Monthly Archives: December 2009

The Elevator Speech

Posted on December 31, 2009 | Leave a comment

I recently posted on LinkedIn in response to another member’s call for help on his “elevator speech”. If you haven’t run into this quaint mnemonic, an elevator speech is a pre-planned, summary of who you are and what you want. It comes from the imagined situation wherein one is in the elevator with somebody you want to talk to. A new customer/client/member of the public who asks you to tell them about yourself. You have the length of the elevator ride (about 30 seconds to two minutes, depending on the situation) to make your pitch.

Elevator speeches are often used at networking events, where you’re meeting new people, introducing yourself to a potential investor, or trying to meet the people who will introduce you to the people you really want to meet.  Whether you’re interviewing for a job, at a cocktail party, or trying to find new clients for your business, it’s a good tool to have in your tool-box.

I’ve networked intensely for eight months now, and this is my advice:

  1. Communication is what the listener does. Try focusing on what your audience wants to know, not what you want them to know. How can you help them, and how can they help you. Make it easy for them by getting to your point quickly. You’ve actually got about the first 10 seconds to convince the listener that they should keep listening, before they move on mentally.
  2. Be specific. For example “I’m looking for a quality control job, and I’m want to talk to Jennifer Smith at Microsoft in Redmond about working there. I’m looking to find somebody that can introduce me to her.” Be that specific. The more specific you are, the easier it is to get what you want. It helps your audience decide quickly exactly how they can help you. No, they probably don’t know Jennifer, but they might know somebody who works at Microsoft in Seattle, or who lives in Redmond, or who’s first cousin once removed used to work in quality control at Microsoft. If the person or people you’re talking to can help you (or you them), then establishing your bona fides will happen in any following conversation.
  3. When you’re listening to somebody else’s elevator speech, focus on them. Think about how you can help them. It’s amazing how much more helpful others are once you’ve helped them, even in the smallest of ways. At least it makes you more memorable. I’ve had people call me up months later with a lead because I stayed focused and was supportive of them, not thinking about what I was going to say when it was my turn.
  4. Practise in front of your web-cam, or your mirror if you want to do it the old-fashioned way. Seriously. It’s a little thing, but you’ll come across much more relaxed and confident if you’re not worried about what you look like or what you want to say. You already know, so now focus on your audience instead. It make a much more powerful connection.

Good Luck!

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Posted in communications, interviews, listening, meetings, networking, presentations, relationships

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Treating Everyone the Same is Unfair

Posted on December 28, 2009 | Leave a comment

It’s okay to care about the people you work with. Spending more time with them will save you time, so it probably works better if you like them. Just make sure you treat everybody the same, because otherwise would be unfair. Right?

My two daughters came to me one day to complain of a perceived unequal treatment. They’d obviously discussed it at length, because it’s not often that they work together towards the same ends. I don’t remember what the specific complaint was, but I do remember the looks on their faces when I bluntly admitted that they were right.

They were shocked. They were appalled. They were expecting an argument, and when they didn’t get it they weren’t sure what to do. So I asked them if they wanted to know why I didn’t treat them the same. At least one of them is naturally curious and said “Yes.”

“Nichole,” I said, “You love talking on the phone, chatting on your computer, spending time with your friends. If had to ground you, the worst thing I could do is take away all your electronics and make you stay in your room. Then you couldn’t talk to your friends, and you’d go crazy with nothing to do in your room. Right?”

She allowed that I might have made a statement of fact that resembled reproducible reality in some fashion.

“Victoria,” I continued, “You like reading. A good day for your is hanging out in your room with a new book you just picked up at Chapters. If I grounded you by making you stay in your room and taking away your electronics, would that really punish you?”

Victoria admitted that no, being forced to stay in her room and read a book wouldn’t really bother her that much.

I turned back to Nichole. “If I took all your books away, Nichole, but left you your phone or laptop, that probably wouldn’t bother you that much, right?” She performed the ritual of the nod of the sullen teenager, which I took to mean some form of consent. “But if I did that to Victoria, how do you think she would feel?” It was a rhetorical question, not requiring an answer, and she had been down this road with me often enough to know this.

The gears duly turned, and wisp of smoke appeared at their ears and slowly drifted upwards, and they made the “Huh” sound in unison.

