Category: Coaching Points
Around Valentine’s Day, we hear more about relationships than any other time of year. Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal provides two interesting articles on relationships and technology. One story, its not u, focuses on ending relationships electronically– primarily through email or text messages. Its author calls the technology-arbited breakups, “techno brush-offs.”
Each article makes the point that our interpersonal relationships are changing for the worse. Tough conversations once reserved for face time are absorbed by people’s familiarity with—and inappropriate use of—technology. One woman, the recipient of a combination-text/email breakup, considers such a message “a product of our times.” “‘I hate what this has become,’ she says. ‘Every computer and cellular phone needs a little instruction manual to let people know what can be sent in a text, what can be sent in an email, what can be said on the phone, and what must be said in person.’”
Yet the appreciation for interpersonal interactions conflicts with our everyday tendencies. We check and respond to email constantly and depend on the web for to-the-minute information on both personal and professional topics. The WSJ article, Deleting the Habit, talks about the similarities between technology reliance and drug addiction. “Addicts” have a hard time unplugging during once-sacred quality time– on vacations, during family time, and even while honeymooning.
Global Ideas Bank, a London think tank, holds an annual “International Internet-Free Day” to encourage people to participate in face-to-face interactions. The Bank’s director said to WSJ, “It’s good to speak to people.” But getting off the Web grid encourages people to do things that seem archaic to techno-junkies, like reading newspapers, having face-to-face conversation, or making phone calls from (gasp!) land lines while sitting still.
Though the content of these articles isn’t groundbreaking, few of us relate these key learnings to our professional lives, like unplugging during meetings and conferences, and having phone or face-to-face conversations rather than instant or email messaging. Using one-way communication technologies, like the latter, cuts valuable interpersonal cues from our interactions. And like breaking off love relationships via email, breaking tough or sensitive news to colleagues is more difficult for recipients when they can’t hear your voice, ask immediate questions, or see your facial expressions.
We advise clients to consider the type of medium through which they send messages. The concept of media richness relates to the amount of feedback a medium affords to a sender or receiver of a message. Lean media are best suited to deliver specific, tactical, or historical information; while rich media are better suited to deliver strategic, persuasive, or emotion-invoking messages. And conversations with your colleagues, direct reports, clients, or leaders often fall into one of these three categories. Highly charged topics simply require face-to-face discussion, or at least a phone call. (Read more about CRA’s take on media richness here.)
So let this time of year remind you to move away from the computer, put down the cell phone, and take time to talk to your colleagues, friends, and family. Communicating this way may take more time (and sometimes gumption) on your part, but your relationships will more likely thrive and endure as a result.
(Read here about techno brush-offs and here about technology junkies. WSJ.com registration is required.)
Many newly promoted managers complain of having two jobs—juggling the roles of performer and team leader. However, employees should manage others throughout their careers—and “managing up” is as important as down. Though it’s challenging, and particularly so in large or travel-heavy organizations, learning to manage one’s superiors is an essential part of any upward-bound career path.
Inspired by a recent Wall Street Journal article (registration may be required), I’ve come up with a few points to keep in mind as you manage inaccessible or difficult-to-reach superiors:
- Create access. Your boss’s hectic travel schedule shouldn’t separate you for long periods of time, so to avoid separation—and subsequent anxiety—be creative in your communication methods. Get to know his or her schedule; try to find out when your boss will be in the office or anywhere “in town” if most of his or her time is spent on airplanes. And don’t forget, an executive assistant holds the key to your boss’s schedule, and can help you to schedule phone or face time with a hard-to-reach boss.
- Adapt and persist. Figure out your leader’s preferred style and method of communication, and adapt your messages to these preferences. Be sure to update your leader’s preferences regularly—no less than annually, and more often for attention-deficient leaders.
- Self-promote. Your supervisor should know your achievements, and you’re responsible to provide those updates. To help you keep track of them among your responsibilities (and all those accomplishments!), schedule updates like appointments. Maybe you’ll send the managing partner an email every Friday at 5, or maybe you’ll leave your director a voice message on Sunday evenings so he or she hears from you as the workweek begins. However you choose to update your boss, be sure to describe your achievements and planned actions, and make your requests for feedback or input at those times.
- Top-of-mind equals top of list. When you’ve let others know about your significant achievement, you increase your visibility… and without much extra effort, you provide reasons why you should remain in your position during layoffs and economic downturns. Leaders will begin to prefer your help when problems arise or work needs completion. Better yet, if you are never far from your leader’s thoughts, you become extremely promotable.
