Throwing chairs, tossing zingers and misusing the English language are probably not the best tactics to ensure your message is heard
If you want people to hear what you have to say, give them something worth listening to.
Sounds simple, right? If that’s the case, why does effectively communicating a viewpoint seem to be such a lost art these days?
We are living in the age of Jerry Springer, the TV talk-show host who delights in chair-throwing, bleep-inducing confrontations between people who need serious sedation and anger-management training. Not surprisingly, this kind of in-your-face entertainment has spilled over to more “serious” news programs on formerly respectable networks.
Look at what’s happening. There’s the weird rant of Tom Cruise in a “Today” show interview (which really wasn’t news except that Cruise apparently invented a new meaning for the word “glib”). There’s the printed gripe session in my hometown newspaper in which the same five people seem to be bickering endlessly. There are town-hall meetings – both in the public arena and in company auditoriums all over America – in which the greatest applause is reserved for the person who tosses the best zinger. And now there are blogs, online journals where freedom of expression is pushed to the extreme (I can’t wait for the inevitable tests of this freedom in future court cases).
As someone who makes a living out of trying to help people communicate effectively, all of this is frequently disheartening. As the volume increases, it is more difficult to hear what people are really trying to say.
Listening to different viewpoints is fun. I learn a lot from hearing people talk about what is important to them. Businesses can learn and grow, too, by listening to employees, customers, suppliers and other important groups. But good information gets lost when it’s wrapped in anything that detracts from the message.
Here are some ways to make sure your message isn’t lost:
Know how to use the language. For some people, all the rules of grammar and spelling are enough to cause hyperventilation. (I feel the same way about math.) But let’s face it: communication depends on knowing how to use the tools correctly. If you’re writing a letter to the editor, committing a grammatical error like “your an idiot” will detract from your message. There is little excuse for poor grammar and misspelling in these days of dictionaries and computerized spell-check.
Don’t let pure emotion take over. It is OK to be emotional when speaking on a subject about which you feel strongly. But when emotion is so strong that it overpowers the message, your audience will remember the outburst and forget what brought it on.
Keep your message simple. Whether you are speaking or writing, the person on the other end will remember only so much. (Think about how much information overload you have in your own life.) Rather than drift off into a half-dozen tangents, stick to the central message you want your audience to remember.
Keep your sense of humor. Humor is a wonderful weapon for defusing tense situations. Use it carefully, however, and aim it mostly toward yourself. Be willing to recognize when someone else is attempting to use humor and don’t take yourself so seriously.
Kill them with kindness. You can attract more bees with honey than you can with vinegar. My career has included a fair amount of communicating strong opinions, but I learned long ago that you can be opinionated and kind at the same time.
Experts have defined engagement as a persistent state of work fulfillment. This fulfillment translates into enthusiasm and passion, higher than average levels of concentration and focus, and an irresistible boost of energy. Indeed, passion, focus, and energy are key components of engagement. Take away any of these factors and engagement suffers.
The potential positive impact of engagement on the organization’s bottom line is substantial. In 2002, the Journal of Applied Psychology released a meta-analysis of 7,939 business units in 36 companies that related engagement to improvements in customer satisfaction, productivity, profits, turnover, and safety records. More recently, a 2006 study in the Journal of Managerial Psychology connected engagement to employee satisfaction and commitment.
Moderation governs employees’ energy. Simply put, workers cannot feel exhausted and be engaged at the same time. Interestingly, the 2003 study “Recovery, Work Engagement, and Proactive Behaviour” in the Journal of Applied Psychology connected regular repose and engagement. Moderation reminds us that people need to recharge their batteries.
Manager represents empowerment. Employees seem more engaged when they have some decision-making power and a greater sense of control over their jobs.
Moon symbolizes learning. In general, people are more engaged when activities tax their energy and intellect. This factor feeds employees’ confidence and sense of accomplishment, adding meaning to the job.
Read about the other eight M’s in this article in Training & Development, Jan 2008
The challenge for business leaders, then, is making sure that all of their managers stay on track and on task. Here are 10 rules that can help.
1. If it’s not on the calendar, it won’t happen. Using a shared team calendar allows you to make deadlines clear, schedule in updates to monitor progress, and let your team know when you want to see them. Setting several dates in a row can help you to force the pace of progress.
2. Focus on the follow-through. Big programs are often broken into smaller, more manageable chunks, each run by separate team leaders. As the person with overall responsibility for delivery, it is essential to make sure that each of these project leaders is executing as required. Do not allow unresolved issues to drop, and to be prepared to offer feedback as necessary.
3. No project owner means no progress. A great idea is a fragile thing: even the best ideas die fast unless someone takes responsibility for putting them into action. This project owner should have the time, resources, autonomy and talent required to succeed.
4. Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. Few people enjoy the luxury of having all the time that they need to get things done; most of us spend our days constantly balancing priorities and choosing between options. The key to successful execution is choosing the important tasks – those which will have the biggest impact on whether or not you can achieve your objective – rather than the urgent tasks, which can often be left to wait. The other critical tool here is delegation: if you do not have to do a task personally, assign it to someone else.
5. Initiate: it gains time. Initiation means using your resources to get a project started, even if you do not have the time to get involved in it at that moment. This means that others in your team can get the ball rolling, for example by finding and analyzing relevant data, so that when you are free to get on board you do not need to waste time on any of this preliminary work.
Read all 10 at the Jakarta Post
Even the most eloquent of public and private speakers could always stand to tweak their communication skills just a little bit. After all, the ability to convey feelings and facts stands as essential to keeping the human species rolling along. Both the Internet and bookshelves sport advice a-go-go on how to get points across as clearly as possible, and the venerable open source lecture series TED does not disappoint in this regard. Its best offerings regarding human connectivity encourage essentials not always discussed in manuals and textbooks, so give them some consideration and use them to launch more exploration into how to grow into an effective, evocative communicator.
Elizabeth Lesser: Take “the Other” to lunch:
If communications with people on opposite sides of political, cultural, religious and other common divides so often proves extremely problematic, try Elizabeth Lesser’s simple-but-effective approach. Rather than arguing, go out for a nice lunch and analyze similarities and gently debate departures to nurture a greater understanding.
Julia Bacha: Pay attention to nonviolence:
Global and personal perspectives alike can benefit from sharpening those reframing skills, as this provocative TED Talk on international relations attests. Julia Bacha encourages listeners to look at stories from multiple angles, using peaceful Palestinian protests that never make the evening news as an example of how things aren’t always as they appear.
Nancy Duarte: The secret structure of great talks:
Presentation expert Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte Design, analyzed hundreds of the world’s most powerful and potent speeches and noted that they tend to sport eerily similar structures. For anyone who hopes to communicate major ideas in a persuasive manner — either to a crowd or to whomever happens to be within shouting distance of the La-Z-Boy — such an observation might prove a particularly valuable advice nugget.
the attack was meant as a show of support for the Occupy Wall Street movement
Video has become an essential marketing tool. It’s a great way to tell your story, show the human side of your business and communicate highly complex ideas in an easy to digest manner. But while video has the power to deeply engage, it also has the power to bore the viewer to tears—and creating compelling video is different than writing, say, a compelling blog post.
Starting a camera and spouting out a thousand words of brilliant prose does not make a compelling video. There are proven techniques and tools that can help make your videos engage, hold attention and wow the viewer. Here are 10 tools that can help you get started.
1. Prezi. This is a interesting take on the slide presentation as it allows you to create one giant and more easily connected idea and then use the tool to zoom, pan and fly all around the presentation to create a really dynamic feel. It’s not the easiest tool to master, but check out some of the incredible examples on the site to get inspiration.
2. YouTube Editor. I like this tool because it’s free, and because you’re using YouTube to host and stream your videos anyway, it gives you some nice editing capability right in YouTube. You can also add annotations and transcripts to your videos making them more SEO friendly.
3. Camtasia. This PC and Mac desktop software is the market leader in the screencapture video world. Screencast videos are a great way to demonstrate how something online works. Camtasia has some nice features that allow you to add focus to areas on your screen as well as annotations and URLs.
As anyone who has crammed for an exam can tell you, usually the number of hours we work without interruption is inversely proportionate to how much we accomplish. So how do these entrepreneurs manage to work so many hours without suffering from brain fatigue?
Well, first of all, it is because they truly love being an entrepreneur and are passionate about their enterprise. But, I believe, part of the answer is that they wear so many hats. They never get stuck doing the same kind of work for too long.
Here are some more brain-based tips that can work wonders and could be what helps propel entrepreneurs forward:
1. Buy a good office chair, or get a standing desk.
Focal Upright Furniture has a brand-new chair-and-desk combination on the market. Invented by Martin Keen, of Keen shoes fame, it uses a position between sitting and standing, and allows lots of movement as you work. It also helps those who use it remain attentive.
2. Do not multitask.
John Medina, author of Brain Rules, tells us the brain cannot multitask, period. What it does do is switch back and forth between tasks very quickly. Someone whose attention is interrupted not only takes 50% longer to accomplish a task but also makes up to 50% more errors. A study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that people who talk on the cell phone while driving are four times more likely to have an accident, because it isn’t possible to devote your full attention to both driving and talking at the same time. Hands-free calling offered no advantage. What’s the lesson to take away? Focus on one task at a time, and you’ll accomplish each better and faster–without killing anybody.
