Booher BanterBusiness Communication Consultant

This morning as I flipped through the TV channels to gather the day’s news, I paused on one network to hear these headlines:  "’Death to the President’ Was Shouted from the Streets of Iran This Morning" … "Long Live Barbaro, the Race Horse."

The two headlines, one coming on the heels of the other, caught me in a reflective mood.  How often do the headlines reflect not only the culture of the societies that create them, but the priorities and values of individual lives within that culture—down to their choice of bread for breakfast, the cars on the freeway, or vaccinations for the dying?

What do your slogans and sound bites say about you in your workplace?  I’m talking about those headlines in your reports.  What about the headings in your slides for your presentations?  Those titles you use to tease people to show up at the industry meeting to hear you speak?  Those advertising jingles you create and hope people will sing in the shower and whistle on the way to work?

And that brings me back to a phone call from a friend yesterday:  He called to bounce around a new product idea for women.  Because he knows I often speak on gender communication issues, he wanted to get my "take" on how the female market might respond to the slogan he had coined to accompany the product’s introduction to the marketplace.  As I told him, it’s a great idea, aimed at a specific market niche, which he had entirely captured through his slogan.  The slogan appealed to a typical psychological "tender spot" in the female psyche.  But the slogan went one step beyond that:  as it should, the slogan revealed its creator’s understanding of his market’s mindset and priorities.

My point:  Slogans wrap many messages so well that many people see (hear) only the wrapping and never open the full package.  And they often reflect as much about their creator as they do about the creation.  Examples from your experience?  Please feel free to share them here.

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Posted at 12:10pm in General Communication | Permalink | Add Comment » |

How do you know if you’ve been successful in communicating your message?  The results you see.  If you walk into a department store and ask for a refund on merchandise when you don’t have a receipt and walk out with the refund, then you’ve been successful.  The purpose of the State of the Union address each year is two-fold:  both to inform and to persuade—to inform the citizens on how their country is faring and to persuade them that the administration is handling things well. Last night’s address was no different.

Bush’s speech, therefore, took a two-prong approach:  a laundry-list structure to inform about issues like health care, immigration, social security reform, education, and energy policy, and then a thematic structure on the primary issue of Iraq.

For the laundry-list part of his speech, he informed. Bullet, bullet, bullet.  Here’s what I’m going to do. Something old. Something new. Something borrowed. Something blue.  A little to like.  A little to love. A little to hate.

For the thematic part, he changed his tone from information to persuasion, and that’s certainly what he needed to do, given the mood of the country.  He got  full applause from both sides of the house as he opened that section of his speech with the comment, "To win the war on terror, we must take the fight to the enemy."  He added his over-riding theme, "Our success in this war is measured by the things that did not happen."  Then he talked about the whole of the events in the last five years, acknowledging that 2006 had not gone well and had indeed been a year when the terrorists had fought back in protest of earlier successes in the establishment of free governments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Finally, he laid out the consequences of losing the war in Iraq.

Did the President succeed in his address? If you flip through the TV channels and listen to the various networks’ after-the-show pundits, you can be sure of one thing:  They always end up where they started.  That is, if they supported Bush and his policies before the speech, they liked the speech and thought he did a fine job.  If they disliked Bush and his policies before the speech, they disliked the speech and thought he failed to say anything new or worthwhile.

But back to my opening question:  The measure of success in communicating a persuasive message is the results you see—attitudes expressed among the real people, rather than the political pundits prophesying about what the American people do or don’t want.

Did Bush’s speech change any minds?  In the minds of people truly seeking answers and still wondering, "Are we on the right course?"  "What is really happening in Iraq?"  "Is this a worthy mission?" "Is a victory in Iraq necessary to our national security?"  "How best do we fight terrorism and keep our own citizens safe at home?"  Did Bush convince them to give him more time to demonstrate that he is on the right course?   Time will tell as you talk to people around your office, in your community, and in your family.

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Posted at 8:42am in Communication—Oral | Permalink | Add Comment » |

Here’s a note I once received from a reader:  “I work in a public library and, for all of my twenty years of experience, still find handling rude, abusive patrons a challenge. My supervisor tells me not to take it personally, but that isn’t always easy.  How do I respond when someone gets upset over a $1.00 fine for a late video or an error on their record? I try to make light of it, and reply that as long as humans sit in front of a computer, there will be errors…. Am I to ignore the abuse?”

Okay, so I recall the Proverb that says, “A soft answer turns away wrath.” But I’ve always considered that option in light of my personal relationships—those times when my children have just thrown a baseball through the living room picture window.  Or, maybe that philosophy stifled a rising urge to snap an “I told you so” at my husband after he’d spearheaded a family vacation that had backfired and ended in seven days of misery.

But when face to face with these issues in the workplace, do nice people just have to “take it”?