- Face time is essential. Though email is often the easiest way to get a message to your boss, face time creates engagement. This is particularly true when your superior manages a large number of people, or has few opportunities for informal meetings with staff. Be sure your boss can connect your name with your face… and the achievements your name carries.
From: “How to Work Around Your Boss’s Habit of Not Being Available” by Joann Lublin. WSJ.com (9/5/06).
A recent New York Times article (password needed) profiled an interesting book by Amy Sutherland on Life and Lessons at the World’s Premier School for Exotic Animal Trainers. She suggested that the same techniques may work on your spouse and children. I suggest that you try some with your direct reports. Rather than allowing negative behaviors from those around you to produce “occasional sarcasm” and “slow boil resentment” in yourself, she shares some of these common sense leadership lessons from the best exotic animal trainers in the country:
- Reward good behavior and ignore bad—as managers, parents, and spouses know, it’s the simplest and hardest thing to do.
- Use “approximations” by rewarding small steps in learning—you can’t expect a dolphin to flip with one command, just as you can’t expect a subordinate to be concise after one conversation.
- Create incompatible behaviors to substitute for annoying ones—if your direct (or child) is hovering before an important meeting (dinner), give him or her something to do to help prepare.
- And L.R.S. or the “least reinforcing syndrome” which means that any response—positive or negative—fuels a behavior, and if a behavior provokes no response, it will go away.
A few weeks ago a client asked that I look at a list of activities they currently perform for internal clients across their company. It was a long list, and included everything from strategic counsel to message design to campaign management to event production. The question was: “From your perspective, in which of these activities should we be involved and which should we avoid?”
It was an opportunity to email them the gist of what I’ve come to call “The Service Level Speech,” and I thought it might be of interest to communication professionals, and really, any person who serves in an internal support or shared services function (save IT, which tends to have very specific service level agreements). Here’s the body of my email:
Thanks for including me in this. For what it’s worth, I think scope will likely vary by role, and that specific roles and their requisite scopes are worth defining across the department.That being said, my reaction to this list is to consider turning the question of scope on its side: Rather than saying “what things do we choose to get involved in,” I’d suggest that the real question is “To whom should we offer our skills, and how?” I look at it this way: Technical writing, web stuff, email protocols, speech writing, planning events, strategic counsel, change management — they’re all things you are able to do as a department, and as a result, are all in scope. But you shouldn’t do them for everyone, or in all conditions. I’d suggest thinking of it in terms of service levels, and I’d offer four of them:
Level 1: “We don’t do that, and you probably shouldn’t either.” This is when somebody calls and says they’d really like a newsletter for their small project, and are interested in you producing it. That’s not a wise investment of your time or expertise, and you shouldn’t get involved. What’s more, the last thing [company] needs is another newsletter, so we should dissuade them of the idea.
Level 2: “You create it, and we’ll review it.” Lots of the [vehicle] messages, [intranet] messages, and some executive comments or events could fall into this category. You won’t do any of the primary work, but you’re happy to look at what they produce for (1) editorial standards, (2) message consistency and fit, and (3) just to generally ensure they’re not making any big mistakes. The ability to provide internal folks with good style guides, message agendas, etc. helps with this service level because you can say “I’ll send you some standards, you put it together, and then check in with me and I’ll look at it for you.”
Level 3: “I’ll consult to you, you create it, and we’ll review it.” The same as Level 2, but you up the service you provide to include giving them counsel and being their consultant. You might have an initial meeting, outline goals, do a creative brief, etc., in addition to reviewing what they produce, etc. Lots of your [technology project] support could fit in here (as well as support of other large projects where you’re not the primary producer of the communication work).
Level 4: “We’re going to do this ourselves from soup to nuts.” This might include the full scope of change management communication work (like you did when working with [name]), or it might including something as simple as writing comments for a lunch with [President] or [VP of HR]. But because of the importance of the issue, project, event, or client, [your department] will take full responsibility and accountability for the communication work. Crisis management and stuff for [CEO] or [President] might be examples of Level 4 work. To this day, I’ll write an email that a client will send to his or her company — very tactical work — if the issue or client is important enough.
If you look at the question of scope through this lens I think the question changes a bit from “What do we do” to “Who do we serve and how.” You might take the list below and re-order it into the four categories. You might also take all the key stakeholders the department has and do the same.
Then it’s easy to go to the stakeholders and say “We’re trying get more effective in how we add value, and we’ve created some service levels to help us do so. Here’s what they are, and here’s how I see the work we do together fitting into them …”
Then you know, and your stakeholders and clients know, how you’ll help, and more important, why.
