I posted yesterday about how Thomas Nelson publishing encourages employees to write blogs. The CEO, Michael Hyatt, as published a blog on personal effectiveness for a while now, and he inspired the corporate policy.
But here’s something new: Michael has also launched a blog, From Where I Sit (which is available outside the corporate firewall) as a platform for him to communicate directly with Thomas Nelson employees. Talk about embracing transparency.
I think it’s a fantastic idea. It’s a symbol of openness, not just to employees, but to current and potential shareholders. And if Thomas Nelson, a publicly traded company, can do this with the approval of their attorneys, other firms can as well.
What’s more, the CEO blog in particular has potential as a powerful tool of leadership. It’s an opportunity for a leader to express his or her style, communicate values as well as direction, and not least important, address uncertainty quickly and directly. Witness this recent post by Michael regarding a hiring freeze rumor:
Twice yesterday, I heard, “Management has put a new hiring freeze in place.” I was dumbfounded. Where does this stuff come from? Not from me, I can assure you.
Yes, we are trying to be very careful about adding expenses. Yes, we are scrutinizing every new position request. And, yes, we are even asking managers to justify replacement positions. But we have not put a hiring freeze into place—and we don’t plan to.
Rest assured, our company is healthier than it has ever been. If you haven’t already, take a look at our operating results through the December 31 quarter (our fiscal third quarter and our most recent reporting period). Revenues are up 8% over the prior year; profits are up 18%. This is healthy by any standard, and I want to keep it that way.
What’s more, once a leader begins to put such an unfiltered face on his or her leadership via such public statements (inside or outside the firewall), it pressures the leader to deliver. In this, blogging can become an accountability mechanism not for the tasks of leadership so much as its character.
These reasons are precisely why I’ve been counseling leaders to blog for several years. If only more would follow Michael’s example: their leadership would be better for it.
Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishing and publisher of Working Smart has recently posted his firm’s Corporate Blogging Guidelines. They provide simple rules of thumbs for Thomas Nelson employees who may choose to blog (a practice which the firm encourages).
It’s a model. And in keeping with our standing advice to leaders that they should always frame an issue before it’s framed for them, it’s a model that progressive companies should build from now, rather than later.
What’s more, it’s a model of an effective internal communication “voice”: simple language, respectful, not pedantic, and written as if to an individual rather than a mass. A sample:
Be nice. Avoid attacking other individuals or companies. This includes fellow employees, authors, customers, vendors, competitors, or shareholders. You are welcome to disagree with the Company’s leaders, provided your tone is respectful. If in doubt, we suggest that you “sleep on it” and then submit your entry to the BOC before posting it on your blog.
Another smart idea in the Thomas Nelson approach: an aggregation page that aggregates (using RSS and XML feeds) each employee blog post in real time, creating an easy forum for employees (and managers) to keep tabs on who’s writing what. It’s a nice nod to transparency and personal responsibility without a ton of bureaucracy.
The folks at MarketingProfs have a piece up on balanced scorecards. Worth reading. For those who seek to dig a bit deeper, Wikipedia has a nice article on balanced scorecards, which includes a set of print references and resources on the web.
A few years ago, a leader I admire, upon hearing a stinging criticism leveled against him, remarked, “This is one of those situations where I need to remember that ‘feedback is a gift.’” Framing the receipt of negative feedback as an asymmetrically beneficial economic transaction struck me as both counter-intuitive and highly compelling. Since then, I have shared this idea with many of the other leaders with whom I’ve worked. In particular, I’ve suggested that they try a technique that I’ve used with success: When hearing uncomfortable information, remain dispassionate and avoid becoming defensive by repeating silently the mantra “Feedback is a gift…feedback is a gift…feedback is a gift…”
As silly as this practice might sound, the emerging field of neuroeconomics lends support to it. According to an article in the current issue of Business Week, people too often act against their own self interests when they process information…
…[n]ot in the prefrontal cortex, where people rationally weigh pros and cons, but deep inside, where powerful emotions arise. Brain scans show that when people feel they’re being treated unfairly, a small area called the anterior insula lights up, engendering the same disgust that people get from, say, smelling a skunk. That overwhelms the deliberations of the prefrontal cortex. With primitive brain functions so powerful, it’s no wonder that economic transactions often go awry.
