Minding Gaps

Be Your Own First Follower

by Thomas J. Lee

On any given day, the people you seek to lead may or may not hear, understand, believe, remember, or appreciate what you have to say. Nevertheless, you must say what you believe, and you must say it often.

On any given day, the people you seek to lead will always notice, observe and remember what you do and how you do it. Never forget that people are constantly comparing what you do and what you neglect or decline to do with what you say and what you said. That's accountability, and you like accountability.

Finally, on any given day, the people you seek to lead are determining for themselves whether to follow your lead. The decision is theirs alone. It is not yours. It will rest largely on whether they regard you as a person of noble purpose and integrity, and as a person of principle, intellect, competence, standards, and wisdom.

So speak up, and speak up often, about what matters most, and then be your own first follower. To show the way, you must first go the way, for leading is all about following first.

Coming on Monday

How Leaders Must Manage Themselves

(First of Four Parts)

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Ten Tactics and Tips for Better Power Point Presentations

 

We will be on our annual study and renewal period through June 30. During this time we will reprise some of our favorite posts of the preceding twelve months. We'll return with all-new essays on Friday, July 1.

 —TJL                         

 

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Relax. You aren't alone. No one else can understand a PowerPoint slide like this one, either. We have all seen too many of them, haven't we?

Recently I sat through yet another PowerPoint presentation that left me numb. Three weeks later I still don't know what the speaker, an official of a major university, was really trying to say.

He was knowledgeable, to be sure; he certainly had the academic credentials and the impressive position to deserve our attention, and his topic was compelling. But he left just about everyone shaking their head. In particular, his PowerPoint slides were a mess. They were worse than the slide you see above, which is just something I stumbled across on the Internet.

Like many presenters, he apologized for the tiny fonts and cluttered layout, but that didn't solve the problem. The members of the audience were squinting their eyes, and one woman told me she had a migraine just trying to decipher the slides.

This phenomenon is all too common. I don't blame the technology, as some people do. Long before there was PowerPoint, there were boring speakers who used overhead projectors. Long before there were overhead projectors, there were boring speakers who read their speech in a droning monotone.

Rather, I point to priorities. Many executives and managers place a premium on data at the expense of connecting with people. Thus, they see little need to invest in and master the art of speaking.

I have no illusions about changing the world. Still, I am offering ten tips and tactics to help the busy executive or manager with presentations. There's a lot more to meeting this challenge, and I stand ready to help. But this will get you started.

I actually hope these tips and tactics are not helpful to you, that you are already well beyond them. But in my experience, few executives are. Just about all managers and all executives need training in public speaking. Alas, according to data published in The Wall Street Journal, few managers think they need any instruction or coaching in communication.

Here are ten tips and tactics you may find helpful:

1. Know your audience. Make an effort to talk with some of the people beforehand, even if only over coffee or lunch, especially if it's a new or special group. If it's a conference, get there early and mill around. Try to gain a sense of the audience's knowledge of the topic, their disposition toward your subject and toward you, their willingness to learn, their inclination to be influenced, and their overall expectations. Then speak to people where they are, both cognitively and emotionally. Take into account the time of day and whether you are speaking immediately after a meal. If the audience appears lethargic, ask people to stand for a moment before you begin. (If your session is long, take a short break every 75 to 90 minutes.) 
2. Don't speak down to people, but don't use acronyms or jargon that some persons may not know, either. Present your message and explain yourself without patronizing anyone, but remember that members of an audience can vary enormously in terms of education and experience. Give real-world examples that everyone will understand. Here, specificity is your friend.
3. Know that you have the “curse of knowledge” working against you. Because you are expert in your subject, you are probably taking certain facts and logical relationships for granted that other people will not. Look at your presentation with a fresh eye. Ask someone who is unacquainted with the material to glance at it, too.
4. Do not prepare or use your slides as talking points. Rather, have talking points on the lectern if you need them. Use the slides mainly for illustrations and mnemonics: pictures, graphs, simple tables and maps, quotes, oversize numbers, and so forth. Slides should never be a substitute for a Teleprompter.
5. Avoid data dumps. Don't try to capture much detail at all in any one slide. Complexity will smother and overcome your message. If you have detailed information to convey, distribute it on paper at the presentation or, better yet, by email attachment beforehand. Complex diagrams and data-heavy tables are especially toxic. Avoid them. Use your oral presentation to explain, persuade, and inspire. Find one or two on-point stories to tell that capture the essence of your message. People remember good stories for a long, long time. Twenty-five years later, you can probably still recall a couple of stories Ronald Reagan told.
6. Prepare the slides so that people in the back row can read them without squinting and that people in the front row can read them without getting a migraine. That means using a large, sans serif font with colors chosen specifically to be easy on the eyes. My preference is navy blue type on a white or off-white background, at least 18 points, preferably larger. It also means using few bullet points and few words on each line.
7. Face the audience. Never turn your back and read from the slides. Speak loudly and assertively, with your lungs full of air. Present yourself with confidence. Give your voice some energy and range. Before you get up to speak, breathe deeply for two or three minutes. Pause whenever you need to. Vary your tone and timing. Make brief eye contact with individuals as you speak.
8. Avoid the hackneyed opening of saying "Good morning" or "Good afternoon" and then repeating it, only louder. Instead, jump headlong into your material. Give two or three riveting facts, or ask a succession of unsettling questions, or quickly relate a relevant anecdote. By the same token, make sure any technology you are using is ready to go beforehand. You should never be fiddling with it while people wait for you to begin speaking.
9. If it's necessary or expected to distribute your presentation, consider doing so as a narrative rather than a succession of bullet-point slides. This way, people will get your message, and you can freely concentrate on the context and core assertions. Set aside more time than usual for questions and answers. Place a high premium on dialogue. Truly listen to people who ask questions, and show that you appreciate their initiative and even their courage. Be especially welcoming of the "elephant in the room" question that everyone is thinking about but few are bold enough to ask.
10. Finally, remember that your slide deck isn't your message. You are. Make yourself and your thinking, not your slides, the focus of everyone in the audience. Avoid distracting slide transitions or anything else that draws attention away from you and your presence. Remember, connecting with people is more important than delivering information. Everyone will feel it and know it if you succeed, and people will remember it as one of the few good presentations they have ever seen.

One more thing: Be sure you practice, and try to memorize your opening lines.

In all my years in business, I have seen very few truly powerful PowerPoint presentations. That doesn't mean it cannot be done. It can, but it takes discipline, creativity, and work.

Call me if you need further advice. I'll be glad to help.

 

Coming on Friday

Suddenly, a Great Need for Immediate Change

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Ten Strategies for Straight Talk in the Workplace

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Over the past week or so we have been exploring ten “talk traps” and their alternative. Talk traps are conventions of internal communication (for leadership in companies or other organizations) that often prove problematic.

The ten talk traps are Small Talk, Sunny Talk, Scare Talk, Sweet Talk (or Smooth Talk), Smart Talk, Simple Talk, Song and Dance Talk, Slick Talk, Snarky Talk (or Surly Talk), and Self Talk. We identified an eleventh, too: Snarl Talk. You can click here or scroll down to read all about these common talk traps.

As we explained, some of these talk traps work just fine in the right place and the right time, but they can backfire in the wrong place or the wrong time. Others are always ill-advised.

We also took a long look at some difficulties that beset Straight Talk, the preferable alternative to those ten talk traps. It turns out that Straight Talk can often pose its own challenges, few of which are obvious to the leader.

Here are ten strategies to make sure that Straight Talk, not one or more of the common talk traps, is undergirding your leadership communication in the workplace:

1. Lay a good foundation. You cannot begin talking about your business environment early enough. If you’re not in the habit, start now. You needn’t talk about future plans that are not yet finalized. Just talk about the past and the present. If you don’t begin now, people won’t be prepared when you do. The straight talk you eventually offer will very likely come as a shock to the system.
2. Establish a broad context. Address the weaknesses of your processes and products as well as the strengths. Talk about changes in technology, customer expectations, and speed to market. Deal openly with your culture, its advantages and its disadvantages. Discuss the business from multiple perspectives. It’s important to view reality from the point of view of customers, investors, hourly employees, even competitors.
3. Consider forming a small communication council consisting of articulate individuals at various levels of the organization or team, both non-management and management, who can provide diverse perspectives on what’s going on.
4. Recognize the fact that senior management has the luxury of time and typically a sophisticated educational background to help it absorb the need for change, while rank-and-file employees typically do not. By the time a new policy or strategy comes down, its imperative is clear to senior managers but can still be a mystery to ground-level employees.
5. Be sensitive to the words and phrases you use to describe the business landscape and to establish the direction and the case for change. Jargon and acronyms that are part of your own day-to-day vernacular can be meaningless to others, especially to employees who must execute your strategy. Language that has no meaning cannot possibly have any credibility or impact.
6. Test your stated values against the real drivers of your decision making. It’s easy to invoke a list of pretty values and nominally pay homage to them. It’s quite another thing to recognize the powerful impetuses that truly direct and shape policy. What really matters? That’s what your values are, like it or not. (One good test: Ask yourself whether you're willing to fire a senior manager you personally like but who violates a value.)
7. Set a high bar on standards and accountability, but acknowledge that none of us is perfect or perfectible. Make clear what rises to a capital offense and what doesn’t, and underscore the hard importance of aspirations. Don’t be impetuous or fickle. Do insist on common rules. If you expect an hourly employee to pay a parking ticket on company time out of his own pocket, the same rule has to apply to a senior vice president.
8. Appreciate the problems inherent in cascading. By cascading, we mean disseminating strategic information through an organization one level at a time. Cascading spawns rumors and creates a tangled web of misinformation and misunderstanding. It is a big problem in a lot of companies, yet it is routinely accepted as necessary and even desirable. It’s neither.
9. Take emotions into account. Emotions are a big part of everyone’s personality. Ignore them at your peril. Probably no emotion is more ubiquitous at work than fear: the fear of speaking up, the fear of questioning authority, the fear of offering an idea. If you’re not dealing with it, you’re being victimized by it.
10. Get into the nitty-gritty of specifics. It is one thing to lay out a grand strategy. It is quite another thing, and much more difficult, to translate that big strategy into detailed implications for rank-and-file employees. You must do this; the failure to do it is all but an abdication of management in support of leadership.