I concluded with “Treating you the same is not fair. You’re two different people, and to be fair I have to treat you differently.”

“That makes sense, Daddy. Thanks”

Okay, I made up that last part about them saying thank-you. I think I still got my point across to them.

Your employees are the same. No, they’re not sullen teenage girls. The are the same as your children in that they’re all different. Some love being recognized publicly in front of their peers for a job well done. Some are embarrassed by the attention. They would do anything to avoid it including going out of their way not to do a good job. Some are motivated by money, some by their family, some love the work for it’s own sake, some do the job to support their hobbies, some need to work with the public, some hate it.

Staff need three basic things to do a good job. These are the necessary prerequisites on the way to building an outstanding team that delivers and is motivated to work together. Think of it as the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, except for employees. The three things they need are 1)  the skills and tools to the job, 2) clear expectations about who does what by when, and 3) somebody at work that takes an interest in them and their career. If you treat your employees all the same the signal you’re sending is “I don’t care about you, because you’re all the same to me.” Think about how you would feel, if your boss said that to you?

It’s up to you as their manager to figure out what each of their unique talents, abilities, and motivators are. It’s your job to match the person to the job (or the job to the person). And it’s your job to make sure everybody gets treated fairly, which doesn’t always mean treating them equally.

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Posted in coaching, developing staff, influencing, listening, relationships

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Go Slow to Go Fast

Posted on December 24, 2009 | Leave a comment

It’s okay to care about the people who work for you, but how do you show you care without being creepy or over-familiar? How do you build the relationships and establish the trust you need to get the best performance out of your team as a whole?

Our first job always is to deliver results. That’s the bottom line. That’s what we get hired for, that’s what we get paid for, that’s why we have staff. If we don’t complete, conclude, accomplish, or perform what’s expected of us, then we’re not doing our job.

As managers we perform through the people that work for us. We can’t do everything ourselves. If we could, we wouldn’t need staff. When we try to do it all ourselves we end up being stressed out, angry, and non-productive. Or we become micro-managers, doing everybody else’s work twice and making them and us stressed-out, angry, and non-productive.

This is not the most valuable use of our time. Time is our most valuable resource. It’s more valuable than our skills, knowledge, talent, money, equipment, or staff. Without time we have no way to leverage the other resources. Whatever we do with our time, that’s what’s most important to us. What we do, not what we say.

So what do we choose spend our time on? One characteristic of the best leaders is that they regularly spend time with their staff, one-on-one. At first this sounds counter-intuitive. If you’re spending all your time with staff, when do you do your own work? Here’s the management silver bullet that everybody’s always looking for: your people are your work. That’s why it’s call leadership. You’re leading people.

Developing your staff is the best way to make sure you and your team will deliver. Ensuring that your expectations of them are clear. Making sure that they have the tools and equipment to deliver. Making sure their natural talents are brought and and used in their work. Then getting out of their way and letting them do the work. It sounds simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Regular, consistent, one-on-one face-to-face verbal contact with your staff is is the best way to establish trust, set expectations, give feedback, coach and develop your staff. It’s the best was to build a team. It’s hard work, requires discipline, and takes time and patience, yet it pays incredible dividends. It’s simple, but it’s not easy.

Why is regular face-to-face communication so powerful? Humans are hard-wired for relationships with other humans. The first thing a new-born baby will recognize is a face. We can’t help it. As much as all those those yucky soft-skills, emotions, and relationship building stuff seems to get in the way and slow us down, the reality is that people are emotional beings. No matter how goal-oriented or technical we like to think we are, we have to deal with people to get things done. Ignoring emotions is ineffective.

Interesting things start to happen when you meet with your staff on a regular basis. First, our communications are clear and targeted, tailored for the way each person prefers to communicate. Any misunderstanding that might get glossed over in a group setting has a better chance of being caught and clarified. That means less time going back and fixing things.

Second, when your direct reports know and trust that they’ll have  regular, periodic, uninterrupted access they stop interrupting you quite as often. Things get saved up for your time together. More time saved for you, and more effective and efficient communication for both of you.

Thirdly, trust is built over time through regular contact. Expectations and project status are better communicated. Staff will know what your intentions and goals are, and will be able to step up and support you and each other without detailed, laborious instructions.

