« May 2005 | Main | July 2005 »
June 28, 2005
Graduation Daze
It’s taken me five days to recover, but I’m finally ready to tell you about my son’s high school graduation ceremony.
Why, in a web log about communication, am I writing about a high school commencement? Because this graduation was like ineffective corporate communication in one important way: It was designed to satisfy the speakers, not benefit the audience.
Ceremonies (dedications, anniversaries, and, of course, graduations) are inherently tricky for speakers—they naturally want to be memorable and appear wise. So it’s all too easy to venture into dangerous territory: the Pit of Sanctimony, the Canyon of Clichés or the Abyss of Officious Quotations.
The greater number of speakers there are, the more acute the danger. In the case of my son’s graduation, we were guaranteed to take a fall: There were 16 speakers. (I’m not kidding: 16 by actual count. See below for a complete list.) That meant the ceremony went on for more than two hours, until our derrieres were sore, our brains were fried, and our bladders were bursting.
It also meant 16 recollections of “when we were younger” or “highlights from childhood/high school/last week.” And 16 pieces of advice on how to be a) happy, b) successful, c) kind to others or d) all of the above. And 16 sets of quotations from famous literary or historical figures, including William James, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gandhi.
In addition to the overuse of quotations, the characteristic each speech had in common was self-absorption—what speakers wanted to say, not what the audience needed to hear. Think of how many senior leader remarks you’ve witnessed (or maybe even written) that have been like that. Now think of how boring that is for employees.
The most popular quotation was from Sir Winston Churchill. (You know, the British politician and prime minister, who lived from 1874 – 1965). No fewer than three speakers used the same Churchill remark: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
It’s an okay quote, I guess, although not really on target, and a quick Google search yields Churchillisms that are more graduation-appropriate (“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”), more provocative (“Personally I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.”), and a lot more funny (“From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.”).
It’s probably not surprising that three people wrote the Churchill quotation into their speeches, or that the principal who reviewed all the speeches didn’t catch the duplication. The biggest surprise is that after the first speaker used the quotation, the other two didn’t change their remarks: They just went ahead and said “Beginning of the end. End of the beginning” as planned.
Why? Because the other speakers weren’t listening. No one was, really—certainly not the seniors, who were thinking about the party afterwards. Not the parents, who were waiting for their child’s name to be called. Not the rest of the audience, or the band, or the chorus, or the pretty little birds up there in the tree, framed against the fading light of the summer evening sky.
If the speeches had really been for any of us, they would have been short. They would have been free of rhetoric, quotations or literary references. They would have been intensely personal, the way these kids actually speak to one another: “I’m proud of you, and of me. At times it’s been hard, but we’ve had some great times. I’m ready to go, but I’ll miss you just the same.”
That would have been meaningful. And if anyone had done that, I would have cried real tears, tears of joy, not tears of relief when the ceremony finally, finally came to an end.
Are your speakers (senior leaders and others) satisfying their own needs to talk, and not focused on the needs of the audience? Remember what Churchill said: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”
*The speakers: class president, student council president, valedictorian, newspaper editor, class corresponding secretary, first and second vice presidents of the board of education, class recording secretary, class advisors (2), faculty speaker, principal, superintendent of schools, president of the board of education, salutatorian, and class treasurer.
Posted by Alison Davis at 08:48 AM | Comments (3)
June 21, 2005
What employees know about communication (everything)
A week or so I moderated employee focus groups, which is one of my favorite things to do. It’s so satisfying—invigorating, even—to sit at a table with a group of employees and encourage them to share their opinions and suggestions about communication.
Here’s why: Employees are very smart and they’re extremely thoughtful. No matter what level of employees you talk to—from hourly production workers to senior scientists—you get keen insights about the way communication works (or doesn’t work) and specific ideas on how to make improvements.
None of the folks I spoke to were professional communicators, yet, like all employees, they have very sophisticated perspectives on communication. This is consistent with my experience that people in general are savvy consumers of media. In their personal lives, people easily navigate the dense jungle of media choices, comfortably selecting among TV, print, radio, Internet and even new forms of communication to develop the mix that works best for them.
So it’s no wonder that employees bring that sophistication to work. If you ask employees for their feedback about internal communication, they’ll offer analysis that is as highly developed as any professional can offer—concepts like these:
“When leaders think about what they want to communicate, they should go beyond what they want to say and consider us, their target audience. We don’t have time for all those details—just give us the overall main points.”
“A picture really does tell a story. There are often too many words, when it would have been better to give us a graph that visually shows how the organization is doing.”
“When I get the publication, I scan the headlines, then read the item I’m most interested in. I make choices about what’s relevant to me.”