There’s more, but that’s enough to give you pause as you move forward. Don’t let it paralyze you, and certainly don’t allow it to keep you from speaking the truth. Honesty is still the best policy. Just be careful out there.

Coming on Wednesday

 Four Rules for Growing Engagement

(We will be off Monday for a national holiday in the United States.)

 

(c) Copyright 2011 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved. 

Eight Common Scenarios When Straight Talk Backfires

by Thomas J. Lee

Over the last few days we have explored ten “talk traps,” or conventions of communication in business that often prove problematic for managers. Many of them work just fine in the right place and the right time, but they backfire in the wrong place or the wrong time. Others are always ill-advised.

The talk traps are Small Talk, Sunny Talk, Scare Talk, Sweet Talk (or Smooth Talk), Smart Talk, Simple Talk, Song and Dance Talk, Slick Talk, Snarky Talk (or Surly Talk), and Self Talk. We identified an eleventh, too: Snarl Talk. You can click here or scroll down to read all about these common talk traps.

Then a couple of days ago we took a long look at some difficulties that beset Straight Talk, the preferable alternative to those ten talk traps. It turns out that Straight Talk can be difficult indeed.

Not only can Straight Talk be difficult, but occasionally it backfires altogether. If you have ever watched Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, you know what we mean. Straight talk can turn into a mess. 

Here are eight scenarios we have seen, even when leaders have the best of intentions:

• Perhaps a leader has been taciturn in the past and then realizes she must communicate a new business strategy. She may assume that employees have a depth of knowledge about the company’s competitive situation that they actually do not. She speaks about the strategy as if it is a foregone conclusion, and she fails to explain its rationale. Employees can only wonder what she is talking about and why the particular strategy has found favor.
• Or the leader sets out to communicate about the organization’s direction and priorities using words and phrases that are foreign to employees. The leader is speaking naturally and forthrightly, but employees perceive attempts to manipulate and spin the information.
• Sometimes a new leader comes on board from another department or even another company in another industry. He wants to “hit the ground running,” as they say, so he lays out a vision before taking the time to fully appreciate the situation he has inherited. That leaves employees mystified over his selection in the first place.
• The leader wants to set a high standard, so he invokes values that put a premium on integrity and team spirit. In the weeks and months that follow, decisions on policy and day-to-day management are seen as conflicting with, or only nominally conforming to, those values. Employees decide the leader is weak.
• Not uncommonly, a leadership team relies on cascading to “get the word out” about a new policy, program, or priority. By cascading, we mean disseminating strategic information through an organization one level at a time. Cascading spawns rumors and creates a tangled web of misinformation and misunderstanding. It never works, and worse, it teases leadership into thinking that it has communicated when it actually has only miscommunicated.
• Senior management devotes weeks or even months to crafting a new strategy, and the strategy is a glorious thing. But it exists only at the level of the enterprise or the division. It has not been translated or interpreted to its practical implications, so employees and their supervisors don’t know what to do with it. Mystified, they naturally ignore it. It’s dead on arrival, but management doesn’t realize it for months to come. So leaders continue talking about something that is a mere historical footnote in the minds of employees.
• In harsh economic times, employees have reason to worry about their own economic security. Many are naturally fearful. The organization needs everyone’s full involvement, but only those people who like to hear themselves talk are willing to speak up. The need for open dialogue has yielded to a cacophony of the loud.
• Having just read the latest best-seller from Harvard Business Press, the leader is pursuing a new management fad that employees think is just plain silly. Having seen so many fads come and go, they’re naturally resilient. They let the leader talk, of course—no one in her right mind will interrupt or fall asleep—but they’re thinking about their own projects and deadlines. The leader is serious but irrelevant.

If you have been around a while, you have seen scenarios like these more than once. None of them is the product of the ten talk traps. All of them involve leaders who think they are talking straight, and yet their very straight talk is actually part of the problem.

On Friday we will look at some strategies and tactics a leader can use to keep straight talk straight. 

 

Coming on Friday

Ten Strategies for Talking Straight

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Six Reasons Why Straight Talk Is Difficult

by Thomas J. Lee

A few days ago in this space we explored ten “talk traps,” or conventions of communication that managers often fall into. Some of them can work in the right place and the right time, but don't work in the wrong place or the wrong time. Others are ill-advised all the time. Each of them poses its own challenge, and they all are tricky.

The talk traps are Small Talk, Sunny Talk, Scare Talk, Sweet Talk (or Smooth Talk), Smart Talk, Simple Talk, Song and Dance Talk, Slick Talk, Snarky Talk (or Surly Talk), and Self Talk. We identified an eleventh, too: Snarl Talk. You can click here or scroll down to read all about talk traps.

By far the best overall approach to communication in business is Straight Talk: just speaking the truth—gently and respectfully, of course—and letting the chips fall where they fall. But even it is difficult, and occasionally it, too, can backfire.

I can think of six powerful reasons why Straight Talk is often difficult.

First, it isn’t always clear what the "facts" are. What you see often depends on what you’re looking for and on what you have seen before. Moreover, the facts of a situation can change rapidly and repeatedly, nowadays with blinding speed. What was true yesterday isn’t necessarily true today or tomorrow.

Second, it isn’t always easy to distinguish between fact and opinion. Again, where you stand often depends on where you sit. For example, try to find some factual ground that politicians on the left and right both acknowledge to be true. Not so long ago, my older brother, whom I have always admired, and I got into a little tiff over the telephone because we happen to disagree on politics. It happens.

Third, the facts can be very unpleasant, to the point that you may not want to face them. Probably all of us have something or someone in our life that we are avoiding. Unfortunately, ignoring or neglecting these simmering problems just lets them fester. Eventually, they are bound to explode like Mount St. Helens.

Fourth, not all facts have an equal claim on your judgment. The facts that you think mitigate your own decisions and behavior are usually, and systematically, ignored by others, and vice versa. It is an unfortunate aspect of human nature that people can excuse themselves for a mortal sin but rush to condemn others for every venal sin imaginable.

Fifth, the facts can force you to confront your own vulnerabilities: perhaps a professional competency that you should have mastered, or a relational skill that has proved elusive, or a loose command over your own time and resources that threatens to undercut your effectiveness. In those situations, it is tempting to look the other way, isn't it?

Sixth, the facts can challenge and bring into question the values you claim, and even undermine your integrity as a leader. No leader exercises such total and abject control over an organization that it fully lives up to the leader’s aspirations. But when the organization falls short, everyone looks to the leader for an explanation or accountability. For the leader, those moments are not enjoyable.

Not only can Straight Talk pose difficulty, but it can backfire. Wednesday, we’ll explore some of the ways it backfires.

Coming on Wednesday

When Straight Talk Backfires

Coming on Friday

Ten Strategies for Talking Straight

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

{Numbers} Effective Managers Repeat Themselves

 

Numbers, a twice-monthly feature, regularly presents business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. It appears on the first and third Monday of each month.

Since its inception two years ago, Numbers has presented data on a wide variety of issues: employee engagement, organizational culture, trust in business, information overload, strategic communication, CEO compensation, layoffs, job satisfaction, Internet usage, nonverbal communication, fear in the workplace, and many other variables.

You can read any or all of those posts (and hundreds of other short essays, as well) whenever you wish, just by scrolling through the archives. For a particular subject, use the search button atop the right column.

by Thomas J. Lee

Ever since the pioneering work of Frederick Winslow Taylor a century ago, managers have been trying to do more with less. Efficiency is good.

For many managers, that is certainly true of communication. They want to say something once and be done with it. Especially in a time when we are all assaulted daily by thousands of messages—emails, advertising, announcements, complaints, questions, Google searches, conversations, requests for this and that, the news—brevity is the soul of clarity as well as wit.

There's just one nagging issue: Does it work? Can we truly say something only once to someone and seriously expect to communicate well?

The answer isn't so simple.