The bottom line is that the amount of internal work you do and the level of support you provide are much more a function of framing expectations than they are of responding to requests. The requests are made within the context of expectations; change the frame of expectations and changes in the requests will follow. The problem is that most folks — regardless of role — don’t actively frame their expectations with colleagues or clients. As a result they tend to inherit the levels of support they provide over time … which ultimately leads to poorly aligned expectations, frustrated staff, and disappointed internal clients.
As I waited in line this afternoon to pick up my dry cleaning, I was reminded of a leadership lesson we often share with clients: What matters most is how you treat those who matter least. You see, I was standing there at the dry cleaners observing the well dressed man in front of me complain about his service. He was clearly a very important person (or so he thought) who could not control his temper. He was berating the poor gentleman who had accidentally starched his shirts. I thought to myself …. frustrating, but hardly a major crisis. Would he treat his boss this way? And what does it say about his leadership character? A lot.
In a recent USA Today article, CEOs talk about how you treat a waiter can predict a lot about your character. It’s true. We constantly remind leaders that they are always on stage. And the lens to your character is how you treat people whom you don’t know or people you don’t have to treat well. So, next time you go to lunch with colleagues, notice how they treat the waiter or how they grab a cab—it will tell you a lot about them as leaders.
A COLLEAGUE AND I have spent the past few days helping a number of client teams prep for a significant presentation to senior management. We do this from time to time, and when we do our focus is typically on message strategy and credibility. That said, presentation design is a heuristic for both, and we inevitably end up teaching the basics of good v. bad slide design at the same time.
At the firm we take an approach to slide design that is different from traditional corporate practice. Our basic philosophy:
- You are the message: A person can communicate with greater persuasive power than any slide presentation.
- Exception: Pictures that say a thousand words. But they REALLY have to say a thousand words. They should also be high-resolution images, or don’t use them. Garr Reynolds has more to say about this, and he’s right.
- Your slides should “do no harm”: They should never compete with the speaker, and only augment the speaker’s point. As a result they should be lean on text and lean on animation (there’s only one slide animation that has any taste, and it’s the slow fade). Otherwise the audience is paying attention to the slide and not to you.
- Ensure everything is essential: Keep the ink:data ratio as close to 1:1 as possible. This means killing chartjunk and following sound principles of chart and table design. It also means killing all that branding and those logos — the audience knows who you are.
As we explain this philosophy we typically point people to the research of Edward Tufte, which I’ll do now. There’s also much more in the CommLog archives if you search for “PowerPoint.”
Yesterday we spent a lot of time coaching around the physical design of slides so they best reflect our approach. As we did I referred to the “CRA presentation style” more than once, and thought it might be useful to describe the physical setup of our standard PowerPoint template here as an example.
Our PowerPoint template comes in two flavors: White background and dark background. Here’s a shot of each. We use the dark background in dark rooms, and the white background in light rooms (you may click any of these images for a larger view).
We’ve honored the Golden Ratio by matching the proportions of the slide itself to that of the Golden Rectangle (1:1.618). In our case the slides are set to be 10″ wide and 6.18″ high. This “letterbox” look is more interesting, permits more interesting layouts, and looks great when you project.
We use Gill Sans font, our preferred font for headings in documents across the firm (we use Garamond for text). Gill Sans is easy on the eyes, has an interesting feel to it, and holds up well regardless of text size.
When we use images (which we prefer to do over text … they help convey an emotional dimension) they’re always high resolution, and often full screen.
When laying out images and text, we turn on PowerPoint’s “guide” function and set our guides so they reflect the “rule of thirds” and make layout choices based on the guides and their four points of intersection (for more on this go here).
When we DO use bullets, they’re a simple as possible …
So that’s our template setup. We think it helps our on-screen stuff be more effective, which is our goal. We’ve also been inspired by the good taste of Garr Reynolds; go see his stuff. Hope the above is of use.
