All too often they don’t. A quick scan through the subject lines of the messages in my inbox provides very little useful information.
The subject lines read…
A Quick Question (They never are…)
Time Sensitive (What isn’t?)
May I Ask a Question? (No, I don’t have time.)
Are You Available Friday at 3:00? (It depends.)
CRD Coding (What about it?)
Registration Details (Are you giving them? Do you want them?)
Following Up (With what? About what?)
One More Thing (What’s the THING?)
Last-Minute Details (On what?)
Forgot to Mention This Earlier (This what?)
Brighton Event (What about it?)
Can you imagine opening your daily newspaper and finding headlines like the above? Where would you start to find items of interest? Or how about opening your document center and skimming such vague folder titles to grab the file you need? What a headache.
Unless you’re writing novels for a living, turn subject lines into informative headings.
Texting has become a hybrid language unto itself—like sign language for the hearing-impaired or the slang teens invent to create a world all their own.
Texting shortcuts such as gr8 or C U 2moro tossed into a formal document suggest that some naïve soul fails to understand the importance of language to his or her career. Unfortunately, CEOs and hiring executives screen out many otherwise capable employees because their writing is inappropriate for the occasion and purpose.
Think of it like this: You don’t wear jeans to a wedding. Neither do you wear a tux to a football game. You dress for the occasion. The same is true for writing. You write for the purpose and the occasion. Informal abbreviations and sloppy grammar may be permissable in texting, but not in a résumé, a cover email, or a sales proposal. Writing too informally for the occasion can be just as damaging to your career as dressing inappropriately.
Stuffed-shirt writing with overblown language and excessively long sentences has never been “in style.” But neither do texting shortcuts—more appropriate for your T-shirt—carry much weight with executives. The issue is not “right” or “wrong,” “old-fashioned” or “new trend”; the matter centers on appropriateness for the purpose.
Seeing and hearing media reports on this week’s health care summit hosted by President Obama reminds me of a key concept about productive meetings of any kind: Your outcome depends on those offering input.
The concept is counter-intuitive. Leaders “large and in charge” of many endeavors—whether governments, schools, corporations, civic organizations, families—often make the mistake of selecting attendees with the wrong checklist in mind. That is, they invite people to their meetings who support them and think like they do. Result: They communicate with each other. They think alike. They come to consensus. They act.
The problem? Their action may or may not have the desired effect. They may or may not get buy-in from those who don’t think like they do. They may or may not make the best decisions or take the best course of action. In short, you might say they “hide out” with others of like mind and make decisions before those who oppose “find out” what has happened. Big mistake.
To prevent related problems, consider this checklist for inviting colleagues to your meetings:
What experts do you need for background information?
Whom do you need for support?
Who will oppose or sabotage your cause or project if they don’t “get in on the ground floor”?
Whose commitment do you need to implement or “make it happen”?
Strong leaders know that the starting point for a productive meeting means creating compelling conversations with the right people in the room.
Now that’s a statement you don’t hear too often. In fact, you hear the opposite more frequently: You can’t over-communicate. (I may have been guilty of uttering that cliché myself.)
Have you ever sent out a company-wide email reminding people to be sure the lights in their office are turned off when they go home each evening—when actually only one person forgets and leaves hers on? Ever invited all 15 staffers to a meeting so they would feel “in the loop” when actually the information pertained to only five—and then had the meeting last twice as long as it should because the extra attendees asked irrelevant questions that bogged down the discussion.
These are symptoms of Brooks’ Law, and the cost of inefficiency can be enormous (as Joel Spolsky, CEO of Fog Creek Software, pointed out in his blog, Joel on Software).
Fred Brooks, in his 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month, first set forth a principle that he discovered while helping to run the OS/360 project at IBM: Adding people to a late project tends to make it run further behind—not end quicker.
Why does putting more people to work on a project tend to make it slower rather than faster to complete?
Clearly, communication is the culprit: I’ve scratched my head as it has happened dozens of times. Sherry’s updating the layout of customized course materials (leader guides, participant manuals, job-aids, slides, and so forth). We pull Vicky off another project to help her. Sherry has to stop her solo work to communicate to Vicky how it’s done. Vicky joins the project. Vicky has to communicate and coordinate her work with Sherry. The deadline is looming. So we bring on freelancer Rachel to help Sherry and Vicky. Now whenever any one of the three wants to make a change in the layout, they need to meet to discuss the decision. If something necessitates a deviation from the general layout rules, they need to communicate that to the other two and await their feedback. If they don’t agree, that requires more time to work out their differences and come to decision. Every time another person joins the team, the interactions and meeting times grow and the actual work time on the project decreases.