The inference? The “feedback is a gift” mantra works by maintaining the synthesis of negative feedback within the prefrontal cortex (where you can act on it rationally), and prevents the anterior insula from taking over (and producing instinctual defensiveness).
Over at CommEcon, Kelly Thul and I are bantering about “market-based” approaches to controlling information overload (here and here).
Last December I had a client come to me with this request: “I want to give the speech of my life.” He’s a CEO, the leader of an international company, and this March he was to give the keynote address at the convention celebrating the company’s 40th year in business.
Last weekend he succeeded, delivering one of the most powerful and moving speeches I’ve had opportunity to see. What’s more, his #2 and #3 executives also gave powerful speeches, each in the unique style of the man doing the talking.
Since then I’ve reflected on why this suite of speeches was so good, and why my client’s speech was so wonderful in particular.
The answer is: “Practice.”
I met with my client three months prior to the show date to discuss strategy for his address, to unpack his emotional and rational themes, to identify his headline and main message, and to discuss structure and length (20 minutes is my general counsel, by the way).
He then wrote his own speech, taking time over the year-end holidays to do so.
We then met twice before the show to run through the comments, hear the flow, and try on stories and metaphors; to hear the words come out of his mouth; to test where he could truly connect with this content and where the connection was forced.
On the weekend of the show, he reserved not two run-throughs, not two hours, but two days of green room and stage time to practice. While he only went through the speech twice on stage, he practiced informally perhaps a dozen times, with me (at that point) simply coaching for confidence and connection.
And then he knocked it out of the park. A standing ovation before he was finished; tears in his eyes and the eyes of the audience.
There are only two reasons he was so good, and neither is me (as much as I’d like to take the credit). The first is that his speech was honest: he, not a speechwriter, wrote the first draft, and his content was totally honest as to what he thinks and how he feels. The second is that he practiced. And practiced. And practiced.
I’ve posted before about the importance of practice for presentations and speeches, describing my time in a green room with Paul Newman before another client’s address (another client who also practiced—running through his speech perhaps 50 times over two months—and who also knocked it out of the park). Since then I’ve taken to telling that story and invoking what I now call “The Paul Newman Principle”:
He wasn’t practicing because he’s Paul Newman, he’s Paul Newman because he was practicing.
These are very busy executives. They both run international organizations of enormous scale. But they make the time to practice for their public appearances, and the more important the appearance, the more time they devote to practice.
So, you, too, can give the speech of your life and enjoy a reputation for compelling communication that drives an organization forward. But it means practice, and if you want those kinds of results, you need to be honest with yourself about the time and practice you’re willing to commit. If you don’t invest the time, you won’t reap the value, plain and simple.
Besides: if it’s good enough for Paul Newman, it’s good enough for you.
Merlin Mann over at 43 Folders is yet another advocate for turning off the auto-check on your email application.
I’ve done this, and I’ve advised most of those whom I coach to do so as well. As Merlin writes:
If you’re doing anything with new email more than every few minutes, you might want to rethink your approach. I’m sure that some of you working in North Korean missile silos need real-time email updates, but I encourage the rest of you to consider ganging your email activity into focused (maybe even timed) activity every hour or three. Process, tag, respond to the urgent ones, then get the hell back to work.
Indeed. Executives today need fewer interruptions, not more, and certainly not one every 60 seconds. Besides, if anyone TRULY needs you that urgently your phone will ring.
So turn off the auto-check, pull down your email every hour or two, and get back to the work at hand.
Update: More on managing the e-tide over here. Tip-o-the-hat again to Merlin.
One of our clients, Kelly Thul of State Farm, a strong comms professional and early adopter of blogs in the workplace, has started his own communication-related blog: Communication Economies. Check it out.
In the Wall Street Journal’s latest “Real Time” column, Less Is More, Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry question the practice of appending a long signature to every e-mail:
We know that signatures are intended to add some personality to dry interoffice communications, but we still can’t help but wince when we get a one-line e-mail — followed by six lines of contact info and some italicized Jimmy Buffett. And while each of us is, of course, a unique and beautiful snowflake, the bottom of an e-mail may not be the best place to express ourselves. Trust us: Ending some workaday bit of bureaucracy with a call to arms by Bruce Springsteen tends to make you look like pathetic cubicle-farm veal, while ending some serious corporate inquiry with the lyrics to ‘Louie, Louie’ makes you look like a lightweight.