Not only do coworkers complain at things we can’t control and customers coerce us and drain all our energy and profit; but picky, pushy, perturbed people, unfortunately, show up at PTA on Thursday night, at church on Sunday morning, and at the office staff meeting on Monday morning.  Some of these with grumpy dispositions are simply having a bad day. Possibly others are just showing their true nature. But the result is the same for those around them:  misery.

Just how do you handle these occasions?  How do you communicate to get things done and work out issues when the other person in the situation is, well, frankly, a crank?

First, it typically takes an attitude check.  I often have to ask myself: Do I really have compassion for people?  Do I see people as a reason for my work or an interruption of my work?

Second, it takes a little insight to determine someone’s intentions and motivations, plus a calm and patient attitude—traits that often are in short supply in the middle of a hectic schedule.

Finally, it often helps to remind myself how often I’ve been forgiven by others when I was guilty of some small insult or slight that occurred in the workplace.

When we find ourselves communicating with rude people, maybe the more important question should be, How can I make a positive impact on my office environment through my communication with other people—even strangers stranded in a few seconds of stress?

Use this forum to share your experiences:  How do you handle the troublesome cranks that cross your path from time to time?

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Posted at 3:44pm in Communication—Oral | Permalink | Add Comment » |

Brad Inman, real estate expert, reveals research on words that can make a big difference in whether your house sells quickly or sits on the market for months or even years:

Houses advertised as "beautiful" and "well landscaped" sell 15% better than those without such labels.  But those described as a "good value" take 5% longer to sell.  Why?  People interpret "good value" as meaning "something’s wrong here so we’ve priced it a little lower to compensate."

"Motivated seller" in the ad should really reel in the buyers, right?  Wrong.  Those houses take 60% longer to sell.  Buyers interpret that to mean "Sellers will negotiate" (typically true when that phrase is used).  But buyers also interpret those words to mean "something’s wrong with this house so I’m determined to dump it."

What about offering a "guarantee"—maybe for a year?  That phrase may take you even longer to unload your house.  Buyers read that to mean "Is something really wrong, so you’re having to offer a guarantee to get somebody to take it off your hands?"

Before you give up on ever selling your house—or at least decide to leave writing the ads to the professionals—think again.  The necessary attention in the language of buying and selling real estate is no different from that required in selling anything—ideas, projects, or yourself. Had you rather work for a supervisor, a boss, a leader, or a visionary?  Is the project a task?  A requirement?  A service? A creative venture?  Will your client find it easier to sign a contract?  Okay the paperwork?   Or, give you authorization to move ahead?

Words have power.  Choose them carefully.

Can you share any personal examples where one or two words made (or could have made) all the difference?

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Posted at 8:39am in Communication—Written | Permalink | Add Comment » |

BusinessWeek Online ran an article by Michelle Conlin (click here for the full text) about the schedule-less work environment that Best Buy has begun testing at its corporate office.  Here’s an excerpt: 

"No schedules. No mandatory meetings.  The nation’s leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical—if risky—experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for ‘Results-Only Work Environment,’ seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours."

"Hence workers pulling into the company’s amenity-packed headquarters at 2 p.m. aren’t considered late. Nor are those pulling out at 2 p.m. seen as leaving early. There are no schedules. No mandatory meetings. No impression-management hustles. Work is no longer a place where you go, but something you do. It’s O.K. to take conference calls while you hunt, collaborate from your lakeside cabin, or log on after dinner so you can spend the afternoon with your kid."

According to the article, it seems to be working. Since the program’s implementation, voluntary turnover has fallen drastically and Best Buy notes that productivity is up an average of 35% in departments that have switched to ROWE.  In some participating departments, voluntary turnover among men dropped to 0.

"For years I had been focused on the wrong currency," says a Best Buy higher-up. "I was always looking to see if people were here. I should have been looking at what they were getting done."

Some of the Best Buy ROWE initiators have formed a subsidiary called CultureRx (http://culturerx.com), set up to help other companies go clockless.

Today, some commuting employees only venture to the office once a week.  Could you lose some of the interoffice magic when workers don’t gather together all day, every day, bouncing ideas off each other? What about teamwork and camaraderie?

"You absolutely lose some of that," a Best Buy manager says. "But what we get back far outweighs anything we’ve lost."

This schedule-less concept works like a charm when managers are supervising people in jobs whose work they understand. That is, if the manager has done the employee’s job and knows how long the work project should take, no problem. But managers supervising technical employees building a widget, designing a gizmo, or planning a whatchamacallit don’t know if the work should take two days, two weeks, or two months. How can that manager tell how productive the employee is and set reasonable expectations and rewards for what should be accomplished in any given week or month?  Any ideas on that hurdle?

Readers, what do you think?  Wireless broadband certainly makes this concept a more realistic possibility, but it can’t be as simple as it may sound.  Can productivity be stable, even take an upswing, when people are allowed to work at their own convenience?  And at what cost to the traditional office concept?  I’d be interested to hear your feedback on this idea, especially if you are in a ROWE-like work environment.

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Posted at 2:32pm in Uncategorized | Permalink | 1 Comment |