In some circumstances it can work. Probably all of us remember hearing some particularly pleasant or hurtful words on the job: "We want you to start work next Monday" or "You have to go to Fresno again" or "We won the Smith account" or "Everyone has to take a pay cut."

On the other hand, when I am troubleshooting poor communication, one-off instructions often emerge as a problem. For routine information, saying something once is tantamount to never saying it at all. People don't remember hearing things that they were told just last week.

Now comes intriguing new research on the importance of redundant communication. A study reported in the current (May 2011) issue of Harvard Business Review found that managers who deliberately repeat themselves are significantly more effective than managers who don't. The key word there is deliberately.

The researchers noticed that the effective managers were building redundancy into their communication plans. Even before they communicated the news the first time, they were planning how to do it a second and even a third time.

The pattern was especially pronounced among managers without formal authority. These days, that includes more managers than ever before, as companies form ad hoc project teams for special assignments and limited periods of time.

The study of six companies shows that 21 percent of managers without formal authority routinely sent redundant messages—for example, following up a face-to-face meeting or a telephone conversation with an email—while only 12 percent of managers with formal power did likewise, according to Paul Leonardi of Northwestern University and Tsedal Neeley of Harvard Business School.

The powerless managers got things done faster and with fewer hiccups, presumably as a result of the redundant messaging, the professors said. Meanwhile, managers with official power tend to rely on their authority. They apparently assumed that employees would just follow their directions, and they believed that communicating once was enough.

"We’re so bred to believe that clarity is the key to being a better communicator," said Leonardi. "The literature says pick the best medium for the [message], and anything else is wasteful. This research suggests that’s not true. You need to use multiple media.

"It’s not necessarily just about clarity. It’s about making your presence felt. Employees are getting pulled in many directions and reporting to lots of people and getting tons of communications. So how do you keep your issues top of mind? Redundancy is a way to do that."

For many of you, this will confirm your lingering suspicion and our intuition. You know from your personal lives the importance of repetition. After all, how many of us are content to hear our spouses say "I love you" only once?

If there is anything I have learned over the years, it is that people are not robots, and that business is all about people. As advertisers and politicians seem to have known all along, managers should repeat themselves. I say:  Managers should repeat themselves. I say . . .

 

Coming on Wednesday

Rogue Communication

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

When Leaders Just Cannot Speak Clearly

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

A client who truly understands the energy that clear, compelling, credible communication brings to leadership has a memorable way of explaining it.

"A funny thing happens to leadership in the absence of communication," Charlene likes to say. "Nothing."

That sums it up fairly well.

Sometimes, though, a leader comes along who has many other important qualities—passion, resolve, intensity, vision, knowledge—but who cannot articulate his thoughts in a coherent sentence. Similarly, sometimes a leader has a knack for saying things that are unintentionally funny, in the manner of Yogi Berra.

Anyone who has lived in or near Chicago for the last 22 years is familiar with the phenomenon. Richard M. Daley, the city's mayor since 1989 who will leave office on Monday, regularly manages to mangle and tangle the English language out of all recognition. Often you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Consider some of the things Mayor Daley has said:

Insisting to reporters that public scrutiny doesn't bother him: "Go scrutinize yourself! I get scrootened every day, don't worry, from each and every one of you. It doesn't bother me."

In the heat of debate over the obligation of railroads to make street crossings safer: "They have a responsibility, they can't get away with it. I mean, they stole the land from the Indians. They took all that land. They got it free from us."

Responding to appeals for a business casual dress code in City Hall: "If somebody takes their tie off, I'm not going to take my tie off. If somebody takes their pants off, I'm not going to take my pants off."

Asked to clarify his position on capital punishment: "I'm pro death! I'm a death-penalty opponent!"

In the wake of concerns about poor sanitation in restaurants: "If a rat is on your sandwich, you hope to know it before. If a mouse is on your salad, it's common sense."

Replying to complaints about police brutality to protesters: "It's just a group of people, yuppies and yippies and hoppies or whatever they call them, I don't know. Who are they? Are they worried about the moon coming out or something? The sun is changing and I don't know. This is unbelievable."

There are countless more.

Daley's father, the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley—they were not Sr. and Jr. as their middle names differed—was similarly afflicted. He was legendary for saying: "The policeman isn't there to create disorder. The policeman is there to preserve disorder."

And: "I resent insinuendo." And: "No man is an Ireland." And: "We will reach greater and greater platitudes of achievement."

The thing is, few Chicagoans ever doubted either mayor's loving commitment to the City of Chicago. I didn't live here when the elder Daley was mayor, but I have been here throughout the tenure of the younger Daley. This city is far cleaner, far prettier, far safer, far nicer, and generally far better now than it was 22 years ago. I invite all of you to visit and see for yourself. You'll love it.

I tell business managers: You need not be eloquent, but you must speak, and the more clarity, cogency, and credibility you can bring to your communication, the more energy your leadership will have.

Every rule has the exceptions that prove it. Somehow, both Mayors Daley managed to wreck the English language with abandon, but no one ever doubted what they meant or how much they cared.

 

Coming on Monday

{Numbers}     Repeat Thyself. Repeat thyself. 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

President Obama Finally Finds His Voice

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Last summer I went public with my criticism of President Obama's plodding, lawyerly style of communication. The silver tongue we had heard it on the campaign trail was tarnished and twisted. He often seemed like a cross between Dwight Eisenhower and Walter Mondale, with a little Jimmy Carter thrown in for good measure. You can read that essay here.

So it's only fair that I go public with a little approbation when it is due. The president finally found his inspiring oratorical voice again Friday afternoon in some powerful remarks to the 101st Airborne troops at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

It was a radical and refreshing change. Stylistically, he delivered this speech with confidence and verve, something that has been sorely missing. Substantively, he packed it with bold calls to greatness. Americans want to be summoned to greatness. Every president should know that and always remember it.

I don't wade into partisan politics very often in this blog, but it seems only fair to give credit when credit is due if I am already throwing barbs when barbs are due.

You can watch the speech here.

 

Coming on Monday

The Irony of the Non-Essential Boss

 ©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Are Our Attention Spans Actually Growing Again?

 

by Thomas J. Lee

For the last two or three generations, ever since television invaded American homes, the average attention span has been shrinking. Everyone bemoans it, even as Madison Avenue copywriters specialize in the 30-second advertising spot and political handlers in the 10-second soundbite. The entire public is just assumed to be suffering from attention deficit disorder.

With the advent of the Internet and especially social media like Facebook and Twitter, attention spans were assumed to be shrinking even more. Web sites are routinely "optimized" to appear among the first few on a Google search. Tweets are confined to just 140 characters. Text messages abbreviate you as u.

Now comes Peggy Noonan, a gifted speechwriter who gave President Reagan so much of his eloquence, to suggest that perhaps we have seen the worst of it. In a recent Wall Street Journal essay, she suggested that our attention spans just might be growing once again, and that we may have the Internet and speeches to thank for it.

She cites huge numbers of visitors to online speeches by politicians, authors, and academics known only to relatively small numbers of people. One example: An online speech by Wisconsin businessman Ron Johnson was responsible for his candidacy for the U.S. Senate; a few months later he sailed to victory over a three-term incumbent. Another example: Links to countless TED talks land on just about everyone's Facebook page and in just about everyone's email inbox, and people actually click on the links and listen to the entire speeches.

Noonan concludes: "A funny thing about politicians is that they’re all obsessed with 'messaging' and 'breaking through' and 'getting people to listen.' They’re convinced that some special kind of cleverness is needed, that some magical communications formula exists and can be harnessed if only discovered. They should settle down, survey the technological field and get serious. They should give pertinent, truthful, sophisticated and sober-minded speeches. Everyone will listen. They’ll be all over the interwebs."

A former speechwriter myself, I think Noonan has correctly observed and commented on a real phenomenon. She is absolutely right about the clips and links arriving by email, and she is absolutely right about people clicking on those links and patiently listening to entire speeches, too. I just hope business executives are paying attention.

Besides, when was the last time anything you came across on Facebook or Twitter has actually influenced you to think or behave differently? Have you ever purchased something because of what you read or saw on Facebook or Twitter? Have you ever done anything, let alone cast your precious ballot, on the basis of what you read or saw on Facebook or Twitter? Neither have I.

I, for one, am all in favor of lengthening our collective attention span, and it sure looks as if that is exactly what is happening, thanks in part to the Internet, of all things.

 

Coming Monday

 New Data on Engagement and Shareholder Return

 

(c) Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee   All rights reserved.

Be Slow to Understand—Be Very, Very Slow

by Thomas J. Lee

Most of our regular readers are successful business managers, and they, which is to say you—you regular reader, you—are smarter than the average dormouse. If you aren't necessarily a card-carrying member of Mensa, you certainly aren't a member of Densa, either.

What you probably don't realize is that your above-average intelligence—the sheer power of cognitive discernment that helped get you this far—is a problem for you. Yes, a problem.

That's because your intelligence interferes with your listening. It is quite a paradox, but it is true. Intelligent people have greater difficulty, not less difficulty, in listening to other people.

