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The OARS of Communication

Years ago I got involved in delivering a training course called Motivational Interviewing to staff who provide care and support to people with mental health support needs. Motivational Interviewing or MI as we like to call it is a type of directive counseling that is used to guide people toward changing unhelpful behaviors.

For example, if I’m supporting someone who is diabetic and the person indulges in diets that are totally at odds with their health condition then I might use MI to try and influence the person to change how they eat for the benefit of their health.

To be honest, I didn’t enjoy delivering MI training but I did learn something from the training which I’ve incorporated into my life, used successfully, and even included in some aspects of the management training I sometimes deliver.

MI has different aspects and one of those is the skills necessary to use MI successfully. The skills are captured with the OARS or SOAR acronym.

I prefer OARS so I will stick to that acronym. OARS refers to the specific communication skills you would use in an MI session and it stands for:

As you can see OARS is a collection of skills that can help us to communicate effectively and are great for having coaching conversations, performance conversations, and giving effective feedback.

And even more important is the fact that you can easily remember the acronym and what it stands for.

Let’s explore each component of OARS.

Open Questions

Open questions allow us to get more information from people, unlike closed questions where you get short direct responses from people.

If you ask someone:

“How are you today?”

You will get an answer like:

“I’m fine, I’m okay or I’m alright.”

But if you ask an open question like:

“Tell me about what you did today?”

You will get much more details from the person.

Here are some examples of open questions from MI sessions:

Compare the above questions with:

It’s clear that the first set of questions will yield much more information than the second set.

The advantage of open questions is that they provide the person answering them with more opportunities to speak about what is on their mind.

Closed questions don’t. If your goal is to get information out of your team members then open questions are much more useful.

Affirmation

Here is how affirmations are defined in the context of MI conversations:

I’m sure you can see how useful affirmations can be useful for a manager, especially in 1:1 meetings and when giving feedback.

Some examples from MI conversations will help us understand better how affirmations work:

And affirmations from a manager may look like this:

Affirmations are great when used after you’ve asked an open question and the person responds in a way you feel should be affirmed. So, when listening to team members, identify aspects of what they are saying that you can affirm.

Reflections

I’m sure you would have heard ‘Reflections’ spoken about as part of active listening. It’s even more important for MI. From an MI perspective, Bill Matulich describes Reflections as:

Pretty intense stuff right?

Thankfully, you don’t need to be that intense as a manager but the technique is great for communication nonetheless.

Here’s a sample conversation with reflections used by a manager:

From the example, you can see how Amber used both closed and open questions to get information from Tim. But she also used a reflection to confirm that she understood accurately what Tim said and an affirmation to validate what he said.

That’s the great thing about reflections. We can use them to verify what we heard the speaker say.

Summaries

The last component of OARS is ‘Summaries’. To be honest, summaries are the same as reflections but just longer. According to Bill Matulich,

A manager can use summaries to summarise what they heard a team member say during a 1:1 session. Here’s an example:

With the above statement, Amber has summarised what she’s been discussing with Tim. Some of the benefits of summaries in MI that can be transferred to management communication are that you can use them to:

Summaries are a great way to get feedback from someone. After summarising, if you pause to let the person speak, they will most likely tell you if you got it right or you missed something.

OARS is an acronym that I always have in mind when I am verbally communicating with people because it helps me ask better questions, listen actively through summarising, and reflecting and affirming what people say as a way of encouraging them.

I definitely believe OARS should be part of every frontline manager’s leadership toolkit.

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