The Process Communication Model (PCM) was developed by Dr. Taibi Kahler and Judy and Joe Pauley have been teaching and implementing this model for over twenty years. Their website for more information is Kahler Communication. The Six Personality Types of the Process Communication Model identified by Dr. Kahler are; Reactor, Workaholic, Persister, Dreamer, Rebel, and Promoter
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Related Podcast: Seizing the Competitive Advantage thru Communication
Transcription of the Podcast
Joseph Dager: Welcome everyone; this is Joe Dager, the host of the Business 901 Podcast. With me, today is Dr. Judith Ann Pauley who has more than 50 years of successful management and leadership experience as a research chemist, a university and high school chemistry and physics teacher, department chair, and a corporate CEO. She has served on the executive board and as president of many scientific and nonprofit organizations. Alongside her is Joseph Pauley, he has been a manager and an executive in several government agencies and in nonprofit and for-profit organizations. He has used quality tools—especially PDSA. He received several commendations for successfully implementing the concepts of total quality management and motivating people in other cultures.
They will be fellow presenters at the upcoming ASQ Annual Service Conference in Las Vegas this October, and their presentation will be on Seizing the Competitive Advantage.
I’d like to welcome the both of you and could you fill in some holes in that introduction and maybe introduce your presentation to me.
Dr. Judith Ann Pauley: Well good morning; I assume it’s morning there because we talk all over the world. This is Judy Pauley.
Joseph Pauley: This is Joe Pauley, and we’re very happy to be talking to you and to all of your listeners.
Judy: We will be presenting at the service conference on something called Process Communications, which is how to build connections with individuals, how to speak their language, so they hear what you’re saying, how to continue those relationships, how to motivate people to do what you would like them to do and help them succeed, help keep them in a good place and if they are in distress, how to invite them out of distress frequently with one sentence and that in a nutshell is what Process Communication is all about.
Joseph P.: What happens when you do all of that is client satisfaction improves, staff productivity improves and the bottom line is profitability increases.
Joe D.: Can you tie that back to Seizing the Competitive Advantage or what competitive advantage you realize from something like that?
Judy: Well for one thing, if you have a relationship with your clients that they enjoy, that they find useful, that is helpful to them, that is an advantage, but we are competitors.
Joseph P.: And if you’re able to increase their profitability as well as maintaining cordial relations, people to business with friends and that gives you a competitive advantage in retaining customers, retaining clients and improving your own profitability.
Joe D.: When I looked at your presentation, it seemed centered on healthcare. Is it more than that? Is it limited to healthcare and how does this tie into healthcare?
Judy: Okay, and you are absolutely right, it is more than healthcare. It is useful for any two people that need to talk to each other. We’re talking not just healthcare, in any industry, in education, we have done much for the government, in fact, we have a national reputation for, excellent international reputation, in education, for keeping kids in school, dropout prevention. Clemson University named us their people of the year in dropout prevention based on what our teachers that we have trained are doing in the classroom and keeping kids in school, so there’s one aspect. When we do our seminars, the first thing that individuals do is go home and use it with their families especially, usually with their kids who might be driving them crazy!
Joseph P.: When we first started we were doing training for Fortune 500 companies as well as for smaller companies and mid-size companies, and we started doing education and then healthcare and it works across the board, in all areas as Judy said, and we now have a very eclectic mix of clients, we’re really the people side of quality.
Judy: And we’re Lean Communications, we show you exactly what one needs to do for crisp, clear communication with individuals and usually when people learn it they say “yes, that works, why I didn’t know this before?”
Joe D: Most of your work, I think, is based on the concepts of Dr. Taibi Kahler’s in his Process Communication Model® and could you tell me what that is and what that incorporates?
Joseph P.: The process stands on two legs, the first is everyone is one of the six basic personality types, and the second is how we say something is more important than what we say – we assume that what we say is important whether or not people hear us depends on how we say it, but it goes beyond that, as Judy mentioned earlier, what it really is is individualizing communication, individualizing motivation, keeping people out of distress by doing that and if they’re in distress because of something that has happened to them someplace else – how to get them out of distress so that they will be happier, healthier and more productive.
Judy: We first heard about this when Joe was working for the government, was interested in communication, cross-cultural communication, and he contacted Dr. Kahler to find out what he was all about, and he told us he had been working with NASA, in fact,he had been invited to sit in on the 1978 astronaut selection interviews, where they selected the astronauts and from that we have been working with NASA ever since.
Joe D.: So this communication model is a structured approach, basically, to improve communication throughout the organization and even from externally to the organization too.
Joseph P.: Absolutely, as a matter of fact that’s what we’re all about, and that’s how we retain clients. That’s how we help people improve their profitability or the effectiveness of an organization.
Judy: Your comment about our presentation on healthcare, we have done a lot in healthcare. In fact, we’ve been able to make significant improvements in patient satisfaction, patient safety, staff morale and staff productivity in several of the medical facilities that we have trained. In one instance, patient satisfaction was in the low 72% and they brought us down to train the whole staff, and by the time we had finished, they had set a goal of 85% patient satisfaction, and by the time we had finished they had gone above that, so they set a goal of 90%, and this is a military facility and some had been deployed, so we went back to train the new ones and it went up to almost 95% and then we back again sometime later and trained others that were new and they were the first facility to break the 95% patient satisfaction barrier. They are now above that by using these concepts with the patients, with each other, the productivity increased despite the fact that the staff was being reduced.
