchasing Coach Soft Skills Toolkit.

The toolkit contains a series of postcards written to Procurement from a selection of Soft Skills - there's been a couple of blogs to give you a flavour so far - one on Change Management and one on Emotions.

As with any of the unconventional tools I use in my coaching or training there's always a positive intention behind using them. ALWAYS.

In this instance the postcards have been written with the aim of starting a conversation about Soft Skills - what are they? what do they help you achieve? what are the implications of not using a Soft Skill well or at all? how is your relationship with them currently helping or hindering you? what does good look like? what about not so good? what steps might you want to take to develop a particular Soft Skill more fully? when will you take those steps? how will you check the outcome or impact of those actions? and so on.

The postcards just provide these discussions with a different perspective or two.

Let's consider the postcard sent to Procurement from Change Management:

POSTCARD

Dear Procurement,

In preparation for the launch of the Hays Procurement Salary Guide and Insights 2017 we were looking at the insights from 2016. Unfortunately I'm not sure it was such a good idea, as we ended up being very upset to see that only 46% of those participating thought Change Management was an important skill, where as 80% thought Communication and Soft Skills were.

Ignoring the semantics of whether Change Management is a soft skill, we're a little puzzled by the outcome. To that end, we've invited Problem Resolution and Creativity over for a meal during the week to help explore what we could be doing differently to raise awareness of how much of what Procurement does involves Change Management.

If you're putting in place a new system, a new process or wanting a wider set of KPIs we're involved. If you're changing suppliers we're involved both internally and externally. If you're developing sourcing, category or relationship strategies were involved. We're also involved if you're wanting to implement or roll out a new contract. In short there's very little of what you do that doesn't include us.

We agree Communication and Influencing skills are great, but how you use them is informed by what you're wanting to do, and if that involves change then there's other factors at play that you need to be aware of before you can decide on a communication or influencing strategy.

It would seem we need to adopt some of our own models to help you change your views about what we're saying. We may need to go back and review the different words we use to depict change.

We look forward to making the journey with you, so that together we can truly transform organisational Procurement.  

With Love from Change Management 

The aim of the Postcard is to provide some food for thought about your relationship with Change Management.

Questions you may want to consider or, if you're working in a group, might discuss or explore include:

• What is change management? 
• What other words are used instead of change management? 
• Does the choice of word have an impact on the recipient of the words? is that impact positive or negative?
• What are the different models of change management? When would you use them? 
• What procurement activity does change management apply to? What activities would it not apply to?
• What are the implications or ignoring change management?
• What elements of change management do you need to consider before developing a communication or influencing strategy?
• What will you do to develop this skill further? 

Hopefully this example has given you a sense of just how useful these postcards could be as personal or team prompts to develop soft skills within your organisation.

Always happy to help with coaching, training, facilitation or development of a (conventional or unconventional) soft skills programme.

Alison Smith
The Purchasing Coach
Unlocking Procurement Potential Using Unconventional Tools.

alison@alisonsmith.eu +44(0)7770 538159

How to buy, and more about the Purchasing Soft Skills Toolkit here.

© Alison Smith 2017