The 5 Voices

How to Communicate Effectively with Everyone You Lead

Jeremie Kubicek, Steve Cockram, Steve Cockram

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781394369393, 9781119111092
• eBook ISBN: 9781119111115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Discover your leadership voice and unlock your potential to influence others

5 Voices is the code for unlocking your capacity to have honest conversations and build deeper, more authentic relationships with your teams, your families and your friends. In order to lead others effectively, we need a true understanding of ourselves, our natural tendencies and patterns of behavior. In learning what your leadership voice sounds like to others, you will discover what it feels like to be on the other side of your personality, as well as how to hear and value others' voices, namely the Pioneer, the Connector, the Creative, the Guardian, and the Nurturer. Once you understand your own leadership voice, you'll discover how best to communicate with each of the other voices, which will transform your communication at every level of relationship, both personal and professional. In mastering the 5 Voices of leadership, you will increase your emotional intelligence, allowing you to gain a competitive advantage as a leader. You will also be equipped with a simple, easy to remember vocabulary that, when shared, has a track record for decreasing the drama, misunderstanding and miscommunication in all spheres of influence.

Are you focused on relationships, values, and people? Or are you oriented more toward tradition, money, and resources? Do you know how others hear your voice? Do you appreciate the contributions of others on your team? This book will help you identify your natural leadership style, and give you a framework for leveraging your strengths.

• Find your foundational leadership voice
• Learn to hear and value the voices of others
• Know yourself before leading others
• Connect and communicate well with team, family and friends

All five leadership voices come with their own particular set of strengths, and all have areas for growth. Understanding both sides of the equation is the key to taking your leadership to the next level and is the secret to increasing your ability to influence your team, family and friends. 5 Voices is a simple key which unlocks complicated relational dynamics and improves the health and alignment of all your relationships.

Section 1
The Voices of a Team

1
The Voice Called Yours

For 29 years Sarah Churman could not hear. She is a wife and a mother, a friend and a daughter, and she was deaf. With an 85 bilateral decibel loss, she couldn't hear her daughter laugh or cry, the birds chirp, the door open, or her husband speak. Even more, she had never known what her own voice sounded like. Can you imagine what that must be like?

Some of our readers know this reality firsthand. According to the Hough Ear Institute, there are approximately 300 million people who suffer from a range of hearing impairment, from severe hearing loss to complete deafness. Millions of people like Sarah are not able to hear their own voice without the help of hearing aids or medicine.

Fortunately, Sarah Churman eventually received help, and with the benefit of technology, was able to experience the miracle of hearing her voice for the very first time in 2011. It is amazing to see her reaction. (Watch for yourself on YouTube/Sarah Churman and experience the emotions of hearing your voice after 29 years of silence.)

What we are attempting to help you do in this book is, in some ways, similar to what the professionals who helped Sarah did: We want to help you hear and understand your leadership voice, maybe for the first time. We want to help you discover the power of your voice, understand what it brings at its best, and what others really hear when you speak.

Your voice is a personal trademark. It is unique because no one has experienced life the way you have. We want to help you own your voice and communicate it with a renewed sense of confidence and self-awareness.

Hearing Your Voice for the First Time

For almost 20 years, Scott from Minnesota struggled with the gnawing feeling inside that he had nothing significant to contribute. To know Scott is to know that he is always full of ideas—ideas that could make everyone better. And yet, no one seemed to hear him or understand how his ideas could make work better for the people on his team.

Evening conversations with his wife Michelle consisted of replaying the day and hashing out the challenges he was facing, hoping to find a solution to one of his biggest questions: “How do I always find myself in the middle of two opposing opinions?” Scott was known as a kind and caring leader who could relate to others. He would share ideas with some of the leadership about how to make his teams work better, but most of the time no one would implement what seemed to him an obvious solution. He was talking, but his opinions and ideas were not being heard.

To anyone looking at Scott's life from the outside, he was the picture of a very successful salesman, rising to the top of each organization he worked for. But on the inside, something was missing. It never occurred to Scott that he had not trained his voice to be heard, and, on a deeper level, he didn't fully understand his own voice. Even more, Scott didn't understand the other voices on his team and was frustrated with his inability to bridge the gap in communication. This frustration would eventually turn to cynicism and then despair, as he began to question his own value to the team. Ultimately, the stress began to physically impact his health.

Does that sound like any of you? Anyone else feel like they are:

• Never having their ideas understood?
• Always fighting for or with people who are against the system?
• Looking at the future, while everyone else is stuck in the past?

Scott did not understand the type of leadership voice he had and what he, as a foundational voice Nurturer, could do to truly bring value to his team and family. (Note: as you will discover as you read further, we all have a foundational leadership voice that drives our actions and interactions with others. Nurturer is one of the 5 Voices.) Listen to how Scott describes finding his voice:

After hearing the 5 Voices for the first time, I realized that I had a [leadership] voice. For many years my voice had been silent. This affected my purpose, my marriage, my team, and my organization. As I became more self-aware, I began to find my voice again. It was a hard process of going through many walls of self-preservation. I had to revive it so it could be heard again. It has been a refining process for me. Little by little, I am becoming more and more alive to not only my voice, but also to truly understanding each of the leadership voices of those around me. Each voice needs to be heard. Part of my purpose now is helping others find their voice so they can be heard again.