Why is that? By definition, intelligent people are quick to absorb and process information, and they think analytically and evaluatively.

Strictly as a quantitative measure, they can listen intelligently at the rate of 400 to 500 words per minute, perhaps even more, all while analyzing the message they are hearing and evaluating the speaker.

Meanwhile, the speaker is in the slow lane. He is probably speaking at 125 to 150 words a minute, or 175 to 200 words a minute if he is talking fast. The bottom line: Listeners are always faster than speakers, and smart listeners are especially fast.

That isn't good. It means you are probably missing some or perhaps even much of the robust information, the subtlety, the emotion, and the crosscurrents of what is being said. You're reading the headlines and maybe the first couple of paragraphs, and then you're psychologically turning to the comics page.

In coaching leaders, I nudge them toward what I call intellectual patience. Be slow to understand, I counsel. Be very, very slow. You will find yourself more reflective, more appreciative, and more nuanced, and therefore wiser than you otherwise would be.

Intellectual patience is just a predisposition of cautious, deliberate exploration and discovery. Imagine yourself walking in the dark, as if you have awakened in the middle of the night and are stumbling to the kitchen for a glass of water. Without a night light, you need to walk slowly, lest you trip over a child's toy on the staircase (as I once did, seriously). 

That is how you should listen. Be quiet. Pay rapt attention. Do not preoccupy yourself with judgments about the speaker or with your own list of things-to-do. Don't interrupt. Don't think of what you are going to say next. Just listen. Listen patiently, and let the speaker finish, even if you are busy. Enjoy the balm of silence on your psyche. Reflect before asking a good, thoughtful question, and then let silence work like yeast. Finally, given a choice between interpreting a message harshly or generously, let yourself be big.

Maybe, just maybe, your intelligence will get out of your way, and you will actually hear what the other person is trying to tell you. You may even understand and accept it.

 

Monday: Romance in the Office

(c) Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

My Case Against Traditional State of the Union Speeches

 

 

For those of you who are fascinated by the art and process of speechwriting, here is an old speechwriter's argument against traditional State of the Union speeches. It appeared in this space four years ago when George W. Bush was preparing to give the 2007 address, but the sum and substance of its argument remains valid today.

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Three or four weeks into every new year, the president of the United States goes before Congress—and, via television, directly before the American people—to deliver his State of the Union address. Year after year, for Democrat and Republican alike, it is a huge missed opportunity.

I'm not picking on President Bush here. Every president I can remember has neglected to make the most of the State of the Union address. Though often well-written, these speeches never rise to their potential as an instrument for leadership. Their shortcomings hold a lesson for leaders in other walks of life, especially business.

Think first of the audience for a typical State of the Union. Arrayed before the president are virtually every member of Congress, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Cabinet, and diplomats from countries around the world. Watching television are probably the vast majority of Fortune 500 chief executives, hundreds of columnists and editorialists, thousands of state and local officials and community leaders, and untold numbers of Internet bloggers, not to mention millions upon millions of U.S. voters.

Not bad, would you agree?

Now think about what all these people typically hear: bromide after bromide, carefully scripted applause lines, a Sears catalogue of policy prescriptions for everything from embryonic stem-cell research to Medicare reforms, and, for the last 25 years, the saccharine introduction and standing ovation for an American hero, a visiting head-of-state, or a poster child for whatever. (This year, at least we’ll hear something we have never heard before, as the Sergeant at Arms intones: “Madam Speaker, the President of the United States!”)

Finally, think of the opportunity that gets away: the chance to focus public discourse on one or two core initiatives or challenges, in a way that enhances the potential for real leadership.

Business leaders frequently make the same mistake. They have so many things on their plate that they sacrifice the opportunity to shine a spotlight on their uppermost priorities. They squander an opportunity for focus.

The State of the Union speech has its roots in the U.S. Constitution. Modeled after the Throne Speech of monarchies, it calls on the president to give Congress information on the state of the Union “from time to time” and to recommend legislation he deems “necessary and expedient.” But it does not require a speech for that process, and there is no constraint on how the president should structure a speech should he choose to give one. Nor does it specify how often or how comprehensive or deep the communication must be.

That allows for flexibility that presidents should use. For more than a century, from Thomas Jefferson in 1801 to Woodrow Wilson in 1913, the State of the Union was a written report without any public oration. Only since 1965 has the speech been broadcast on prime-time television. So the event has evolved, and it can evolve some more.

Here’s what a creative leader would do: Submit the extensive detail on the “state of the union” to Congress in a written report. Accompany that report with another document describing in detail the “necessary and expedient” legislation he wishes to be enacted. Then, use the televised speech itself to focus attention on one or—at the most—two issues or initiatives that he deems particularly important.

Remember, the first step of the leadership process is fixing attention on a challenge or issue. Until people share a common focus, they cannot share a common bond of resolve. The focus is critical.

All of us have an inherent need for noble, visionary, resolute leadership. In calling for an annual message to Congress, the founders were simply sketching out the president's role as a policymaking leader. They would applaud mightily a president who stepped up to the challenge.

Business leaders take note: Convey detailed information in writing, either as narrative or spreadsheet. Use oral presentations and speeches to focus attention. Get to the point and stay on point. Do so often, and you will define your leadership and shape the future. You will lead.

 

(c) Copyright 2007 and 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved. 

Let's Move from I to We

 

We're back from a brief hiatus, but we're reprinting a few of our favorite posts for two weeks while we go through a year-end strategic review. We will return in full force, with completely new essays, on Monday, January 10, 2011. (The following day will be 1-11-11. It will be a good time to begin anew.) In the meantime, here's another little essay that many of you liked. Feel free to forward it to your staff and colleagues.

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Anyone who has studied languages knows this template for personal pronouns. (If it's indecipherable to you, ask your kids. They have seen this in school.)

 

Person and Case \ Number	Singular	Plural
First Person Nominative First Person Possessive First Person Objective First Person Reflexive	I my or mine me myself	we our or ours us ourselves
Second Person Nominative Second Person Possessive  Second Person Objective Second Person Reflexive	you your or yours you yourself	you your or yours you yourselves
Third Person Nominative Third Person Possessive Third Person Objective Third Person Reflexive	he / she / it his / her or hers / its  him / her / it  himself / herself / itself	they their or theirs them themselves

 

Too often in business, we hide behind the wrong personal pronouns. We lock ourselves into the singular, and we focus on our separateness.

We get caught up in my this and I that. We hold you accountable, but not me. We blame him or them.

It's long past time we change this. Our linguistic habits reflect an orientation of division, argument, and apportionment. It isn't good for anyone.

Organizations of any kind—profit or nonprofit, small or large, old or new—need cohesion and camaraderie. So let’s make a concerted effort to go beyond this little talk.

From this point forward, let’s shift to the first person plural whenever we can.

Everyone in the company should be part of us. We all should be we. Let’s pull everyone together under the same big tent. Let’s look for what binds us together, not what drives us apart. The competition is out there, not in here.

We. Now that’s a sweet sounding word.

 

(c) 2010 Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Ten Tips and Tactics for Better Power Point Presentations

 

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Relax. You aren't alone. No one else can understand a PowerPoint slide like this one, either. We have all seen too many of them, haven't we?

Recently I sat through yet another PowerPoint presentation that left me numb. Three weeks later, I still don't know what the speaker was really trying to say.

He was knowledgeable, to be sure; he certainly had the academic credentials and the impressive position to deserve our attention, and his topic was compelling. But he left just about everyone shaking their head. In particular, his PowerPoint slides were a mess. They were worse than the slide you see above, which is just something I stumbled across on the Internet.

Like many presenters, he apologized for the tiny fonts and cluttered layout, but that didn't solve the problem. The members of the audience were squinting their eyes, and one woman told me she had a migraine just trying to decipher the slides.

This phenomenon is all too common. I don't blame the technology, as some people do. Long before there was PowerPoint, there were boring speakers who used overhead projectors. Long before there were overhead projectors, there were boring speakers who read their speech in a droning monotone.

Rather, I point to priorities. Many executives and managers place a premium on data at the expense of connecting with people. Thus, they see little need to invest in and master the art of speaking.

I have no illusions about changing the world. Still, I am offering ten tips and tactics to help the busy executive or manager with presentations. There's a lot more to meeting this challenge, and I stand ready to help. But this will get you started.

I actually hope these tips and tactics are not helpful to you, that you are already well beyond them. But in my experience, few executives are. Just about all managers and all executives need training in public speaking. Alas, according to data published Monday in The Wall Street Journal, few managers think they need any instruction or coaching in communication.