3. Use all your senses.
Work is more entertaining for your brain–and therefore makes you more alert–when you engage as many of your senses as possible. Use colored paper and pens. Experiment with peppermint, lemon, or cinnamon aromatherapy. Try playing background music.
4. Don’t make too many decisions in one day.
It sounds farfetched, but if you go shopping in the morning, then negotiate yourself out of eating a cookie at lunch, and finally try to decide between two job offers that afternoon, you might choose the wrong job because you didn’t eat the cookie, according to Scientific American. Making choices depletes your reserves of executive function, or “the mental system involved in abstract thinking, planning, and focusing on one thing instead of another.” This can adversely affect decisions you make later.
5. Take a quick break every 20 minutes.
A study in the journal Cognition reveals that people can maintain their focus or “vigilance” much longer when their brains are given something else to think about every 20 minutes. That’s the time when thinking becomes less efficient. This trick is called momentary deactivation. If your mind isn’t as sharp after a long period of work, it may not be completely fatigued. It just needs to focus on something else to refresh the specific neural network you’ve been using.
6. Work with your own circadian rhythms.
Are you an early bird or a night owl? Do you fade every afternoon, or is that when you are strongest? Don’t schedule an important meeting at a time when you will be operating on one cylinder. And don’t waste your peak work time at a doctor’s appointment.
7. Relax for 10 minutes every 90 minutes.
When you’re awake, your brain cycles from higher alertness (busy beta waves) to lower alertness (alpha waves) every 90 minutes. At that point, you become less able to focus, think clearly, or see the big picture. You know the signals: You feel restless, hungry, and sleepy, and reach for a coffee. Herbert Benson of Harvard, author of The Relaxation Response, recommends working to the point where you stop feeling productive and start feeling stressed. At that moment, disengage. Meditate, do a relaxation exercise, pet a furry animal, go for a quick jog, take a hot shower, pick up your knitting, practice the piano, or look at paintings. Allowing your brain to go into a state of relaxation, daydreaming, and meditating will reset your alertness.
Read full article via Inc.
Sometimes it’s darkest just before the light. Here are 11 great articles to assess the times we’re in, and plan for better days.
Five C’s for Communicating in this Crunch
We’ve developed a gut-check list of “Five C’s” to help guide communications on dire economic subjects, from news releases to corporate Web sites to internal communications.
10 Tips for a Challenging Economic Environment
9. Communicate authentically. Strong leaders acknowledge the challenges they struggle with and, by doing so, build trust among followers. Rather than being a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength.
Marketing and PR tactics, budgets likely to change during recession
What companies don’t realize is their marketing budget will go a lot further and create much more buzz in a down market. As your competition pulls back, you should become much more aggressive. When you do, you will achieve top-of-mind status and grab market share as the economy stabilizes and will be able to remain on top during the next upswing in the economy.
Are You a Media Savvy Leader? How Agency Heads Can Boost Results in a Tight Economy
I think the inability of the PR business to really comprehend what Web 2.0 is about is shocking. So, real leaders get in there and they take a look at the trends in media and online and get active there. For example, if you’re going to offer a CEO blog, you have to be prepared to spend an hour a day doing it—not every other day. Also important is understanding and respecting the online world’s mindset of sharing—it’s all about developing conversations with constituents.
Your website can thrive in a recession
It is 14 times cheaper to allow a customer to complete a task on a website than to have the customer complete the same task over the phone. The Web is 35 times cheaper for completing such a task than a face-to-face interaction. Isn’t that a compelling business case for a website during a recession?
The range of possible futures confronting business is great. Companies that nurture flexibility, awareness, and resiliency are more likely to survive the crisis, and even to prosper.
Time to Reboot: What to Expect in Politics, Policy and PR in 2009
For those in consumer PR, this will be a tough year as product-side clients retrench. But if you are engaged in advocacy PR, public affairs or crisis communications, 2009 may be a robust year for your business, especially if you can hitch things to the “change” agenda in Washington and on Wall Street.
Social Media Begins Forcing the Totally Transparent Layoff
The combination of social media technology such as Twitter—where people post updates about themselves online at Twitter.com—and a cultural shift toward greater personal disclosure means more and more employees will document details of their dismissal, said Jennifer Benz, a communications consultant based in San Francisco.
Give Data a Human Touch to Weather the Economic Storm
The key, say many experts, is to use customer data and analytics for its original purpose: forging stronger customer relationships.
Market Smarter in 2009: Make the Right Choices
Remember two words: frequency, consistency. Even with finite resources, it’s vital to maintain a level of frequency and consistency. It is crucial to stay in front of your customers and prospects. You should never disappear for stretches at a time. If that means you need to focus marketing efforts on a few of your strongest market sectors, do it.