“To me, the most important communication is about my function. Then comes the site. I care about the company, of course—but it’s got to be a lower priority, because it doesn’t affect my day-to-day work.”
See how smart they are? These employees are clear about what’s important, they know how to manage communication to meet their own needs, and they see clearly how to make communication better.
Need to improve your communication? Ask the experts: your employees.
Posted by Alison Davis at 05:35 PM
June 14, 2005
Dear Morgan Stanley: It’s all about culture
You don’t even have to read between the lines of today’s coverage of the departure of Morgan Stanley’s CEO to discover why Philip J. Purcell finally bowed to pressure to resign: Culture issues clearly became too powerful to resist.
Mr. Purcell’s downfall is a valuable cautionary tale for all those senior leaders who believe the following: Culture doesn’t matter. Communication isn’t important. Simply tell people what needs to change—give them the facts—and they’ll do it. After all, if you have power, you don’t need persuasion.
Not so, Mr. Purcell. Think again, all you leaders who struggle with large, complex organizations that won’t bend to your will. If engaging employees is important, you simply can’t rely on authority to make it happen. You need to pull out all the stops to get people on board. You need to convince employees, and win their trust and respect. In short, you need to communicate like you’ve never communicated before.
Mr. Purcell clearly didn’t do so. Today in the media, Mr. Purcell was criticized for being “a strategist, not a manager.” Mr. Purcell was the mastermind behind the 1997 merger of Dean Witter, the retail brokerage firm that he led, with Morgan Stanley, the prestigious investment bank. He had a vision of an integrated full-service financial services firm that would serve every facet of the market.
But he was never able to reconcile the different factions within the firm, and pundits offering 20-20 hindsight took Mr. Purcell to task for not working hard enough to gain consensus. “He spent too much time conceptualizing, too much time ensuring his position and not enough time with his management people and his clients,” Richard X. Bove, an analyst at Punk, Ziegel & Company, was quoted as saying in today’s New York Times.
“In the end,” reported The Times, “Mr. Purcell’s greatest shortcoming appears to be failing to integrate two difference cultures.” As a Wall Street lawyer commented, Mr. Purcell “never really melded the company where there’s an us versus them mentality; it was us against us.”
As the former Morgan Stanley CEO painfully learned, culture is not an afterthought. It’s a powerful force that can help organizations succeed, or get CEOs fired. Senior leaders ignore culture—and the communication that helps create a strong, healthy culture—at their peril.
Posted by Alison Davis at 03:07 PM
June 06, 2005
Contemplating clutter
Too many e-mails, too much paper and, these days at my house, too many paint cans and drop cloths: Major home improvement is under way, slowly and very messily.
So it’s no wonder that I’ve been thinking about clutter in all its forms. Take my favorite, for instance: information overload. Every employee we’ve ever talked to says he or she receives too much information. That’s no surprise. But the flip side is that employees also report that they don’t have access to enough information, especially when it comes to subjects they care about.
Contradictory? Not really, if you consider that much of the information that fills our various mail boxes comes unbidden—we didn’t ask for it, and we may not want it. When we do want to learn about something, we want to find what we’re looking for quickly, easily and intuitively,
And that’s where employee communication efforts often fall short. It’s relatively easy to fill in-boxes with lots and lots of messages. But it’s much harder to provide employees with access to information on an ongoing basis, so they can find what they’re looking for as effortlessly as locating a book on amazon.com
Far too often, employees go to an intranet site to get information, and they are thwarted because the site is too confusing, too full of clutter, and the search function is weak. These bad sites don’t need a makeover—they need a complete overhaul. They need professional help, like the gal on HGTV who helps you re-organize your garage. The show is called “Mission: Organization” for a reason.
Although the garage looks nice after the re-org project, the purpose is not aesthetics; it’s ease of use. (Now you can actually find your pruning shears and trim that perennial.)
Savvy consumer magazine publishers get this. They know that a print magazine is designed to let the reader browse through the pages, reading the features that are the most compelling. But who wants to keep all those old magazines around the house, piling up on the coffee table? When it’s time to look something up, it’s much easier to go online and search the magazine’s Web site.
According to a recent survey by 101communications, an information technology consulting firm, those who subscribe to digital versions of their favorite magazines like Web versions because they are easier to save (55%), convenient (54%) and have search capability (51%). (Print has its advantages: three out of four subscribers say they prefer print because it’s easier to read while traveling.)
So take a long, hard look at your intranet site. Is it clean, well-organized and easy to use? Or is it time for some clutter-busting spring cleaning?
Posted by Alison Davis at 02:57 PM | Comments (1)