5 Voices (2016) is a handbook designed to help you communicate more effectively in your professional and personal life. To do this, leadership experts Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram argue, you need to get a handle on what type of communicator you are. These blinks outline five communicative strategies and provide a wealth of tips and tricks that’ll help you get your point across without getting in peoples’ faces.
Before becoming a bestselling author, Jeremie Kubicek was the CEO of Leadercast Conferences, a platform that helps leaders reach their full potential. His previous books include Making Your Leadership Come Alive (2011) and 5 Gears (2015).
Steve Cockram is the cofounder of GiANT Worldwide, a company specializing in leadership training for executives. He is also the coauthor of 5 Gears and a successful consultant.
© Jeremie Kubicek: 5 Voices copyright 2016, John Wiley & Sons Inc. Used by permission of John Wiley & Sons Inc. and shall not be made available to any unauthorized third parties.
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Start free trial5 Voices (2016) is a handbook designed to help you communicate more effectively in your professional and personal life. To do this, leadership experts Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram argue, you need to get a handle on what type of communicator you are. These blinks outline five communicative strategies and provide a wealth of tips and tricks that’ll help you get your point across without getting in peoples’ faces.
When it comes to communication, the authors identify five different “voices” we all use. We switch between them depending on the situations we find ourselves in, but most of us fall back on a single dominant voice – our primary means of self-expression. So what are these voices? Well, say you’re someone who values the input of others and emphasizes group harmony: your predominant voice is that of a nurturer.
Nurturers go out of their way to look out for those around them. They often put others’ needs ahead of their own and are most comfortable in environments where kindness and shared values come first. Nurturers are firmly anchored in the present: they want to take action now to ensure that relationships and the companies they work for flourish in the future. Nurturers also tend to believe that people are more important than profits.
A nurturing manager, for example, will put in extra hours to talk to employees and make sure that they’re happy with their work, feel motivated and have everything they need to do their jobs well. Outside work, a nurturer is the kind of person who’ll cancel his own plans to help a friend move into a new apartment.
That all sounds positive, right? It is, but nurturing types often run into a problem: they struggle to make themselves heard. This can have a big knock-on effect in organizations – after all, nurturers will keep their eyes on the wellbeing of people when everyone else is scrambling to meet targets. Without them, companies risk embracing a dog-eat-dog ethos that’s bound to undermine morale in the long run.
But because they’re modest by nature, nurturers often undervalue their own contributions and end up keeping their heads down rather than speaking up. And here’s a crazy thing: according to the authors’ calculations, around 43 percent of the population is made up of nurturers. That’s a huge number of people who aren’t having their concerns taken seriously! We’ll explore what can be done about this later on. But before that, let’s take a closer look at the second voice.