Words You Use Can Change Your Bottom Line
Asking someone “How was your day” vs asking “What was the best part of your day” will usually get you two very different answers. The usual response to how was your day is at best “fine.” When you ask what was the best part of your day it forces a person to think through and tell you the high part of their day and it elicits different emotions. This sounds great and you might be thinking like I did “Positivitiy is great but how does it help the business other than it’s a nicer place to work?” Being a nice place to work has it’s benefits from reducing turn over to higher engagement of employees. Aside from that there is some research that shows the amount of positive comments to negative comments can affect sales performance directly.
The Role of Positivity and Connectivity in the Performance of Business Teams: A Nonlinear Dynamics Model by Marcial Losada and Emily Heaphy published in American Behavioral Scientist 2004; 47; 740 goes into how positivity influences the bottom line of a business. In this study they took 60 sales teams of an IT sales organization and the company ranked them as high performing, average performing, and low performing teams. For six months they recorded and encoded every group conversation the teams had. They controlled for experience, talent, personnel and a whole host of other items. What they found was that the controlling factor was the ratio of positive comments to negative comments.
High performing teams had a ratio from 3:1 to 9:1
Average performing teams had a ratio of 2:1
Low performing teams had a ratio of 1:3
The conclusion was that the worse the ratio the more of a stress response which dropped the performance of the team. What is the positive to negative ratio for your teams?
If you want to learn more about how to increase the positive to negative ratio in your teams conversations and how to implement it apply for a discovery call now and we can do a deep dive discovery of your situation at no cost if you qualify.