5 Lessons on Marketing for the Recession
Lesson: Keep hiring channels open and be pickier than ever. For anyone who hasn’t read Hard Times or any of the Studs Terkel interview compilations, they are an incredible insight into people’s attitudes and behaviors throughout history. I highly recommend
Question #1 – What is the employees’ perspective?
Front-line employees deal regularly with customers and observe first-hand the issues, challenges, and successes of those they serve. The IT department sees advances in technology before the rest of the organization has adapted to the last update. Professionals throughout the company attend association meetings and have access to experts in their field. Your organization has hired the best and the brightest – and your task is to tap their expertise, points of view, and concerns. The first question to ask is: “What do employees think?”
Question #2 – Did you “set the stage” for change?
The best time to discuss the forces of change is well in advance of an organization’s response to them. Everyone in the organization needs a realistic appreciation of the precursors of change and transformation – the impact of globalization, market fluctuations, technological innovations, societal and demographic changes in the customer base, new products/services of competitors, new government and regulatory decisions. And here technology can be a great asset. Although it certainly shouldn’t be the only medium, the intranet can be a timely vehicle for competitive and industry information.
Question #3 – How will you track employee perceptions?
Employee interaction and feedback loops help communicators track the level of workforce comprehension. Whether you supply an email box or a phone number for individuals to ask questions about the change, use online surveys to query a sampling of the workforce, or create Communication Advisory Teams to represent their fellow workers, the greatest advantages come when organizational feedback is gathered immediately after the delivery of an important message.
Question #4 – Do you have honest answers to tough questions?
Not only can employees tolerate honest disclosure, they are increasingly demanding it. And when it comes to change, employees want straight answers to these tough questions:
* Will I keep my job?
* How will pay and benefits be affected?
* How will this affect my opportunities for advancement?
* Will I have a new boss?
* What new skills will I need?
* What will be expected of me?
* How will I be trained/supported for the new challenges?
* How will I be measured?
* What are the rewards or consequences?
Question #5 – Can you answer the most important question: What’s in it for them?
There are personal advantages to be found in almost every change, but people may need help discovering what the advantages are. Sometimes employees just need to be guided through a few questions: What are your career goals? What are the skills you would like to learn? What job-related experiences would you like have? In what ways might this change help you to fulfill some of your personal objectives?
Organizations send two concurrent sets of messages about change. Formal communication is what companies “say” to employees about the organization and its goals. Informal communication is what the company “does” in terms of rewards, compensation, training, leadership behavior, organizational structure, etc. to demonstrate and support what it says. For today’s skeptical employee audiences, rhetoric without action quickly disintegrates into empty slogans and company propaganda.
Question #7- Who’s vision is it?
Effective communicators understand the power of vision to imbue people with a sense of purpose, direction and energy. But if the vision belongs only to top management, it will never be an effective force for transformation. In the end, people have to feel that the vision belongs to them. The power of a vision comes truly into play only when the employees themselves have had some part in its creation. So the communicator’s role moves from crafting executive speeches to facilitating interactive events.Question #8 – Can you paint the big-little picture?
Vision is the big picture, and it is crucial to the success of the enterprise. But along with the big picture, people also need the little picture so they know where their contribution fits into the corporate strategy. And here’s where first-line supervisors can be the most effective communicators. In face-to-face discussions with their team members, supervisors become a vital link in turning the organizational vision into practical and meaningful actions.
Question #9 – Are you emotionally literate?
People have to understand the rationale for change – the business case, the marketplace reality. But change is more than just the logic behind it. Large-scale organizational change almost invariably triggers the same sequence of emotional reactions — denial, negativity, a choice point, acceptance, and commitment. Communicators who track this emotional process design strategies that help people accept and move through the various stages.
Question #10 – Are you telling stories?
Good stories are more powerful than plain facts. This is not to reject the value in facts, of course, but simply to recognize their limits in influencing people. People make decisions based on what facts mean to them, not on the facts themselves. Stories give facts meaning. Stories resonate with adults in ways that can bring them back to a childlike open-mindedness – and make them less resistant to experimentation and change.
Question #11 – Do you know how change really gets communicated?
Town hall meetings in which senior leaders speak openly about change, great stories that embody the spirit of change, well-designed intranets filled with pertinent information about the forces and progress of change, interactive “transformation sessions” in which a cross-section of the organization co-creates a vision and develops the strategy, online employee surveys that query and monitor a work force as it deals with the nuances of change, icons and symbols and signage that visually reinforce change, and (especially) first-line supervisors who are trained and prepared to engage their direct reports in a dialogue about what change means to them – these are (and will remain) vital tools for communicators. But, as powerful as they are, these are formal communication channels operating within the organizational hierarchy. And a single informal channel, the company grapevine, can undermine them all.In the hallways, around the water cooler or coffee pot, over the telephone, as part of a blog, in rouge web sites, and through e-mail messages, news is exchanged and candid opinions are offered. It is during these “off-line” exchanges and daily conversations that people decide whether or not to support change. Want to dramatically improve the effectiveness of your change communication? Then find ways to identify, involve, and enlist your organization’s social networks and informal opinion leaders.