Joe D.: Communication is so important, but I think it’s very difficult to learn because you’re doing it on the fly and all these steps you learn, how do you practice them and how do you make them worthwhile? Am I asking the right question?
Joseph P.: No, actually that’s a really good question. The answer is that, in every one of our seminars, we have practical exercises so that they also get information; they get to practice using the concepts under supervision with each other. Then, we have additional exercises where we place them in a situation that they encounter in their own organization, and they all go away going “wow, I can do this” and you’re right it takes time. However, as the former Acting Surgeon General of the Army said, “we start with one person at a time and solve problems and then move on to use the concepts with others.”
Joe D: How does that tie into PDSA?
Joseph P.: Well first of all you plan a strategy, one of the things we give them in the seminars is a form whereby they can analyze the person, plan the strategy to use with them, plan their communication, plan their motivation and when with a clue as to what the person is going to do in distress so that they already have it worked out. One CEO of a company said that he had on his desk the plan for each of the members of his staff, on his senior staff, and he refers to it every day, and he valued that more than any other document that he had on his desk, and he took his company from $85 million to $100 million in one year and gave us credit for it.
Joe D.: You are one of the top-rated presenters at ASQ. Can you tie all this back to quality? Can we rate conversations by the quality of them?
Judy: When we want people to hear what we have to say it certainly helps to speak to them in the way they prefer to be spoken to, and that’s the bottom line. Knowing what each personality type is, knowing what the personality type of the person you’re communicating with is, and using their favorite “language.” If everybody speaks English, there are six different versions of English and six different ways of communicating the same thoughts and ideas. We talk about how we perceive the world through thoughts; others perceive the world through their opinions, others perceive the world through their feelings, others perceive the world through reflection, others through reaction their likes and dislikes about things and others through action. Those are the basis of the six different personality types, and we have all six in us but some of them are more developed than others and those are the ones we respond to most readily.
Joe D: I’m a sales and marketing guy so when I look at it, I think this has some great value to a salesperson. What I just took from what you said is that I should be really trying to understand how that person communicates before I start trying to communicate. How they look at the world and how best to reach or communicate with them.
Joseph P.: That’s a great observation; you’re absolutely right that is what it’s all about. As a matter of fact, we have a sales course where people get to practice individualizing their approach based on the person that they are interacting with, and each of those six types that we mentioned buys for a different reason. We give the salespeople knowledge of what that motivation is going to be before they ever go in so that they can plan their approach, make the approach; you asked about PDSA, study the results and analyze them and then make any changes that they have to make to be successful, and we do the same for managers, for leaders for everyone who has to talk to another person.
Joe D: Do you have any books on this? I can’t wait for the presentation, okay.
Judy: Actually we have written four books; the last two were published by ASQ, the third one we wrote was on leadership; Communication: The Key to Effective Leadership and the fourth one was on healthcare and that documents all of the improvements in healthcare that we have been able to show from the trainings that we have done and that our colleagues have done in the different healthcare industries.
Joseph P.: The first two books were for educators; there are links to the publishers of all four books on our website.
Joe D.: What’s interesting to me is how you have migrated to healthcare from this?
Joseph P.: Actually that’s another great question, you ask great questions; an army nurse attended one of our seminars just before she went to take over a dysfunctional department in an army hospital, and she was so impressed by it, and as a matter of fact she used it and subsequently took us to every command that she held, and she became the acting surgeon general of the army and she wrote a forward for the leadership book that ASQ published in which she describes that and gives us credit for her ascension, gives the concepts credit for her ascension. That started us in healthcare, and word of mouth advertising has carried it over, and I don’t know if you’ve seen the July 2012 issue of consumer reports, but they ranked, I’ve forgotten the numbers now, 15, 1600 hospitals nationwide and not one got the highest grade in communication; communication is a major problem in healthcare and, so we have continued to do a lot of work in healthcare, but also in all the other areas too.
Joe D.: Your presentation is Monday at ASQ, at the service conference, is Monday morning, I think it just about starts out the week, doesn’t it?
Judy: I believe it does
Joe D.: So if you communicate really well, the rest of the week we can put it into practice.
Judy: Yes, sometimes we have done tutorials, the last two times we have but we did not do it this year but usually we do one day tutorial frequently following the conference and people will then get a little bit more and a little more practice and a better understanding of the concepts and be able to use them.
Joe D.: I’m going to recommend to ASQ that they put it before the conference; I think it’s a great idea.
Joseph P.: Well the reason we ask for it at the end of the conference is that people who attend the one hour presentation sign up to take the workshop at the end.
Joe D.: Is there something that I did not ask that you would like to add?
Joseph P.: If they’re going to the conference, we invite them to our session. If they would like more information, they can go to our website www.kahlercom.com. Also, we are the editors of the Journal of Process Communications for the International Process community, and the inaugural issue of the journal is currently on our website with half a dozen very interesting papers.
Joe D.: Could you spell the website?
Judy: www. kahlercom.com, kahlercom.com
Joe D.: Well I would like to thank the both of you very much, I appreciate it, and I can’t wait to attend your presentation and meet the both of you in Las Vegas, and so again I would like to thank you.
Joseph P.: Thank you, we’re looking forward to seeing you in Las Vegas and attending your session as well, it sounds fascinating.
Judy: Thanks a lot Joe
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