Helping others to choose well in a business setting often involves education. But the education, for it to stick, has to be centered on the needs of the particular learner (i.e., client, customer, direct report, or manager).

The best teachers are never the ones looking for canned lesson plans borrowed quickly from a colleague or ripped off a website, and the same can be said for the best business people, who would never want to be accused of offering canned advice or guidance. Though teachers speak often about “not reinventing the wheel,” the best teachers never adopt an old wheel if it means that they have to give up their ability to make choices, in the moment, about the learners in front of them.

They are masters of human‐centered optionality, which is a fancy way of saying that they have methods for keeping their eyes on the learners in front of them and then choosing instructional options from a vast toolkit to bring each learner one step closer to the ultimate goals of the class itself. They do what their classes (and schools) promise to do, and they take great pride in that fact. It's a responsibility that comes with a great, internal reward when fulfilled.

They might stop a discussion that isn't going anywhere, or that seems to be alienating parts of the class, and ask students to silently journal and then pass their journals to the right. They might call for a debate…and then switch the sides at the last moment so that students have to drop their dug‐in viewpoints and adopt the other side. They might insist that students ask questions instead of making statements. They don't always know what they're going to do in advance – they're not overcommitted to any particular path.

What they're committed to, intensely, is the art of constant adjustment. They make constant adjustments, on behalf of the learners in their care, based on information from the environment, the class, and each student. This is why, when a good teacher is asked how she can teach the same book for a decade or longer, she'll often say, it's never the same book because it's never the same class.

Close the Communication Loop

Earlier, we talked about breaking into misunderstandings – the black box of the learner's mind. You also have to break into understandings, in part, because there's a lot going on inside human beings at any particular time.

This isn't just the case with young people. Though the adult brain may not be as pliable as the child's or teen's brain, it is pliable nonetheless. As all teacher's know, it's a nuanced and tricky environment within which to do business of any kind.

Mostly, when we tell people things in a business setting, we expect them to hear us, process and store the information appropriately, and then respond to or act on the information in a way that will please us and advance our conversation, process, project, and so on.

But researchers Eleanor Drago‐Severson and Jessica Blum‐DeStefano remind us that communication is neither convenient, nor easy, even if we want to fool ourselves – or are good at fooling ourselves – into believing it is so. We, the communicators, play a huge role in the extent to which our communication lands (Drago‐Severson & Blum‐DeStefano, 2016). The “me” on the receiving end of the communication needs to be “told” in a certain way for the message to be “heard” or received. The communicator, therefore, if he doesn't just want his message to skip off the surface of his audience, has to understand what's happening inside his audience.

We discussed this communication imperative with an expert on digital culture working for the Vatican at the time of this book's writing. He shared his perspectives as a former classroom teacher who had become responsible for communications and audiences at a truly global scale. He urged us – and others – to take responsibility not only for the transmission of messages, but also for the extent to which those messages were received. Good teaching, he would say, must be apparent in the students themselves. As such, good teaching can often be reduced to interacting with students in order to understand what they understood, offer correction if need be, and to continually assess what is working or not working in the teaching space. Communication is a cycle. A good teacher ensures that the cycle is complete.

Deliver Your Message

Adults see the world through a variety of lenses. As information comes to them, they are constantly evaluating it against certain priorities that live deep inside them, perhaps unknown to them. If you give adults feedback and don't take those shifting sands into account, you are wasting the feedback.

The same holds true if you're making choices for adults about how they will experience a process or transaction, how a service agent will interact with them, how you will greet them at the door, or how you will create the text‐based architecture that will process their communication (Drago‐Severson & Blum‐DeStefano, 2016). It helps to be at least a little bit of a constructivist, and therefore someone who recognizes that “people actively interpret – or construct – their experiences throughout their lives, and that these constructions largely dictate their realities” (p. 37).

Use the table in the following box to think about the people with whom you communicate most urgently. These are the people you most need to receive, process, and understand your communication; the people to whom you are seeking to demonstrate authenticity; the people whose understanding – of an issue, concept, solution, sale, initiative, or new skill – will help you to reach your own goals. As you identify their “meaning‐making” style, think about how you could shift your communication style in order to ensure that you are taking responsibility, in the words of our friend from the Vatican, “not just for what you're saying but much more for what the other person is understanding.”

Seek Full Enrollment

Some systems are set up to segment clients and customers and to solve problems following a one‐size‐fits‐most logic. Others are front‐loaded to treat clients and customers like learners entering a classroom with a caring and effective instructor who seeks to build understanding in students (i.e., clients and customers) early and often, to try to head off problems and misunderstandings before they derail ultimate understanding, and to create abundance.