Question #12 – Are you positioning change as an event or a corporate mindset?
Clearly, there are basic ‘hygiene’ factors that companies need from their comms people: strong written/verbal skills; excellent conversational and presentation skills; an eye for design; awareness of communication technology trends and corresponding audience reach strategies.
However, a good PRO will always stand out on a number of more complex, intuitive and leadership levels and I would proffer the following attributes:
1) Acts as strategic and trusted advisor to the leadership team (including the CEO, CFO and commercial and functional heads); contributes with authority to strategic corporate discussion and works on his/her track record to be viewed as a contributing equal;
2) Through accumulated insight and marketplace persceptiveness, may be in a truly unique position within any organisation to ‘Bring the Outside World’ in to corporate thinking, ensuring sound future governance and guiding strategies that help protect any company’s future ‘Licence to Operate’ in the open, global marketplace;
3) Is an astute and credible diplomat, able to navigate elegantly through all layers and across all organisational silos to inform, to encourage collaborative thinking and to galvanise operational solutions to any issues or opportunities faced by a company in its public and employee dealings;
4) Intuitively understands and bridges the interdependency between internal and external reputation and has astute command of the theory and tools/practice of its delivery;
What attributes would you add to this list?
Don’t mess up these 25 most egregious grammar goofs, thanks to copyblogger and BlueGlass:
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INTEL
Always pause and think before posting. That said, reply to comments in a timely manner, when a response is appropriate. But if it gives you pause, pause. If you’re about to publish something that makes you even the slightest bit uncomfortable, don’t shrug it off and hit ‘send.’ Take a minute to review these guidelines and try to figure out what’s bothering you, then fix it. If you’re still unsure, you might want to discuss it with your manager or legal representative. Ultimately, what you publish is yours – as is the responsibility. So be sure.
Perception is reality. In online social networks, the lines between public and private, personal and professional are blurred. Just by identifying yourself as an Intel employee, you are creating perceptions about your expertise and about Intel by our shareholders, customers, and the general public-and perceptions about you by your colleagues and managers. Do us all proud. Be sure that all content associated with you is consistent with your work and with Intel’s values and professional standards.
It’s a conversation. Talk to your readers like you would talk to real people in professional situations. In other words, avoid overly pedantic or “composed” language. Don’t be afraid to bring in your own personality and say what’s on your mind. Consider content that’s open-ended and invites response. Encourage comments. You can also broaden the conversation by citing others who are blogging about the same topic and allowing your content to be shared or syndicated.
You alone can consciously take the personal leadership steps in strengthening and managing relationships, including those with a boss. The often used phrase for this is“managing upward.” While the phrase describes aspects of managing relationships with bosses, the dynamics are deeper.
From my personal experiences and observations, here are 16 ideas to consider in creating a stronger working relationship with your boss. (BTW, I alternated “he” and “she” as personal pronouns throughout the list.)
16 Ideas for Managing Upward
- Understand your boss as a teammate and a client because both roles are relevant.
- Ask and learn how your boss likes to communicate? Deliver communications that work for him, with the “right” amount & type of information.
- What are the strengths & weaknesses of your boss? Complement both of themin your working relationship.
- What’s her decision making style? Propose recommendations in ways that fit how she evaluates & decides on things.
- Hone your skills to anticipate what he needs and see things coming before they actually happen.
- Demonstrate complete trustworthiness. Display the highest integrity. Don’t break confidences; safeguard the “vault.”
- Be networked – know who knows things and be able to share relevant information your boss might not be privy to in her relationship circles.
- Have a great working relationship with your boss’ assistant and the other key people around him.
- Be a strong negotiator.
- Ask questions – help her think through issues and get to stronger points of view based on your contributions.
How should employees behave as company representatives on social media platforms?
- Transparency. Should employees acting as company agents identify themselves? Should they use their own names? Should they list their job title? Should there be specific rules that apply their use of photographs or avatars?
- Confidentiality. What information are employees allowed to disclose? Is this information already public? If not, does it require specific approvals? Who gives permission for release of non-public information? Is the information of competitive value?
- Financials. How should employees discuss corporate results or financial situation? This is particularly important for publically traded companies where regulatory agencies are involved.
- Copyright. How are intellectual property (aka IP) issues to be handled? What are the internal procedures? To whom should employees address their questions?