Here are ten tips and tactics you may find helpful:

1. Know your audience. Make an effort to talk with some of the people beforehand, even if only over coffee or lunch, especially if it's a new or special group. If it's a conference, get there early and mill around. Try to gain a sense of the audience's knowledge of the topic, their disposition toward your subject and toward you, their willingness to learn, their inclination to be influenced, and their overall expectations. Then speak to people where they are, both cognitively and emotionally. Take into account the time of day and whether you are speaking immediately after a meal. If the audience appears lethargic, ask people to stand for a moment before you begin. (If your session is long, take a short break every 60 to 75 minutes.) 
2. Don't speak down to people, but don't use acronyms or jargon that some persons may not know, either. Present your message and explain yourself without patronizing anyone, but remember that members of an audience can vary enormously in terms of education and experience. Give real-world examples that everyone will understand. Here, specificity is your friend.
3. Know that you have the “curse of knowledge” working against you. Because you are expert in your subject, you are probably taking certain facts and logical relationships for granted that other people will not. Look at your presentation with a fresh eye. Ask someone who is unacquainted with the material to glance at it, too.
4. Do not prepare or use your slides as talking points. Rather, have talking points on the lectern if you need them. Use the slides mainly for illustrations and mnemonics: pictures, graphs, simple tables and maps, quotes, oversize numbers, and so forth. Slides should never be a substitute for a Teleprompter.
5. Avoid data dumps. Don't try to capture much detail at all in any one slide. Complexity will smother and overcome your message. If you have detailed information to convey, distribute it on paper at the presentation or, better yet, by email attachment beforehand. Complex diagrams and data-heavy tables are especially toxic. Avoid them. Use your oral presentation to explain, persuade, and inspire. Find one or two on-point stories to tell that capture the essence of your message. People remember good stories for a long, long time. Twenty-five years later, you can probably still recall a couple of stories Ronald Reagan told.
6. Prepare the slides so that people in the back row can read them without squinting and that people in the front row can read them without getting a migraine. That means using a large, sans serif font with colors chosen specifically to be easy on the eyes. My preference is navy blue type on a white or off-white background, at least 18 points, preferably larger. It also means using few bullet points and few words on each line.
7. Face the audience. Never turn your back and read from the slides. Speak loudly and assertively, with your lungs full of air. Present yourself with confidence. Give your voice some energy and range. Before you get up to speak, breathe deeply for two or three minutes. Pause whenever you need to. Vary your tone and timing. Make brief eye contact with individuals as you speak.
8. Avoid the hackneyed opening of saying "Good morning" or "Good afternoon" and then repeating it, only louder. Instead, jump headlong into your material. Give two or three riveting facts, or ask a succession of unsettling questions, or quickly relate a relevant anecdote. By the same token, make sure any technology you are using is ready to go beforehand. You should never be fiddling with it while people wait for you to begin speaking.
9. If it's necessary or expected to distribute your presentation, consider doing so as a narrative rather than a succession of bullet-point slides. This way, people will get your message, and you can freely concentrate on the context and core assertions. Set aside more time than usual for questions and answers. Place a high premium on dialogue. Truly listen to people who ask questions, and show you appreciate their initiative and even their courage. Be especially welcoming of the "elephant in the room" question that everyone is thinking about but few are bold enough to ask.
10. Finally, remember that your slide deck isn't your message. You are. Make yourself and your thinking, not your slides, the focus of everyone in the audience. Avoid distracting slide transitions or anything else that draws attention away from you and your presence. Remember, connecting with people is more important than delivering information. Everyone will feel it and know it if you succeed, and people will remember it as one of the few good presentations they have ever seen.

One more thing: Be sure you practice, and try to memorize your opening lines.

In all my years in business, I have seen very few truly powerful PowerPoint presentations. That doesn't mean it cannot be done. It can, but it takes discipline, creativity, and work.

Call me if you need further advice. I'll be glad to help.

 

(c) 2010 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Nonsense on Nonverbal Communication

 

Minding Gaps is taking some time for a respite to rejuvenate, write, and plan. During our absence, we are reprising some of our own favorite posts from the past year. Today's post is on the widespread nonsense and common misconceptions about nonverbal communication. 

We will return with all-new essays next Monday, September 27. 

 

 

— Tom           

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Over and over, in books and journals and speeches and videos and websites, some of the most well-known and widely respected experts on communication make the same error. Unintentionally, but nevertheless irresponsibly, they casually misunderstand, misinterpret, and misrepresent certain research data on nonverbal communication and body language.

They get the data correct, but they distort and exaggerate its significance. Their mistake is so common, the misstated information is all but a cliché. Even more troubling, perhaps millions of otherwise intelligent and discerning people have just accepted the mistake at face value, and they repeat it as gospel. So the error, like a viral pathogen, grows and grows into a disease of misinformation.

Everywhere you turn, you read and hear about Albert Mehrabian’s research on nonverbal communication. Mehrabian, it is said, found that only 7 percent of a message is conveyed verbally—through words. The other 93 percent is conveyed nonverbally—38 percent by tone of voice and 55 percent by body language.

Before I go any further, for the benefit of readers who only glance at the first few paragraphs of an essay like this and then move on, I must state with perfect clarity that the foregoing description of Mehrabian’s research is false. It is wrong, and anyone citing the data in such a way should stop and correct what they have previously stated. That’s a lot of experts.

It’s impossible to list all the authors and publications citing Mehrabian’s work in error. Brian Tracy, who has few peers among professional speakers, makes the error in his popular book Speak to Win. Tonya Reiman does likewise in a website on body language. So does Carol Kinsey Goman, an author and consultant, in her recent book The Nonverbal Advantage. Peter Block’s otherwise masterful Flawless Consulting cites the data in error. Daniel Goleman refers indirectly and wrongly to the study in his classic work, Emotional Intelligence. The list goes on and on, and it includes some very good company indeed.

Now common sense tells you the data cannot be true as described. If true, you would have no trouble communicating in a foreign land without knowing the local language, for 93 percent of the intended meaning would be clear. You could watch television without the sound. You wouldn’t bother listening to talk radio or a podcast. A game of charades would be over in seconds.

You would dare not sign a contract, as only 7 percent of the mutual commitments would be on paper. Historic documents and speeches like the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg Address would be almost meaningless. Laws would be unenforceable. Email? You certainly wouldn’t go there. And why would you ever read a blog like this or surf the Internet? Why, indeed, would you bother reading anything? Mehrabian's research itself, which he published in two books, would be unintelligible!

The fact is that words account for much, much more than 7 percent of a message. While tone of voice and body language undeniably carry some meaning, they rarely account for nearly as much impact as words. Indeed, many other aspects of nonverbal communication—such as punctuality, patience, courtesies, logic, attentiveness, inquiry, creativity, relevance, authority, accuracy, wisdom, sincerity, depth, research, etiquette, dignity, and interpersonal regard—are vastly more important than posture and a handshake.

The research itself was legitimate. Albert Mehrabian, now retired, was a professor at UCLA when he conducted two studies in the 1960s. The studies were quite modest, and their scope was very narrow. He found that, in personal relationships, a message of emotional commitment could easily be confused by conflictive vocal tone and facial expression. That’s the extent of his findings. Period. End of story.

In the decades since, his findings have been repeatedly construed more broadly. Today his name is virtually synonymous with the urban myth that words generally convey only a tiny fraction of meaning. Mehrabian himself has been frustrated by the misrepresentations, and also by the extrapolated meaning. He counts those two studies as a minor part of his decades of academic research, and he is quick to point out their narrow scope.

“Whenever I hear that misquote or misrepresentation, I cringe,” Mehrabian said emphatically in a 2009 interview on BBC. “It should be so obvious to anybody who would use any amount of common sense that that’s not a correct statement.”

Mehrabian cited an everyday example of giving directions. “If I were to tell you that the pencil you are looking for is upstairs in the desk drawer of the bedroom, three drawers down, I couldn’t do that nonverbally,” he said. “I mean, I could try to point, but that would hardly locate the pencil, whereas I could do that very precisely with words.”

He concluded: “There’s no question you can’t extrapolate my findings to communication in general.”

So there. Have we cleared things up? I certainly hope so.

Memo to "experts": Stop saying this!

(c) Copyright 2010 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Ten Strategies for Better Straight Talk

 

Minding Gaps is taking a few weeks of respite to rejuvenate, write, and plan. During our absence, we are reprising some of our own favorite posts from the past year. Today's post offers strategies for straight-talking leadership. We will return to this space with all-new essays on Monday, September 27.

— Tom           

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Last week we explored five “talk traps” and their alternative. Talk traps are conventions of internal communication (for leadership in companies or other organizations) that often prove problematic. The five we discussed are small talk, sweet talk (or happy talk), scare talk, slick talk, and snarly talk (or surly talk).

As we explained, some of these five talk traps works just fine in the right place and the right time, but they all backfire in the wrong place or the wrong time.

We also took a long look at some difficulties that beset straight talk, the preferable alternative to those five talk traps. It turns out that straight talk can often pose its own challenges, few of which are obvious to the leader. (To read those posts, just scroll down.)