This abundance fuels ongoing feedback, input, lasting engagement, productivity, joy, investment, and full enrollment. Your clients and customers keep showing up because they want to, not because they have to. They become fans, with all the loyalty that implies.

The quest for full enrollment can inform and guide how we organize our work, our teams, our families…to do the things we want to do. Yes, it can cost you something in terms of speed and efficiency. It can mean embracing the messy side of human interactions (i.e., being authentic) instead of lopping it off and pretending it doesn't exist. But let's not forget that efficiency and speed have their costs, too.

There are dozens of wonderful tech tools that leaders, sellers, service professionals, and trainers can use to inspire and guide their constituents. And it pays off to think with some specificity about your clients, colleagues, and customers as you're choosing the best ways to connect with them and to serve them. This example may be granular, but Steve still remembers the time he set up an auto‐scheduler and people on his teams literally walked into his office and laughed at him. He suffered through that head‐slap moment where he realized that he decided to use the auto‐scheduler to help himself rather than the people he was responsible for leading/serving.

Most of us can't control the trends. They're going to wash over us. What we can control is our reaction to them. What we can do as leaders (and service professionals and salespeople and trainers) is to help others adapt and react. We can be present for, and awake to, what teachers call “teachable moments,” which are moments that you didn't plan for but that arose naturally from being with your students, from the circumstances surrounding your classroom. Like good teachers, we can look for opportunities instead of just speed, abundance instead of (only or mostly) efficiencies. We need to remain conscious…staying ever‐vigilant with the relationships and transactions that matter most to the long‐term success of our organizations and initiatives.

Calibrate for the Familiar

One of the best things a teacher can do to set the stage for meaningful learning is to personalize as much as possible his or her exchanges with students. Personalization can happen when a teacher greets students by name as they enter the classroom, writes feedback that is genuine rather than generic, or even finds ways to record his or her voice when he or she has to hand off a class to a substitute.

In our estimation, based on years of observing classrooms and assessing learning, one simple reason for the effectiveness of the personalized approach is the simplest part of it: students thrive when they know that they are meeting the same caring adult each time they enter the classroom. They thrive when they feel that this adult knows them. They thrive when they recognize the voice, tone, mannerisms, and so on of the person trying to teach them. Familiarity, it turns out, lowers barriers to learning.

It's something you can't fake. It can only be built upon a certain level of trust, a certain level of showing that you have the best interests of the student in mind. It happens after small talk and big talk, after agreements and disagreements. It happens when a known entity interacts with other entities with whom he or she has taken the time to build a relationship.

Learning science might frame the above in terms of a mitigation of risk and threat, both of which are kryptonite to learning. Brain expert Eric Jensen puts it this way:

Threats [cause] the brain to trigger a sense of fear, mistrust, anxiety, or general helplessness. This state can be a result of physical harm or perceived danger (usually from teachers, parents, or peers), intellectual harm (usually from teachers, parents, or peers)…or emotional harm (embarrassment, humiliation, or isolation). (Jensen, 2008)

Once a student feels a threat, he or she loses all kinds of learning velcro. According to Jensen, students under threat have more difficulty using their brains for everything from picking up basic context clues in their environment to storing new information and then being able to access it when they need it. In short, threats reduce their ability to do both the simple and complex things that are necessary to thrive in an educational setting. It takes a caring teacher, one willing to connect meaningfully with each and every student in her care, to reduce threats that can derail learning (Jensen, 2008).

Throughout our interviews for this book, we noted a related and relevant trend in business right now: using video snippets to engage with others. For example, in sales, the easy thing to do in a follow‐up to a prospect is to send a link to a generic video created by your company's marketing team. The more authentic thing would be to create your own video to send the customer so as to maintain the familiarity established during your last meeting.

In leadership, when you can't do a one‐on‐one check‐in with every member of your team every week, you can send a quick, personalized video to him or her to preserve the continuity of touchpoints.

In training, it's easy to make one training video and then hope it will suit all learners. The more authentic thing to do would be to sacrifice polish for personalization, creating video content that demonstrates that you know your audience and the pain points in their learning.

In service, use the same move as a salesperson; that is, don't send a generic video when you can send something personalized as a follow‐up.

Whether in school or at work, we seek control of situations and connection with the entity on the other end of the lesson or transaction. As a result, if we're on that other end – the teachers, the sellers, the leaders – we can accomplish a great deal when we align interactions and transactions around a familiar voice. That familiarity leads to an important, often unacknowledged, result: moving customers and clients into an authentic learning mode as often as possible. If they are learning, chances are they are primed to be responsive, primed to adjust as necessary, primed to partner with you or others, primed to solve problems, primed to do their best work.