Technorati Tags: powerpoint, presentations, garr reynolds, information design
While doing some client research on intercultural communications, I found this simple article from HBR’s Working Knowledge. The author offers tips for communicating with a diverse workforce:
1. Learn how the source culture best receives communications.
2. Train international employees early and often.
3. Train the non-foreign-born, too.
4. Assign mentors and take care of the spouses.
5. Practice open-door communication–carefully.
6. In company-wide communications, avoid jargon and slang.
7. Play by the rules and stick to business.
Some of these tips remind me of what we take away in business from uncertainty reduction theory, a seminal theory in intercultural communication. The theory proposes that we seek to reduce uncertainty in our communication interactions. We do this automatically by making predictions at the cultural, sociocultural, and psychocultural level. In other words, we make assumptions about other people based on prior experiences. When we communicate with people we don’t know or with individuals from an unfamiliar culture, it’s critical that we check our assumptions and seek to learn about one another by making factual observations, asking questions, and disclosing personal information that prompts a reciprocal response.
This post at 43 Folders, in which Merlin Mann asks "how many actionable emails do you get each day?" (he also has a poll up), prompted me to post this comment:
I get plenty; theyre nearly all actionable. That said, I (and the folks in our firm) receive significantly less that our peers in other organizations, and certainly less than our clients.
Why?
1) We put pull information where it belongs: On the web. The core of our intranet is a blog, which we use to post any information that would otherwise find its way into an email distribution. If someones hosting lunch at Chilis for Suzie from ARs birthday or there are Dunkin minis in the break room, you need to check the blog to know. And if you miss something important because you dont read the blog, youre accountable for the miss.
2) We do a good job of matching message to media based on the principles of media richness. (Read more about media richness here). The result is that we spend more time in face-to-face or telephone conversation, which is more efficient than email for a whole range of topics.
Works for us, and thanks to the liberal use of David Allens Getting Things Done Outlook add-in across our firm, we nearly all go to bed each night with our inbox an empty box.
One of the reasons our IC practice has pushed blogs so hard with clients isn’t because we have a high level of latent geekiness (well, not all of us). It’s because one of their benefits is a significant reduction in email traffic. Over the three years that blogs have been the foundation of the CRA Intranet, employees have become wonderfully conditioned to (1) post anything there that’s of interest to the group, rather than emailing it, and (2) check there on a regular basis.
As a result, nearly any internal email we get is either one-to-one or one-to-few.
As to media richness, certainly go read the CommLog post I linked to in the comment above and download its primer (it’s a PDF file). When I speak about communication, especially to leaders, I hammer the point of media richness: the more uncertain, strategic, persuasive, or relationally important a topic is, the more it requires media closer to face-to-face conversation.[1]
"Uncertain" involves a lot of daily business discourse, but it typically doesn’t mean "earth-shaking uncertainty." Indeed, most of these conversations are routine. Trying to set a meeting time among three people is a routine task. It also involves a large amount of uncertainty, which is why it’s so difficult to do via email–the feedback channel for the medium has significantly greater lag than that of a telephone conversation.
We overuse email because it’s in front of us and it’s cost-efficient. But getting off your keyboard and on the phone, or face-to-face, often produces faster and better results.
- More on these issues here.
As a former academic, I find myself still perusing academic journals from time to time (yes, Im a nerd!). More often than not, however, I find an interesting article consisting of great theory and impressive empirical results, but, lets be honest here such articles can be painfully boring to read. Still, an article published in the most recent issue of one of the most prestigious management journals, The Academy of Management Review, is worth a closer look. Hence, I offer you my quick and dirty translation of this article
In our coaching business, many of our clients are taking advantage of a program we call Coaching4Teams an innovative program which combines one-on-one coaching and team based learning. In their latest article, A Theory of Team Coaching, Richard Hackman of Harvard University and Ruth Wageman of Dartmouth College tackle the question: How much of a difference does team coaching make to team performance effectiveness? Great question, right? I thought so.
According to the authors, coaching behaviors can and do help teams achieve and sustain team performance effectiveness, but only under certain conditions which may surprise you……
Read the rest of this entry »
Many leaders are so tied to their BlackBerrys that they view face-to-face conversation as more of a nuisance than a learning tool. But in an email era, this IABC-sponsored article In Praise Of Small Talk
re-affirms something weve been telling our clients for years: employees prefer face-to-face communication with their direct managers.
The article echoes our advice to leaders: make time for talk, use smart questions, build partnerships, share experiences, and create a clear & common purpose-all things difficult to do over email.
A client recently called to tell me that, after struggling to convince his CIO to engage in these informal conversations,” his boss is now a big believer in them. And the organization is seeing huge benefits. The informal leadership conversations theyve organized with small groups of employees have reduced uncertainty during a recent outsourcing, improved performance, uncovered new information, and helped discover ways of working better.
We know you’ve heard it before … but if you want to be a smarter leader, consider leaving your BlackBerry at home for the day and start talking.
