Karen’s career has taken her through various roles within the extractives industry, with a heavy focus on managing and executing projects involving the characterization and mitigation of environmental risks and opportunities. She offers strategic direction, consulting, training and implementation services in the realms of embedding sustainability goals and environmental assessment requirements into business operations, strategic plans, decision making processes, and project plans and execution.
Determining how to easily gain buy-in and adoption to change is one of those challenges frequently discussed. Why is it a challenge? Because it involves human interaction, and meandering through all the differing behaviors and responses that we find in these situations.
But this is why open communication—and plenty of it, offered in many forms—is really our best tool for the job (even more than trust, which I usually say comes first). It is something that is available to each and every one of us, and the nice thing is that trust is more easily earned with transparency and openness. Let me give a couple examples…
Whodunit?
Have you ever played one of those games where you need to solve some imagined crime or life-threatening situation before the buzzer goes off? One of those whodunits where the only way to solve it is by listening to each other and working closely together?
I had the opportunity to watch my daughter’s class sit in a large circle, each having been given one to two clues to help solve a mystery. It wasn’t even clear at the start whether a crime had been committed, but the mystery was to be pieced together.
I was amazed to see the positive communication skills this group developed—each taking turns, raising their hand when they could clearly hear a link to the clue they held in their hand. The story grew and
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Published at Wed, 02 May 2018 04:00:00 +0000