Brooks followed this process repeatedly with mathematical formulas, counting communication connections and interactions to be managed and the resulting days added to project completions.
Recently, a group of hospital administrators asked me to conduct a workshop on how to run more efficient meetings. The easiest problem we had to diagnose and correct? Their typical meetings included 40-45 people. The ideal meeting size is seven. With too few people, you limit creative ideas. With too many people, discussion bogs down. Sidebar conversations start, irrelevant issues surface, and good ideas die for lack of time to investigate them further.
What are the take-aways here?
Limit email distribution to those with a need to know rather than cluttering everyone’s in-box.
Stamp out the paranoia about not being invited to meetings that are not directly related to a person’s job. Don’t create a culture where missing a meeting is a career-limiting move.
Assign one person to make sure relevant communication goes to those involved on a project.
Create opportunities for conversation that generates innovative ideas and builds relationships rather than communication that complicates and clogs ongoing work.
Talk is not cheap. Real communication is priceless.
In honor of Valentine’s Day coming up, here are some suggestions to start the wheels turning for ways you may want to communicate your love to that special someone:
1. “I’m the luckiest man/woman on the planet to have you.”
2. “The day I met you was the best day of my life.”
3. “I love you more every year.”
4. “If I lost everything in the world—and still had you—I could make it. You are my world.”
5. ”I don’t care where we live, where we go, or what we do just as long as I’m with you.”
6. “You make my life meaningful. By comparison, before I met you, everything was vanilla. Now, it’s richer, deeper, fuller, significant.”
7. “I love and respect you more every day that we’re together: your work, your accomplishments, your wisdom, your decisions, your way with people.”
8. ”You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”
9. “Heads sure do turn when you walk into a room.”
10. ”Remember: I love you, and you’re taken when all those jealous people out there are trying to get your attention.”
Early in my career, I asked a well-known motivational keynoter a question that had puzzled me for sometime: “I’ve noticed that many on the speaker circuit promote themselves as professional business speakers, while others call themselves motivational keynoters. How would you explain the difference?”
“Well, your first clue is the term ‘keynote,’ she responded. ”Notice that it’s singular. One keynote. The keynote speaker has one key message or theme—not three or ten points. The second distinction is mood. The keynoter’s mission is to set the tone and mood—it’s not about specifics. The business speaker, on the other hand, is an expert. He or she provides substantive content. And the third difference: With a keynoter, there’s never a handout; nobody ever takes a note.”
By her definition, I’d say the President gave a motivational keynote tonight. His theme seemed to be this: “I feel your pain in this lousy economy. You want jobs now so I’m going to move that item to the top of my agenda, but I’m forging ahead with the rest of my plans.”
Tone and Mood
His tone and mood aimed to motivate by celebrating the American spirit. He opened on a patriotic note, recounting all the times throughout history that Americans had found themselves in a tough spot as a nation—yet they struggled through to become stronger than before. Then he closed 70 minutes later again focused on the individual character and spirit of Americans as compassionate, generous, strong, decent, charitable—as evidenced in their volunteerism at home and in Haiti.
The opening and closing tugged at the emotions—with its references to “letters and emails he reads every night.” Those from children asking him to help them keep their home. Those from parents struggling to send their kids to college. Those from the elderly giving of their meager savings to those in less fortunate circumstances. It’s time that people “get a government that matches their decency.”
Who could argue with that kind of opening—or reasoning?
Theme/Structure
The body of his speech focused on his keynote theme—jobs. ”Jobs will be my number one focus for 2010.” He folded all his other agenda items under that theme:
Strengthen financial systems—because that will stimulate small businesses, thus creating more jobs.
Pass my energy plan—which will, by the way, produce more jobs.
Export more of our goods—which will, of course, support keeping more jobs at home rather than transporting them overseas.
Invest in skills and the education of our people—which will ensure that they can get and keep a job no matter what happens in the future. Education is the best insurance against poverty.
Pass healthcare reform—which will lower costs for small businesses, thus providing more jobs and lower costs for all.
So much for the keynote structure.
So What About Delivery?
Characteristically Obama, the candidate, without the happy face.