- Competitors. Since social media forums tend to be open to the public, how should employees treat competitors and their representatives? Are there specific procedures that they should follow?
You must decide – as an organization and as an individual team leader – what spirit you intend to convey with the participation of your employees in social media.
If your intention is for them to be simply mechanical amplification vehicles for a very carefully crafted marketing message, that can work. You’ll likely see some results in terms of absolute reach and volume of short-term message resonance. You will sacrifice a degree of credibility on behalf of your individual representatives and personality and genuineness on behalf of your brand in favor of a consistent, safe(-r) message. You will also likely sacrifice culturally, since your employees will realize they’re part of a marketing machine, not someone who is entrusted to help build and shape a brand.
If your intention is for employees to become individual voices for your organization and unique representatives of your company’s values, personality and diversity, that can work too. You’ll likely see results in terms of trust and affinity for your brand as well as better identification of your advocates, both internal and external. You will sacrifice a certain amount of stability and potential consistency of message in favor of communications that are more unique and individual. You’ll also sacrifice some predictability around outcomes and need to rely on strong education and culture initiatives to guide your teams and hone their own sense of good judgment.
The bottom line: governance and guidance is important. But it’s a means to more scalable social media, not the end.
We’ve said many times here — and will continue to — that social business transformation is far more cultural than it is operational. Getting your employees involved is no different, and your policies and guidelines need to consider not just what you don’t want to happen, but instead what values, vision and intent you want your teams’ social media participation to convey.
You must decide – as an organization and as an individual team leader – what spirit you intend to convey with the participation of your employees in social media.
If your intention is for them to be simply mechanical amplification vehicles for a very carefully crafted marketing message, that can work. You’ll likely see some results in terms of absolute reach and volume of short-term message resonance. You will sacrifice a degree of credibility on behalf of your individual representatives and personality and genuineness on behalf of your brand in favor of a consistent, safe(-r) message. You will also likely sacrifice culturally, since your employees will realize they’re part of a marketing machine, not someone who is entrusted to help build and shape a brand.
If your intention is for employees to become individual voices for your organization and unique representatives of your company’s values, personality and diversity, that can work too. You’ll likely see results in terms of trust and affinity for your brand as well as better identification of your advocates, both internal and external. You will sacrifice a certain amount of stability and potential consistency of message in favor of communications that are more unique and individual. You’ll also sacrifice some predictability around outcomes and need to rely on strong education and culture initiatives to guide your teams and hone their own sense of good judgment.
The bottom line: governance and guidance is important. But it’s a means to more scalable social media, not the end.
We’ve said many times here — and will continue to — that social business transformation is far more cultural than it is operational. Getting your employees involved is no different, and your policies and guidelines need to consider not just what you don’t want to happen, but instead what values, vision and intent you want your teams’ social media participation to convey.
Read full article via sideraworks.com
- Strategic communications help a business achieve its objectives. That is their purpose.
- Effective communications are those that produce measurable results and they can be a competitive differentiator.
- There are costs associated with communicating, but there can be costs associated with not communicating as well. Internal communications seek cost-effective and creative solutions to solve complex communications challenges.
- Employees are drowning in information, but starving for understanding. Our job is to make the important interesting.
- Credibility is the foundation upon which effective communication is built. Unless it is believed, a message has no worth.
- Face-to-face communication is the most desirable form of communication because it is immediate, personal and interactive. Most employees say their immediate supervisor is their preferred and most credible source of information about the business.
- Communication is, by definition, a two-way process. Feedback mechanisms must be part of every employee communication.
- Communication is a management responsibility. Internal Communications supports leaders by serving as consultants, facilitators and resource partners.
- As in any effective strategy, form should follow function. The medium is the message.
There are three important keys that all companies should strive for: energy, focus and accountability.
Energy. In a healthy company, everyone is engaged. Next time you’re in a meeting, pay attention to how people are interacting. Are they staring into space? Checking e-mail? Working on other things?
You could get mad at them, but the problem is probably your lack of energy as a leader.
If you’re engaged, if you lead and set the tone, others will follow. It’s the same in leading meetings as it is in leading a company. Set the pace and expect others to keep up.
Focus. Energy is important, but if it’s not channeled correctly, it can become destructive. How do you prepare your team for a meeting? Do you think through what you want to discuss? Do you prepare an agenda? Does everyone know why you’re calling them to a meeting and what you expect?
Learn a lesson from Steve Jobs. Focus. He took a multitude of ideas and focused his team on one great idea. Channel your team’s creative energy into one specific task and goal.
Accountability. You can have all the energy and focus in the world, but if your employees don’t know what they’re supposed to do, your team will either do redundant work or give up because they’re not sure of what you want.