Here are ten ways to make sure that straight talk is serving the purpose of your leadership:

1. Lay a good foundation. You cannot begin talking about your business environment early enough. If you’re not in the habit, start now. You needn’t talk about future plans that are not yet finalized. Just talk about the past and the present. If you don’t begin now, people won’t be prepared when you do. The straight talk you eventually offer will very likely come as a shock to the system.
2. Establish a broad context. Address the weaknesses of your processes and products as well as the strengths. Talk about changes in technology, customer expectations, and speed to market. Deal openly with your culture, its advantages and its disadvantages.
3.  Discuss the business from multiple perspectives. It’s important to view reality from the point of view of customers, investors, hourly employees, even competitors. Consider forming a small communication council consisting of articulate individuals at various levels of the organization or team, both non-management and management, who can provide diverse perspectives on what’s going on.
4.  Recognize the fact that senior management has the luxury of time and typically a sophisticated educational background to help it absorb the need for change, while rank-and-file employees typically do not. By the time a new policy or strategy comes down, its imperative is clear to senior managers but can still be a mystery to ground-level employees.
5. Be sensitive to the words and phrases you use to describe the business landscape and to establish the direction and the case for change. Jargon and acronyms that are part of your own day-to-day vernacular can be meaningless to others, especially to employees who must execute your strategy. Language that has no meaning cannot possibly have any credibility or impact.
6. Test your stated values against the real drivers of your decision making. It’s easy to invoke a list of pretty values and nominally pay homage to them. It’s quite another thing to recognize the powerful impetuses that truly direct and shape policy. What really matters? That’s what your values are, like it or not. (One good test: Ask yourself whether you're willing to fire a senior manager you personally like but who violates a value.)
7. Set a high bar on standards and accountability, but acknowledge that none of us is perfect or perfectible. Make clear what rises to a capital offense and what doesn’t, and underscore the hard importance of aspirations. Don’t be impetuous or fickle. Do insist on common rules. If you expect an hourly employee to pay a parking ticket on company time out of his own pocket, the same rule has to apply to a senior vice president.
8. Appreciate the problems inherent in cascading. By cascading, we mean disseminating strategic information through an organization one level at a time. Cascading spawns rumors and creates a tangled web of misinformation and misunderstanding. It is a big problem in a lot of companies, yet it is routinely accepted as necessary and even desirable. It’s neither.
9. Take emotions into account. Emotions are a big part of everyone’s personality. Ignore them at your peril. Probably no emotion is more ubiquitous at work than fear: the fear of speaking up, the fear of questioning authority, the fear of offering an idea. If you’re not dealing with it, you’re being victimized by it.
10. Get into the nitty-gritty of specifics. It is one thing to lay out a grand strategy. It is quite another thing, and much more difficult, to translate that big strategy into detailed implications for rank-and-file employees. You must do this; the failure to do it is all but an abdication of management in support of leadership.

There’s more, but that’s enough to give you pause as you move forward. Don’t let it paralyze you, and certainly don’t allow it to keep you from speaking the truth. Honesty is still the best policy. Just be careful out there.

(c) Copyright 2010 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved. 

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Beware These Eight Common Scenarios of Poor Communication

The essay you are seeking has been revised and moved. You can read the new version here.

 

 

Example of a Very Scary Public Speaker

A colleague sent me this video of an Ohio politician declaring his candidacy for public office.

I have heard hundreds, perhaps thousands, of political speeches in my career by candidates of all stripes and persuasions. Never before have I witnessed anything like this. It is downright scary. This guy makes Howard Dean look sound asleep.

The fact that this speaker claims a master's degree in communication makes it all the more pathetic. It serves as an object lesson in what not to do as a speaker. Do not begin with hostility. Do not yell. Do not become unhinged. Do not be threatening.

I hope and trust you can do much, much better. Goodness, that should be easy.

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Leaders, You Must Manage These Five Talk Traps

 

The post you are seeking has been extensively revised and expanded.

 

You can read the revised post here.

— Tom                                      

 

The Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint

 

Here’s a lighthearted post for a listless Friday afternoon in late summer, as the kids go back to school and our colleagues drift home from vacation. Created by Peter Norvig, director of research for Google, it is a brilliant riff on what the Gettysburg Address would have sounded like if Abraham Lincoln had used PowerPoint.

It has been on the net for years, and you may have seen it before. Frankly, I will never grow tired of it. As you view it, click the NEXT button to move through the deck of six slides.

Before anyone writes to remind us of the sanctity of Gettysburg National Cemetery, be assured we are appreciative. A few years ago we spent an afternoon at Gettysburg, and we recommend it to every American.

Trumpets, puhleeze.

 

"And now please welcome Mr. Abraham Lincoln, president of these old United States of ours."

"Good morning. I said, Good morning!

"Just a second while I get this connection to work. Do I press this button here? Function-F7? No, that's not right. Hmmm. Maybe I'll have to reboot. Hold on a minute.

"Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I'm your president. While we're waiting, I want to thank Judge David Wills, chairman of the committee supervising the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. It's great to be here, Dave, and you and the committee are doing a great job. Gee, sometimes this new technology does have glitches, but we couldn't live without it, could we?

"Oh, is it ready? Okee-dokee, here we go:

 

Gettysburg Cemetery Dedication by Abraham Lincoln

 

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"We Have Met the Enemy, and He Is PowerPoint"

 
 

The New York Times carried a front-page article yesterday that is mandatory reading for anyone concerned about leadership and its energy: clear, credible, compelling communication.

The article reports on a debate in the high command of the U.S. Department of Defense over the use of PowerPoint.

That’s all I’m going to say for now. Just read the article for yourself. When you finish, come back here and leave a comment.

Here’s the article.

 

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Two Simple Questions for Every Manager

Here are a couple of simple questions for managers to think about: When you communicate at work, what are you usually trying to do? And why are you doing it? Take a moment to reflect on these questions.

If you are like most managers, you may answer that you are giving clear work instructions or setting a deadline or a quota. You may reply that you are trying to influence people. You may say that you are addressing problems or explaining a process change of some sort.

Any of these responses is, of course, very understandable. Every manager must do this kind of work.

Then if I ask you to go deeper, you may say you are setting stretch goals or motivating people to work harder or faster. You may say you are reminding them of the customer’s concerns. You may even say you bringing some light-hearted levity to an otherwise dreary workday world.

That, too, is understandable, even laudable.

But it is not enough. Ultimately it reflects a self-limiting view of communication, so it compromises your own leadership and thus your potential to lead.

At the very least it is a failure of imagination. At worst, it is yet another instance of the paternalism or even the arrogance of management, implying as it does that the manager always knows best.

I have asked these two simple questions of thousands of managers. You’d think by now I would be used to their responses. Yet I am always dumbstruck. It is not so much their answers that puzzle me. It is what they don’t say that just boggles my mind.

Specifically:

• Why do scarcely any managers say that they are seeking to learn?
  
  
• Why do so few say they want to inspire people, not merely influence them?
  
  
• Why are they not hoping to attach a spirit of nobility, of importance, to the work?
  
  
• Why aren't they asking to be challenged, to hear a profoundly impertinent or deeply disturbing question that may upend all their assumptions about the future?
  
  
• Why aren’t they sharing insights and creative ideas? Why do so few mention camaraderie or engagement?
  
  
• Why are they not trading experiences and expertise—story for story and lesson for lesson? Why do they say nothing about growth or journey or vision?
  
  
• Why are words like extraordinary and unprecedented, or self-confidence and discovery, altogether missing from this conversation?
  
  
• Why is the notion of a conversation, a dialogue, a colloquy, itself entirely absent?

Your parents and teachers probably taught you, as a youngster, that you had two ears and only one mouth for a reason: to listen more than you talk.

My question: Why have so many managers forgotten such a basic lesson from childhood? When will they—you, and me too, for I am a long way from perfect on this—remember it again?

If you find this column of interest, we ask you to subscribe to either the RSS feed or the Google Reader feed of Minding Gaps. Both are free. You'll never miss another of our posts, and we will be able to count you as a follower. (That's important, because it will convince a publisher to take a chance on our books. We thank you.)

 

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Quote / Unquote: Edward M. Kennedy on Shouting

  

Quote / Unquote is a feature that appears irregularly but frequently. It offers a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, or business. In most cases we also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion.

 

  

I just finished reading the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s memoir, True Compass, and I heartily recommend it to anyone—Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal—for a fascinating look at politics and public policy through the eyes of the liberal lion.

The book is compulsively readable. Kennedy strings together story after story about his life. He spares no self-incrimination, especially around Chappaquiddick and his personal lifestyle during the 1970s and 1980s. Nor is he stinting in his praise for people he liked and respected, including some noteworthy Republicans, or in his scorn for those he didn’t, including some well-known Democrats.

Toward the end of the book, the late senator tells of a couple of speeches he gave. One of the speeches was to the students and faculty of Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg, Virginia, which was founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. The other was to his peers at the Senate Prayer breakfast.

In both speeches, Kennedy would be uncommonly forthright about his life—its promises, its principles, its practice, and its pain.

Prior to the Senate Prayer Breakfast speech, Kennedy reminded himself of the need to speak softly, in a quiet and temperate voice. He told himself:

  

 

The louder our voices become, the more

we grow strangers to each other and ourselves.

 

 

As you reflect on this quotation, ask yourself whether people argue too much. Ask yourself whether we actively look for common ground as much as we should. Ask yourself what the effect would be of lowering the volume of our debates, and of asking more genuine questions and making fewer tenuous assertions.

 

 

Life Support for Your Vital Front-Line Managers

 

Consider these stunning, disturbing facts:

• Four out of every five change initiatives fall short of expectations.

