Category: Tools in Practice
Some time ago I stumbled across David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and it’s been extremely influential in helping the members of our firm enjoy dramatic increases in our ability to manage our time, understand our priorities, and true to the title, get things done. With our lives of relationships, tasks, and travel, it’s been our killer app of 2005.
Given how wired our professionals are, however, and given that our information platform is Outlook, David’s method would be more difficult for us to implement if not for his Getting Things Done add-in for Outlook. It’s difficult to describe what it does, but I can tell you what it creates: a full inventory of everything you need to do, now, soon, or someday, on your PC (sorry Mac owners) and your PDA of choice, and … best of all … an empty inbox at the end of every day.
That alone has been invaluable: we’ve all found the add-in a remarkable tool for managing email, and the days of 10, 100, or 1,000 (you know who you are) emails sitting in an inbox unprocessed are long gone.
The add-in has a free 30-day trial, after which there’s a $70 fee to register the tool. Worth every penny, and in fact, I would have paid more. And I’ve been referring it (and the book) to clients daily … indeed, the more senior and busy you are, the more you need the tool.
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.
You’re all members of one team or another. How much do you love it when one team member sends out an email asking for feedback and another team member decides that they should “reply to all” with their response? And THEN, another team member replies to that message…and then someone else replies to the first message…and next thing you know you have 25 emails that all originate from one that was sent to you 13 minutes ago. It’s happened to all of us.
A recent article from the Houston Chronicle reports that many teams have started to use wikis and blogs for online teams collaboration (and to reduce email). For the full article, go here…
Here’s something useful: PowerPoint’s “Presentation View.” Your slides on the big screen; your current slide, notes, a timer, and the series of slides before and after the one being displayed on the screen of your laptop.
And while you’re checking it out, spend some time reading the other posts of Working Smart … it’s a great blog.
InfoWorld columnist Chad Dickerson weighed in on wikis last week:
After my conversation with Peter, I was psyched up to give TWiki a spin, so I logged into our intranet server planning to set TWiki up and check it out. Guess what? It had already been installed months ago by our IT manager. I took this as yet another reason that I needed to pay attention. Worthwhile IT innovation is nearly always a bottom-up affair. If you were a naysayer about the Internet, Linux, or even Weblogs, embracing the Wiki might be your chance to beat your staffers to the punch at last.
For the entire article, go here…
For our clients who wear both the internal communication and PR hats … we’ve seen thought leadership become a priority for many of you over the last couple of years. MarketingSherpa posted a case study today about a CEO who started a weblog, external to his company’s website, where he posts his industry-related ideas…seems as though it’s proven successful.
Chuck was kicking around the idea of using a blog as a corporate communication device. I never got that excited about it being an official thing because a lot of corporate blogs are thinly disguised press releases dressed up to look hip,” Libin explains. “We have better resources to get out press releases.
But, PR guy Chuck Tanowitz persisted. “What better way to position Phil as an industry thought leader than to create a body of work that would continually grow?”
Plus, Tanowitz shared a frustration common to many PR pros. Libin had lots of insights into the state of the security industry and its place in 21st century life, but scheduling time to meet with him during working hours or getting him to write formal columns was nearly impossible. When you’re running a quickly growing company, and jetting around the globe for meetings, think piece ideas aren’t at the top of your to-do list.
Check out the rest of the case study…
Even Bill Gates is beginning to see the value of weblogs as an internal communication tool. A portion of his remarks at the May 20, 2004 Microsoft CEO Summit:
Another new phenomenon that connects into this is one that started outside of the business space, more in the corporate or technical enthusiast space, a thing called blogging. And a standard around that that notifies you that something has changed called RSS.
This is a very interesting thing, because whenever you want to send e-mail you always have to sit there and think who do I copy on this. There might be people who might be interested in it or might feel like if it gets forwarded to them they’ll wonder why I didn’t put their name on it. But, then again, I don’t want to interrupt them or make them think this is some deeply profound thing that I’m saying, but they might want to know. And so, you have a tough time deciding how broadly to send it out.
Then again, if you just put information on a Web site, then people don’t know to come visit that Web site, and it’s very painful to keep visiting somebody’s Web site and it never changes. It’s very typical that a lot of the Web sites you go to that are personal in nature just eventually go completely stale and you waste time looking at it.
And so, what blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to write something that you can think of, like an e-mail, but it goes up onto a Web site. And then people who care about that get a little notification. And so, for example, if you care about dozens of people whenever they write about a certain topic, you can have that notification come into your Inbox and it will be in a different folder and so only when you’re interested in browsing about that topic do you go in and follow those, and it doesn’t interfere with your normal Inbox.
And so if I do a trip report, say, and put that in a blog format, then all the employees at Microsoft who really want to look at that and who have keywords that connect to it or even people outside, they can find the information.
And so, getting away from the drawbacks of e-mail — that it’s too imposing — and yet the drawbacks of the Web site — that you don’t know if there’s something new and interesting there — this is about solving that.
The ultimate idea is that you should get the information you want when you want it, and we’re progressively getting better and better at that by watching your behavior, ranking things in different ways.
Read the full text of his speech, and see his PowerPoint presentation, here.
The latest edition of SalesForceXP includes an article about the importance of internal communication–and in particular, the importance of a two-way dialogue between leaders and their direct reports. (Read the entire article here…)
The more I speak with and read advice from top entrepreneurs, sales coaches and highly regarded business authors, the more it becomes obvious that communication is a top-three common denominator among successful sales managers, sales teams and sales channels.
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The emphasis on dialogue, however, doesn’t begin and end with salespeople and their customers and prospects. In fact, it’s a good bet that the quality of communication between a sales team and its roster of clients and prospects will mirror that of the sales team and the sales manager.
The author, Paul Nolan, describes the approach Pat Croce, former president of the Philadelphia 76ers, uses and calls Five-Fifteens.
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Some internal communicators have added webinars to their vehicle portfolios as a way to increase the richness of their communications to dispersed audiences. MarketingProfs.com offers some tips on How to Host a Successful Webinar. While this is focused on hosting webinars for external audiences, there are some lessons learned applicable to planning, promoting, and following-up on internal webinars as well.
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