Scott truly heard his voice for the first time. And our commitment to you is to help you hear yours, as well. Through the 5 Voices process you will gain an understanding of your voice, your role, and your influence in a completely new manner. We hope that reading this book will give you the opportunity to understand the way you were wired from the very beginning and that you will find this incredibly helpful in every aspect of your life.

The Other Side of Your Voice

Do you know what it is like to be on the other side of you in a group setting? Are you aware of your tendencies and how you process information and share it? How do others tend to hear you or respond to you?

Some of us have a low speaking voice, while others have a higher pitched voice. Some of us are loud, and others are naturally quieter. It is just the way we were born. The question is, what does it feel like to be on the other side of your voice? And do you understand the power of your voice for good or ill?

The way your actual voice works is amazing. Think about this for a moment: Your vocal chords, similar to a flute, shape the air that passes through them to become an understandable sound. Your brain connects to that sound to produce words that we all understand. Amazing. In the same way that we have a physical voice, we also have a personality or leadership voice that becomes our trademark role inside organizations, families, and friendships. Through years of research and testing, we have found that there are five foundational voices that shape the daily interactions of our lives. When each individual understands what his or her voice sounds like, then they have the chance to communicate more effectively and create environments where voices that are different from their own can be truly valued and heard.

The 5 Voices are the Pioneer, the Connector, the Guardian, the Creative, and the Nurturer. By the time you have finished this book you will know which is your foundational voice and have learned to truly appreciate the contribution each of the other voices brings. You will also understand how your history and life experiences (your “nurture”), as well as your life choices, have shaped the way your voice is heard by others.

Understanding the Code

Each of us has the ability to speak and understand all of the voices and yet, in our nature, there is always one preferred voice that is easiest for us to speak and understand. We call this our foundational voice. Some of the other voices come easily to us and are readily recognizable in the way we communicate. However, there are always one or two voices that are far harder for us to value and access. Knowing your voice order is crucial, and we will spend time later in this book assessing and understanding how to leverage and manage our voice and the voices of others.

The 5 Voices are a codebook that deciphers messages from others. Without the right cypher you will never be able to understand the intent of the original message. Our default is to interpret all communication through our own cypher (or foundational voice), which tends to be wrong a considerable amount of the time. Similarly, when we speak, we assume everyone has our codebook to interpret what we are trying to communicate. The 5 Voices, then, becomes the shared codebook that allows us to truly interpret and understand what others are trying to share, as well as to be understood ourselves.

Most relational drama and conflict comes from misunderstandings or miscommunication. When a group of people, be that in a home or workplace, is able to harness the power of the 5 Voices, tension, drama, and frustration will decrease. The 5 Voices are a common leadership language that will increase team alignment and synergy, meaning that everyone is able to relax and bring their best. You can observe how the process works in this story from Mani Joseph, a health care executive in Scotland:

The revelatory experience for me came in accepting who I was and how I had been wired—in many ways taking the time to really get to know myself so I could begin to lead myself, to lead others, and to lead my organization. The 5 Voices showed me the patterns and trends in my past behavior, which has made it easier to take time to plan future decisions, to understand what makes me tick, and to identify those voices I respond to best as well as those that I find challenging. Identifying as a foundational voice Connector with strong Pioneer/Creative gave me legitimacy and confidence to be myself and to work on more fully understanding the contributions of Nurturers and Guardians. I am leading with renewed confidence and the team is far better placed to tackle the challenges that lie ahead.

This is what we believe will take place with you, as we first focus on you and your personal leadership journey and then the others in your life. It is vital for you to first know and understand your own voice before you begin to speculate on what others' voices might be. We cannot give what we do not possess, so together let's commit to knowing our own voice and ourselves first. Once we have done that, we can confidently and competently help others discover their own voices, and then a world of opportunity is created.

Here's one more example of the transformational experience that is possible for you. It's a story from a leader in Romania who has been implementing the 5 Voices into the IT company where she works. Marina Uliniuc shares this:

I have to admit that the first time I interacted with the 5 Voices I was a bit suspicious; was this another box I was about to be put into? However, while some of the learning has been painful, I have learned to value those around me in a completely new way. My biggest aha was when I discovered that my tendency to ask critical questions was not always appreciated! I have started to work on my active listening, learning to draw out people's true feelings. The relational dynamics of our team have been hugely impacted by the 5 Voices; I now try to communicate enthusiasm and empathy, which I discovered they all love! This might seem common sense fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Section 1: The Voices of a Team
• Section 2: How to Interact with Each Voice
• Section 3: Building Powerful and Effective Teams
• Transformational Leadership Resources
• About GiANT Worldwide
• Speaking Inquiries for Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• End User License Agreement