In meetings, everyone should also know what you expect of them coming into and going out of a meeting. It’s not enough to talk and dream, you also have to do. Bring crystal clarity to your team and follow up.
Want to change your company culture? Start today by working on your meeting culture.
The bottom line is the demand that managers tend to put on their people create a flurry of activity, yet little additional productivity. When in the end, being really busy in itself doesn’t pay bills, doesn’t foster innovation, and won’t strengthen culture. In fact, too much busyness may in fact yield the opposite. So with this in mind, try replacing busy with the following three things to yield greater results.
- Trade Clocks for Results: Time is finite, in fact it is one of the few things we can’t make more of. Talk to most employees about their vacation and they will tell you how important “Their” time is. Well, many employees would be inspired by the opportunity to create a little flex time. So perhaps instead of punching a clock, start focusing on what needs to be done each day, week, month, before someone has reached their targets. Once those targets are reached allow them to earn some personal time in exchange for their efficiency. This way everyone wins; the company is executing its objectives and the employee is getting something precious in return.
- Reward efficiency: Beyond just time, efficiency can be rewarded in many ways. When targets, objectives, and revenues are realized companies know they are making money. While sharing the wealth may be outlandish, most business owners would share a piece of a bigger pie all day long. Highly efficient employees tend to drive dollars to the bottom line, make sure they see that their contribution matters. Telling them will get you some bonus points, showing them will get you some bonus hours.
- Live The Message: This one is a life theme, it applies here and in so many other places. So ask yourself often, What does your team see when they see you? If they don’t see you living the message then you can bet they won’t be as likely to either. This means that you need to be on time (as much as possible), show respect and value for other peoples time (regardless of whether they are subordinates), consistently discuss the importance of goals, what they are, and where you and your team are in respect to meeting them.
Several weeks ago I was listening to a This American Life podcast in which their host, Ira Glass, took an inside look one of the editorial meetings at the The Onion. I was fascinated to learn that for every 16 stories in their bi-weekly paper, they brainstorm 600 headlines. While this level of editing isn’t feasible for most B2B content marketers, there is a lot we can learn from The Onion’s editorial process. (Hat tip to The Beaverton Style Guide for this nice set of articles directly related to this.)
How the process works
First, here’s a great explanation of the general process from Joe Randazzo, the Editor-in-chief at the The Onion:
Basically the way it works is on Monday everybody pitches 15 headlines. We have about 10 people on staff, plus about 20 contributing writers who also pitch 15 headlines. If two people in the room vote on it, it goes on the to the next list. So we narrow them down from about 600 headlines to about 100 to 125, and we talk about them at another meeting on Tuesday.
From those, we choose the 16 or so headlines that make up the whole issue. We assign them and brainstorm what the stories will look like. When we put together every issue, we are trying to find a good balance of stories that are national and international in scale along with local or smaller things, or observational humor. We spend about an hour or so brainstorming those stories on Tuesday afternoon, the writers spend Wednesday writing them, and then we have draft meeting Thursday where we go through first drafts and rip them apart. Then they write second drafts on Friday, which the editors go through on [the following] Monday, and we go through a first round of editing, make notes, there are rewrites and then a second round of editing. On Friday, I’ll go through [the] final issue and make a last pass. I usually don’t have to make too many changes, but I might punch up something that needs it.
As content marketers, what can we take from this?
Turn it on and off. The most vexing aspect of using BCC in modern versions of Outlook is that it’s not even visible by default, and figuring out how to get to it is challenging. To see the BCC line in a new email, open a blank new message and click the Options tab in the ribbon. Then click BCC. The BCC field is now on for all new messages until you turn it off again in the same way.
Figure out who you BCC’d. As you know, recipients can’t tell who you included in the BCC field, or even if you used the BCC field at all. But that doesn’t mean you can’t. To see who you BCC’d in a previous email, just open the Sent mail folder and open the message. You’ll see the BCC field preserved for future reference.
Never violate the trust. Being included in the BCC field of an email is a sacred trust. If you’re a manager, for example, and one of your employees BCC’s you on an email about an overdue project, the last thing you should do is click Reply All and jump into the conversation, admonishing the recipient for being late. If you do that, the jig is up, and everyone knows that the sender was secretly informing you about the email thread. This can have a seriously draining effect on productivity and morale. Bottom line: Never, ever reply-all to a message for which you’re in the BCC line.
Human beings are genetically programmed to look for facial and behavioral cues and to quickly understand their meaning. We see someone gesture and automatically make a judgment about the intention of that gesture.
And we’ve been doing this for a long, long time. As a species we knew how to win friends and influence people – or avoid/placate/confront those we couldn’t befriend – long before we knew how to use words.