• A clear majority of employees in U.S.-based companies admit they are disengaged.

• Almost all corporate employees say they know in advance when a project will fail.

• Only a handful are willing to tell their supervisor about it for fear of being blamed for the failure.

Why is that? What could possibly account for it? How can we finally make big change and genuine engagement a reality?

The answer involves the front-line supervisor. Typically overlooked or undervalued, front-line supervisors are a critical link in the execution of any business strategy, change initiative, operating priority, or rebranding campaign. Supervisors are uniquely positioned to translate the implications of the strategy or initiative to the day-to-day work that employees do on the factory floor, in the front office, on the loading dock, in the research laboratory, at the call center, or in face-to-face contact with the customer.

Fully 25 percent of all employee engagement is driven by front-line supervisors. Good supervisors create a halo effect around a company that makes it easy to find and recruit the best employees. By the same token, bad supervisors drive good employees out the door. Either way, front-line supervisors are the critical link in engagement. In fact, no other factor accounts for more employee engagement than supervisors.

Yet far more often than you may assume, front-line supervisors are not onboard with a strategy or initiative, and they don’t believe it will last more than a few months. They feel safe dismissing it and ignoring it. Consequently, business strategies and initiatives are often DOA long before senior management realizes.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Here is an opportunity to learn how to enroll front-line supervisors as champions of your next business strategy, change initiative, operating priority, or rebranding campaign. You can learn:

• How front-line supervisors may starve a strategy or initiative to death even before it can achieve anything.

• How you can manage implicit as well as explicit communication around a strategy, initiative, or brand.

• How you can win the hearts and minds of supervisors, so that their initial disposition is to support senior management.

• How your communication planning can benefit from a continuing dialogue with front-line supervisors.

Seats are limited, so register now for this important webinar:

 

Friday, November 20, 2009

11 a.m. Eastern Time / 8 a.m. Pacific Time

"The Front-Line Supervisor: Strategies

for a Critical Link in Performance and Change"

$159 per person

( $79 for the first 50 registrants)

 

To register or get more information, send us an email or telephone us at +1-847-247-2241. Be sure to include your name, affiliation, email, and telephone. (Please note we have reverted to single-seat pricing to accommodate more individuals. This reduces the price; however, each person who participates is asked to be individually registered. Fees are non-refundable but fully transferable within your organization.)

 

Fleshing Out Differences Between Management and Leadership

Regular readers of the Minding Gaps blog know that we bring not just a scalpel but a meat cleaver to distinctions between management and leadership.

We define them both not by position or level in an organization but rather by the work, the purpose, the energy, and the communication that differentiate them. Anyone in a position of authority in any organization carries the burden and opportunity of both; the CEO manages as well as leads, and the front-line supervisor leads as well as manages. 

Briefly, we think of management as the work of ensuring a group’s performance of a task to a predetermined standard of some sort. If the standard involves money, we call it making budget or making the numbers. If it involves time, we call it beating a deadline. If it involves quantity, perhaps in terms of sales or production, we call it exceeding a quota. Often it involves anomalies in product quality or a linear process such as manufacturing, and there we refer to it as quality control or process control.

Conversely, we think of leadership as the work of bringing about change, either cultural or operational, through the discretionary (or optional) and often self-sacrificing efforts of people. That requires knitting together disparate people as a coalition or community, identifying and describing a threat or opportunity, developing and offering a cause (or solution) that addresses the concern, modeling the behaviors appropriate to that cause, campaigning for the cause, and finally meeting the rewards of success or the penalties for failure. All of that is in orbit around the connection between leaders and the led.

It is important to emphasize that we define and compare these two concepts as work, not as levels of responsibility or as positions in an organization. The nature of the work is what counts.

Prior posts in Minding Gaps have explored, and future posts will continue to explore, particular aspects of this model. Today, I want to devote some attention to differences in style, disposition, and communication serving the purposes of management, on the one hand, and the purposes of leadership, on the other hand.

Consider this framework:

Aspect	Work of Management	Work of Leadership
Nature of work relationship	Legal, official, structural	Intuitive, perceptual, fluid
Source of authority	Power, employment	Insight, conviction, shared values
Presumption of manager	Atypical knowledge	Atypical wisdom
Best-case scenario	Influence for meeting expectations	Inspiration for realizing a vision
Orientation	To the task	To the person, the relationship
Thrust	Accountability, dependability	Opportunity, innovation
Consequences	Rewards or penalties	Satisfaction or dissatisfaction
Language, rhetoric	Directive, commanding, “I”	Inviting, collaborative, “we”
Process	Iterative, corrective	Exploratory, adaptive
Peril of insufficiency, too little	Purpose, motivation	Attention to detail
Peril of excess, too much	Micro-managing, self-execution	Leeway, loss of focus and drive
Need for empathy	Of marginal, occasional importance	Of great, constant importance
Attitude toward exceptions	Fear of deviation (snafus)	Hope for deviation (ideas)
Motivational energy	Requires external impetus	Potentially self-sustaining
Systems, training required	Typically already in place	Typically needs deployment

As you look over this chart, ask yourself these questions:

• What makes immediate and obvious sense here?

• What don’t you quite grasp?

• What is most challenging to your own style?

• Do you see how the work of management and the work of leadership are complementary?

• What aspects of your own business require the steady hand of management?

• What aspects of your business can benefit from less management and more leadership?

• What kinds of leadership should your extended management team do more of?

• How are you supporting the leadership work of your middle managers and front-line supervisors?

Feel free to telephone us at +1-847-247-2241, or write to us at info@arceil.com, for more explanation. And, yes, we do offer workshops in leadership development (apologies for shameless plug).

Our Philosophy

Now that have you had a chance to get to know us at Minding Gaps, we would like to set forth more fully our philosophy and purpose.

Minding Gaps reflects a philosophy of leadership and communication. In brief, our philosophy holds that:

• Leadership and management are two different things. Individuals who are good managers are not necessary good leaders. Management concerns itself with organizing and ensuring performance to a predetermined standard. Leadership, on the other hand, concerns itself with envisioning the future and inspiring people to go to extraordinary lengths to achieve that vision.

• Good communication—clear, credible, compelling—is the energy of leadership. Words are powerful, for they mold attitudes and identity and bring people together behind a concern and a cause.

• Communication for the sake of management is different from communication for the sake of leadership. The former is detailed and directive, and its essential message is accountability. The latter is general and inspiring, and its essential message is opportunity.

• Leadership is essential to change, and therefore enduring change is impossible without leadership. The single most important change that most companies can make is a dramatic increase in the engagement of their people.

• Many organizations have solid management but few have dynamic leadership and sufficient levels of engagement. Consequently, few organizations are able to marshal change.

• Leaders need followers more than followers need leaders. Leaders must connect with followers so as not to leave them behind, and leaders connect best with followers through a systematic process of integrated, strategic leadership communication*.

Our purpose is simple and straightforward. We want to make leadership and change simple, natural, and as close to inevitable in your organization as we possibly can. We think you will like that.

Offered by Arceil Leadership Ltd., Minding Gaps is written by the firm's founder and president, THOMAS J. LEE, who is solely responsible for its content. Mr. Lee is president of Arceil Leadership Ltd., a niche consultancy at the crossroads of leadership, communication, and change. He works with management teams of large and medium-size companies to enhance their leadership credibility and impact. An alumnus of the University of Chicago and of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he is formerly a Fortune 25 corporate speechwriter and a newspaper journalist, serving as political editor and editorial columnist.

A dynamic and popular speaker, THOMAS J. LEE has lectured, consulted and led workshops throughout the United States, across Canada, and in nearly a dozen other countries in South America, Europe, and Africa. He has benchmarked organizational communication in nearly 30 major corporations, including Starbucks, 3M, Hewlett-Packard, Shell Oil, DuPont, Levi-Strauss, Nordstrom, Walgreens, Federal Express, Chick-fil-A, Motorola, and Harley-Davidson, among others. His first book, Mind the Gaps: The Three Voices of Leadership, is nearing completion.

Rhetoric and Political Debate

Here is a brief and fascinating discussion of the rhetoric involved in the debate (here in the United States) over health care insurance and policy.

(For the benefit of our readers outside the United States, President Obama was elected largely on public support for extensive change in health care. Since the election, however, opponents have managed to whittle away at his support by using emotionally charged phrases to describe the legislation.)

The link features Jason DeSanto, a senior lecturer in communication at Northwestern University. He appeared this evening on a Chicago public-affairs television program to discuss the rhetoric around health care—in particular, phrases like “death panels” and “socialized medicine.” The clip runs about 7 minutes.

One observation that DeSanto makes is especially intriguing.

He asserts that the “the real discussion is the rhetoric.” So important is language to our construction of reality, he maintains, the words and phrases that political rivals use in debate actually define our perception of the issues at stake. In a real sense, the policy debate isn’t so much the difference of perspective and opinion but rather the very rhetoric of communication.

The implications for business leaders are profound. If, as a leader or agent of change, you are not mastering the rhetoric around change, it will very likely master you. You cannot bring about change without the energy of communication in your sails. By further inference, if you complain that change is impossible, the real question may well be your inability to use rhetoric to energize the change you seek.

