How to Help Employees Speak Their Best

Here’s a difficult situation for you employers:

You have a perfectly good employee, adequate, even good in most ways, BUT, there’s something about the way they talk that is a problem: for you, for them, and for your customers.

What do you do? What should you do?

The first issue would be your ability and willingness to offer them some help.

Let’s say you are in a position to offer some speech therapy, voice coaching or communication consulting to them. You would consider this because of the investment you have already made in their training and because you sense that they would really benefit from this instruction.

The second issue has to do with how you broach the topic.

You are embarrassed because you think you are going to embarrass them, right? How do you tell someone that their speech is not good enough?

Here’s one way:

“ Pat, you are particularly good at managing your work flow and keeping reliable records. You show a good grasp of the marketing issues we have to consider. We’d like to see if we can’t bring up some of your communication skills to the same level of excellence as your other abilities. We think you would be good with more actual sales exposure. We’d like to invest in your professional development by supporting a two month program of Communication Development training.”

There. How does that feel?

I’d love to hear your reaction to this approach. Let me know if it has solved a problem for you.

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If you would like to help someone (family, friend or employee) work on their speaking skills, you might consider the gift of Dr. Fleming’s Holiday package: Speak Your Best!

Click here to learn more about Dr. Carol Fleming’s Gift Package, Speak Your Best!