Discovering Traummunication™ and Behavioral Traits

A Strategy to Being More Productive as a Leader and Creating More Engagement with Your Team.  

Traummunication is our proprietary system and results-based methodology around effective communication and how to both “meet people where they are”, and foster increased engagement at the same time. Its core characteristics blend with the Harrison Assessment® in a powerful and influential way.  

My business partner, Michael L. Stahl, is a master trainer with this behavioral traits profile and has done more than 1,000 individual debriefs around the world. Together, we have seen some remarkable breakthroughs in human performance, communications, team effectiveness, and leadership productivity. It allows you to customize a development program that will improve your organizational team’s performance and get the results you want, when you want them. 

While there are twelve sets of “paradoxical traits” in the instrument, this will be a three-part series that looks at a few of the paradoxes on a deeper level each month. Let’s explore the “communication” paradox. We will examine how this can influence every aspect of your team interaction and Traummunication™ across diverse contexts.  

When working with one of our clients, we met a gentleman who was a VP-level leader and had been with his company for more than 30 years. He was successful, well-liked, and charismatic, and yet, we found that people had been giving him a “pass” in many communication situations.  

Let me explain… 

In the communication quadrant, he was extremely high on frankness and yet quite low on diplomacy. So, as you can imagine, he certainly let people know what he thought and why he felt that way. While there was nothing wrong with that from an honesty standpoint, his low diplomacy made him come off as incredibly blunt.  

In short, in many situations with people who did not know him well, people simply felt like they were being metaphorically bludgeoned with his words. Words communicated with honesty and without tact can have the unintended consequence of people wanting to “push back” instead of being committed to engaging in constructive dialogue regarding the words.  

In essence, blunt communication lacks traummunication. Leaders, and everyone on a team for that matter, should aspire to communicate with a balance of frankness and diplomacy. We call this being a “forthright diplomat”. 

So why on earth did the people around this leader give him a “pass” when it came to him coming across as blunt and lacking any level of tact? People would say things like, “Oh that’s just the way he is. He doesn’t mean anything by it.”  

Why would people he had worked with for years not push back on his bluntness? 

Well, it had nothing to do with his position, I can assure you.  

In behavioral psychology, there is something called a “moderating trait’. This means that if a person has one of these traits that is high in their “psychological ecosystem”, it moderates the potential negative consequences of an imbalance in another area. 

The leader was a “10” in warmth and empathy, which moderated his bluntness with people who knew him well. They knew that, deep down, he really, genuinely cared about everyone and wanted the very best for the entire team. So even when he would communicate with such searing bluntness, in most cases with the people who knew him, they would not be offended.  

The challenge was when he communicated with vendors, customers, and partners who may not have known him as well. The bluntness came across as aggressiveness and was a detriment in many cases when working with other people outside of his core team.  

When we ran the Harrison with him and he found out about his extremely blunt nature (yes, believe it or not, he didn’t even realize it), he actually became emotional because he never purposely intended to offend anyone. He was deeply affected when he realized how his communication could have been a detriment to his relationships over the years.  

With coaching on how to balance his diplomacy with his frankness, he was able to learn how to become a forthright diplomat with everyone. This included people on his core team and those who did not know him well. Remarkably, he noticed that his ability to get things done and the overall results of his department improved significantly. It was amazing to him to see how people responded in such a positive way to his more balanced communication.  

He was not any less frank, yet his level of tact improved to such a level that people heard what he said and took the communication in a positive way. Meetings were easier, developing strategy became less laborious, and outside vendors became more like ‘partners in success”.  

Next month we will look at a real-life experience with a person who had high diplomacy with low frankness and how that affected performance. More importantly, we will delve into how to create a better balance from that perspective, which leads to improved business results.  

To learn more about the Harrison Assessment®️, please visit: https://www.situationaltraummunication.com/coaching