“We live in a world of words,” DeSanto argues. Language “frames our view of the world. That’s what language does.”

I recommend two books for further reading:

• Don’t Think of An Elephant by George Lakoff (a Democratic Party-affiliated consultant)

• Words That Work by Frank Luntz (a Republican Party-affiliated consultant)

Both are excellent, and business leaders can derive a great deal of insight from them.

By the Numbers: The Truth on Nonverbal Communication

Last week we introduced a new regular feature, By the Numbers, of the Minding Gaps blog. We’ll start each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We’ll accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. Today, we present data on nonverbal communication that many otherwise intelligent people believe is true—but isn’t.

Over and over, in books and journals and speeches and videos and websites, some of the most well-known and widely respected experts on communication make the same error. Unintentionally, but nevertheless irresponsibly, they casually misunderstand, misinterpret, and misrepresent certain research data on nonverbal communication and body language.

They get the data correct, but they distort and exaggerate its significance. Their mistake is so common, the misstated information is all but a cliché. Even more troubling, perhaps millions of otherwise intelligent and discerning people have just accepted the mistake at face value, and they repeat it as gospel. So the error, like a viral pathogen, grows and grows into a disease of misinformation.

Everywhere you turn, you read and hear about Albert Mehrabian’s research on nonverbal communication. Mehrabian, it is said, found that only 7 percent of a message is conveyed verbally—through words. The other 93 percent is conveyed nonverbally—38 percent by tone of voice and 55 percent by body language.

Before I go any further, for the benefit of readers who only glance at the first few paragraphs of an essay like this and then move on, I must state with perfect clarity that the foregoing description of Mehrabian’s research is false. It is wrong, and anyone citing the data in such a way should stop and correct what they have previously stated. That’s a lot of experts.

It’s impossible to list all the authors and publications citing Mehrabian’s work in error. Brian Tracy, who has few peers among professional speakers, makes the error in his popular book Speak to Win. Tonya Reiman does likewise in a website on body language. So does Carol Kinsey Goman, an author and consultant, in her recent book The Nonverbal Advantage. Peter Block’s otherwise masterful Flawless Consulting cites the data in error. Daniel Goleman refers indirectly and wrongly to the study in his classic work, Emotional Intelligence. The list goes on and on, and it includes some very good company indeed.

Now common sense tells you the data cannot be true as described. If true, you would have no trouble communicating in a foreign land without knowing the local language, for 93 percent of the intended meaning would be clear. You could watch television without the sound. You wouldn’t bother listening to talk radio or a podcast. A game of charades would be over in seconds.

You would dare not sign a contract, as only 7 percent of the mutual commitments would be on paper. Historic documents and speeches like the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg Address would be almost meaningless. Laws would be unenforceable. Email? You certainly wouldn’t go there. And why would you ever read a blog like this or surf the Internet? Why, indeed, would you bother reading anything? Mehrabian's research itself, which he published in two books, would be unintelligible!

The fact is that words account for much, much more than 7 percent of a message. While tone of voice and body language undeniably carry some meaning, they rarely account for nearly as much impact as words. Indeed, many other aspects of nonverbal communication—such as punctuality, patience, courtesies, logic, attentiveness, inquiry, creativity, relevance, authority, accuracy, wisdom, sincerity, depth, research, etiquette, dignity, and interpersonal regard—are vastly more important than posture and a handshake.

The research itself was legitimate. Albert Mehrabian, now retired, was a professor at UCLA when he conducted two studies in the 1960s. The studies were quite modest, and their scope was very narrow. He found that, in personal relationships, a message of emotional commitment could easily be confused by conflictive vocal tone and facial expression. That’s the extent of his findings. Period. End of story.

In the decades since, his findings have been repeatedly construed more broadly. Today his name is virtually synonymous with the urban myth that words generally convey only a tiny fraction of meaning. Mehrabian himself has been frustrated by the misrepresentations, and also by the extrapolated meaning. He counts those two studies as a minor part of his decades of academic research, and he is quick to point out their narrow scope.

Just last week, in an interview on BBC Radio 4, “More or Less” host Tim Harford asked Mehrabian whether words accounted for only 7 percent of meaning. “Absolutely not!” Mehrabian replied emphatically. “Whenever I hear that misquote or misrepresentation, I cringe. . . . It should be so obvious to anybody who would use any amount of common sense that that’s not a correct statement.”

Mehrabian cited an everyday example of giving directions. “If I were to tell you that the pencil you are looking for is upstairs in the desk drawer of the bedroom, three drawers down, I couldn’t do that nonverbally,” he told Harford. “I mean, I could try to point, but that would hardly locate the pencil, whereas I could do that very precisely with words.”

He concluded: “There’s no question you can’t extrapolate my findings to communication in general.”

So there. Have we cleared things up? I certainly hope so.

Memo to "experts": Stop saying this!

 

Everything You Know About Nonverbal Communication Is Wrong

Everything you know about nonverbal communication is wrong.

How can I be so sure? Simple.

Most people know only one thing about nonverbal communication. They “know” that only 7 percent of meaning comes from words, while 55 percent of meaning comes from body language and posture, and the remaining 38 percent of meaning comes from tone of voice.

That is bunk.

For clarity, let me repeat: That is bunk.

Those numbers were indeed the product of legitimate academic research, but they don’t mean what everyone believes they mean. Their application is very, very narrow. Even then, the nonverbal component is subject to manipulation just as words are.

Please take just just a few minutes to watch this YouTube video, produced by Martin Shovel of Creativityworks in the UK. In addition to demolishing the myth of nonverbal communication, he demonstrates the unique power of creative animation.

Here it is:

Let me know what you think

In the future, I will have more to say about the kind of nonverbal communication that really does matter.

Leadership and the Internet

I want to share with you a fascinating presentation by Clay Shirky, which I found on ted.com.

It takes about 16 minutes, and it just may change your view of how organizations and their leaders will communicate with their people in the decades ahead. I recommend you devote the time to watching it. Then come back.

Here it is.

Now, after viewing it, think about the implications for leadership and change in your organization. In particular, ask yourself:

• Haven’t “the many” always been talking to “the many”—albeit more slowly? What exactly is changing? How will that affect leadership?

• What does viralism, to coin a word, hold for the future of leadership?

• What are the implications of Twitter and Facebook, in particular, on leadership messaging in your organization?

• How will gaps between the “official truth” and the “ground truth” of your organization become even more problematic?

• How can we harness the power of viral communication to enhance directional change and control chaotic change?

The Critical Link of Change

A conference producer called in a state of some anxiety last week. It seems she had lost one of her speakers for an August 4-5 conference in Chicago, and she was wondering if I could fill in.

I agreed. If you’re interested in the subject of strategic engagement and alignment, by all means, contact me and I will point you in the right direction.

Here is the précis of my presentation, on the morning of August 5:

The Front-Line Supervisor: Critical Link in Employee Engagement

Two out of every three change initiatives collapse in failure, and a clear majority of employees in U.S.-based companies admit they are disengaged. Why is that? How can we finally make big change and deep engagement a reality?

The answer involves the front-line supervisor. Typically overlooked by communicators and the senior management team alike, front-line supervisors are, in fact, a critical link in the execution of any business strategy, change initiative, operating priority, or rebranding campaign. Supervisors are uniquely positioned to translate the implications of the strategy or initiative to the day-to-day work that employees do on the factory floor, in the front office, on the loading dock, in the research laboratory, at the call center, or in face-to-face contact with the customer.

And yet far more often than you may assume, front-line supervisors are not onboard with a strategy or initiative, and they don’t believe it will last more than a few months. They feel safe dismissing it and ignoring it. Consequently, business strategies and initiatives are often DOA long before senior management realizes.

It doesn’t have to be that way. In this session, you will learn how to enroll front-line supervisors as champions of your next business strategy, change initiative, operating priority, or rebranding campaign. In particular, you will see:

• How front-line supervisors may starve a strategy or initiative to death even before it can achieve anything.

• How you can manage implicit as well as explicit communication around a strategy, initiative, or brand.

• How you can win the hearts and minds of supervisors, so that their initial disposition is to support senior management.

• How your communication planning can benefit from a continuing dialogue with front-line supervisors.

If this interests you, and you can be in Chicago on August 4-5 (I am also offering a half-day workshop at the same site on August 6), just write to me at tom@arceil.com or telephone us at +1-847-247-2241.

"You Are What You Think About"

Earl Nightingale died twenty years ago, and yet the wisdom of his message is as relevant and timely today as ever.

Nightingale created the art of motivational speaking and, in the golden years of radio, brought it to the masses. His commentary was broadcast regularly on WGN Radio, Chicago, whose signal was (and is) strong enough to reach two-thirds of the nation. Millions of people read his books, listened to his broadcasts, and took his advice.

Here is an excerpt from perhaps his most famous talk. Set aside eleven minutes and view it in its entirety. Then devote some more time to thinking rigorously about its message, and apply it to yourself. I am doing just that for myself.