But our ancient ancestors faced threats and challenges very different from those we confront in today’s modern society. Life is more complex now, with layers of social restrictions and nuanced meanings adding to the intricacies of our interpersonal dealings. This is especially true in workplace settings, where corporate culture adds it own complexities and unique guidelines for correct behavior.
No matter what the culture at your workplace, the ability to “read” nonverbal signals can provide some significant advantages in the way you deal with people. You can start to gain those advantages by avoiding these five common mistakes people often make when reading body language:
1) They forget to consider the context.
Imagine this scene: It’s a freezing-cold winter evening with a light snow falling and a north wind blowing. You see a woman sitting on a bench at a bus stop. Her head is down, her eyes are tightly closed and she’s hunched over, shivering slightly, and hugging herself.
Now the scene changes . . .
It’s the same woman in the same physical position. But instead of sitting outdoors on a bench, she’s seated behind her desk in the office next to yours. Her body language is identical – head down, eyes closed, hunched over, shivering, hugging herself. The nonverbal signals are the same but the new setting has altered your perception of those signals. In a flash she’s gone from telling you, “I’m really cold!” to “I’m in distress.”
Obviously, then, the meaning of nonverbal communication changes as the context changes. We can’t begin to understand someone’s behavior without considering the circumstances under which the behavior occurred.
2) They try to find meaning in a single gesture.
Nonverbal cues occur in what is called a “gesture cluster” – a group of movements, postures and actions that reinforce a common point. A single gesture can have several meanings or mean nothing at all (sometimes a cigar is just a cigar), but when you couple that single gesture with other nonverbal signals, the meaning becomes clearer.
For example, a person may cross her arms for any number of reasons. But when that action is coupled with a scowl, a headshake, and legs turned away from you, you now have a composite picture and reinforcement to conclude that she is resistant to whatever you just proposed.
3) They are too focused on what’s being said.
If you only hear what people are saying, you’ll miss what they really mean.
A manager I was coaching appeared calm and reasonable as she listed the reasons why she should delegate more responsibility to her staff. But every time she expressed these opinions, she also (almost imperceptibly) shuddered. While her words declared her intention of empowering employees, the quick, involuntary shudder was saying loud and clear, “I really don’t want to do this!”
4) They don’t know a person’s baseline.
You need to know how a person normally behaves so that you can spot meaningful deviations.
Here’s what can happen when you don’t: A few years ago, I was giving a presentation to the CEO of a financial services company, outlining a speech I was scheduled to deliver to his leadership team the next day. And it wasn’t going well.
Our meeting lasted almost an hour, and through that entire time the CEO sat at the conference table with his arms tightly crossed. He didn’t once smile, lean forward or nod encouragement. When I finished, he said thank you (without making eye contact) and left the room.
As I’m a body language expert, I was sure that his nonverbal communication was telling me that my speaking engagement would be canceled. But when I walked to the elevator, the executive’s assistant came to tell me how impressed her boss had been with my presentation. I was shocked and asked how he would have reacted had he not liked it. “Oh,” said the assistant, her smile acknowledging that she had previously seen that reaction as well. “He would have gotten up in the middle of your presentation and walked out!”
The only nonverbal signals that I had received from that CEO were ones I judged to be negative. What I didn’t realize was that, for this individual, this was normal behavior.
5) They judge body language through the bias of their own culture:
When we talk about culture, we’re generally talking about a set of shared values that a group of people holds. And while some of a culture’s values are taught explicitly, most of them are absorbed subconsciously – at a very early age. Such values affect how members of the group think and act and, more importantly, the kind of criteria by which they judge others. Cultural meanings render some nonverbal behaviors as normal and right and others as strange or wrong. From greetings to hand gestures to the use of space and touch, what’s proper and correct in one culture may be ineffective – or even offensive – in another.
For example, in North America, the correct way to wave hello and good-bye is palm out, fingers extended, with the hand moving side to side. That same gesture means “no” throughout Mediterranean Europe and Latin America. In Peru it means “come here,” and in Greece, where it’s called the moutza, the gesture is a serious insult. The closer the hand to the other person’s face, in fact, the more threatening it is considered to be.
So just remember: Body language cues are undeniable. But to accurately decode them, they need to be understood in context, viewed in clusters, evaluated in relation to what is being said, assessed for consistency, and filtered for cultural influences. If you do so, you’ll be well on your way to gaining the nonverbal advantage!
Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D. is the author of nine books including CREATIVITY IN BUSINESS and “THIS ISN’T THE COMPANY I JOINED” — How to Lead in a Business Turned Upside Down. She delivers keynote speeches and seminars to association and business audiences around the world. For more information or to book Carol as a speaker at one of your events, please call: 510-526-1727, email: CGoman@CKG.com, or visit her website: http://www.CKG.com.