— Arrogant word choices (”Let me set the record straight.” “I want a jobs bill on my desk without delay.” “If I have to enforce this discipline [fiscal discipline] by veto, I will.”)
— Lecturing/parental tone: Both his statements, phrasing, and tone positioned himself as a Washington outsider as he scolded others about their lack of transparency, earmarks, special deals to states/groups behind closed doors, and lack of bipartisanship. He ended with my-poll-numbers-may-be-sagging-but-I’m-up-to-the-task-of-doing-the-hard-job-that-is-good-for-the-country-and-I’m-not-a-quitter statement. At that, I could hear my dad saying to me as a child, “I don’t care whether you want to stop playing and go to bed now or not. You’ll be tired for school for tomorrow. Lights out!”
All things considered, it was definitely a keynote. It will be up to voters and Congress to determine how motivational it was.
In nearly every business writing workshop we teach, we hear stories—some humorous, some deadly, and many costly—about mistakes caused by unclear communication.
On Friday, engineering blogger Jon Ostrower posted “Page One of the Engineering to English Dictionary” proving that aerospace engineers share the general population’s tendency to convolute messages with buzzwords and industry-specific jargon.
Here are the top five from his list:
A number of different approaches are being tried. We are still guessing at this point.
Close project coordination. We sat down and had coffee together.
An extensive report is being prepared on a fresh approach. We just hired three punk kids out of school.
Major technological breakthrough! It works OK, but looks very hi-tech!
Customer satisfaction is believed assured. We are so far behind schedule that the customer will take anything.
By Kari Gates, Marketing Director at Booher Consultants, Inc.
Are you looking for a cutting-edge tool to communicate your message to clients, colleagues, or staff? We think we found one.
It’s not often that we do product reviews, but we’ve recently examined Brainshark and like it so much we thought we’d share the insight with you.
Benefits
Usability: When I sat down to create our first presentation in the Brainshark platform, a company overview, I was struck by the ease of use—especially considering the breadth of possibilities available in the platform.
Creativity:Brainshark converts your presentation slides into Flash videos for viewing by end users anywhere at any time. You can even incorporate audio recordings, live web pages, surveys, and much, much more. Simply post, embed, or email the presentations, reaching wider audiences with your key messages.
Functionality:Brainshark even allows you to enable viewer guest books for follow-up communication after your presentation has been viewed. Translated for a non-tech audience, what that means is that anyone who wants to view your presentation enters their name and email address, letting you know they’ve viewed it.
Drawbacks
Before you can start creating presentations, Brainshark offers several training educational presentations you’ll want to complete before you’re up and running…a few hours worth, in fact. Also, it can be a little overwhelming to decide which options to use to make the most of your message. But then that’s where your creativity shines!
It’s exciting to discover a communication tool that allows us to incorporate Booher’s key communication concepts with the technology to deliver our message in a memorable way. We’d love to hear your experience with Brainshark or any similar platform. How are you using the tools?
NOTE: In the interest of full-disclosure, Brainshark asked us to try out their platform, but it’s only because we found it really useful that we’re sharing our experience with you.
During the four years I’ve been writing this blog, readers email me with questions from time to time about their specific problems in writing, presentations, or interpersonal skills issues. And I love offering practical tips or insights with those really tough challenges. But here’s an easy one that a reader asks today.
Cara writes:
Dianna,
I have been a fan of yours since our group attended a session at your Grapevine location many years ago. My question is, how do I control a horrible (and embarrassing) “cotton mouth” feeling that I get when I start talking? It happens when I present and when I speak seriously one-on-one. It just derails me because I get all preoccupied about the impression I’m making. I have to stop talking, take a breath, and swallow every time.
What can I do to prevent it from happening, especially now that I’m returning to the job-seeking market.
Thank you.
Cara
My response?
Cara,
Cotton mouth is noticeable to you–but probably NOT to those around you. The best solution is just to sip water. Keep it with you and sip along unobtrusively as needed. I don’t mean to sound like a bumper sticker here,… but politicians do it, speakers do it, entertainers do it, and singers do it. That’s natural. Simply build pauses into a presentation so you can take a sip. During a one-on-one conversation, sipping from a bottle of water is quite natural these days; people carry bottles with them all the time for health reasons.
Other solutions: Suck on candy or a mint.
As you relax and realize that nobody notices the hydration issue but you, the problem will go away.
Dianna
Maybe you have secret that I haven’t heard of and that you’d like to pass it on to this reader as well. Feel free to leave her a comment here.