Fourth, you’ll be spending time putting out fires before they start. Regular, direct communication with your staff means that you’ll be better informed on regular basis. This means you’ll be able to make better decisions, make choices more thoughtfully and promptly, and be more proactive than reactive.

An example of this is Nelson’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar. He spend a lot of time with his ship’s Captains during his travels back and forth across the Atlantic searching for the Spanish Armada, both over dinner in groups and individually. When Nelson found the Spanish, the English Captains had a very clear understanding of Lord Nelson’s intent, knew everything Nelson knew, and trusted Nelson and the other commanders at all levels. Nelson didn’t need to saddle his Captains with tedious and detailed rules of engagement that tried to cover every contingency.

The result was that a fleet that should have been soundly trashed was able to successfully employ risky new tactics to defeat the more numerous and larger ships of the Spanish navy without losing any of their own ships. It was what modern military parlance calls a “self-synchronized force” (page 28).

Want to build a team? Spend time with each team member regularly. Spending time with your staff means you’ll have more time. Go faster by slowing down.

http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dodccrp.org%2Ffiles%2FAlberts_Power.pdf&ei=rwYxS4T-N46GswPHt_G7BA&usg=AFQjCNHC-iYum8D8yf-sMLJ7wqcpK1VwKQ&sig2=nOxKgNbqAeskwZY-zYE8nQ

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It’s Okay to Care

Posted on December 21, 2009 | Leave a comment

In my last post I talked about finding your own talent, and gave an example of what passit ion looks like. What happens if you’re leading a team of people – do you care what their talents are?

When many leadership and management coaches talk about talent and passion they usually do so on a very personal level. Your personal level. They don’t talk about learning what your staff’s talents might be, and how to line those talents up with their job responsibilities. It seems almost like you’re crossing a personal boundary to discover somebody’s passion or natural ability. It’s one of those squishy, icky soft skills that so many of us shy away from because it makes us uncomfortable.

And getting straight answers when selecting staff is difficult. The question “what’s your passion?” might get you an answer like “I’ve always loved scanning and filing. As a child I always kept my room very neat.” Any guesses what kind of job this person is interviewing for? While I’m sure that such people exists and are sincere, as a boss in a job interview your B.S. meter is going to read high on that kind of answer. You’re going to want to probe. Answers we can trust come with an established relationship, which you will build over time.

All great companies cultivate trust as part of their environment. They get the most out of their people because they genuinely care about them. All people want to know that somebody cares about them as a person. If somebody at work cares about them, then they’re going to look forward to work and will care about doing a good job.

But when I say companies create trust, what I really mean is that the people that belong to that company actually do the work of building trust by building relationships.

As managers, we can define our jobs finding the right people to deliver the desired results. A big part of that is developing (aka caring about) the people who work for us. How can we fit the right person to the right job, motivate them in the most effective way, and develop them as human beings, if we don’t know who they are and what drives them?

Does this sound manipulative? Sure, it sounds that way. If you consider providing a work-place where the staff actually look forward to coming to work, know what’s expected of them, and have the skills and tools to do the best job possible every day as being manipulative, then it certainly is.

If you’re not comfortable getting up close and personal with people, and need to keep them at an arm’s length because one day you might have to fire them, then I totally respect that. Just don’t complain when you can’t figure out a way to get your team to work together, or how to motivate your staff, and coach somebody whose poor performance if uncorrected will lead to their dismissal. If you can’t or won’t learn the skills to manage people, and the intestinal fortitude to use those skills when needed, then maybe you should consider not being a manager.

Yes, it hurts to fire somebody. It should hurt. If it doesn’t hurt then you’re not doing your job as a boss. Lack of pain means you have no connection to them. You haven’t spend the time and effort to do everything reasonable to help that person not get fired. It probably means you’re one of those bad bosses you’re used to complaining about.

Do you care?

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Posted in behaviour, developing staff, influencing, listening, relationships

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Following Your Passion

Posted on December 19, 2009 | 2 Comments

As a Scout leader, having actually sat around a campfire and sung “Kumbaya” (not my choice, but it takes all kinds), I don’t have much patience for leadership mumbo-jumbo. I’ve grown up with leadership theory from age thirteen, and most of it is crap.

If I don’t know what behaviour to change, or what to do as a result of what somebody is trying to tell me, then it’s useless to me. It’s like telling somebody that you love them, but if you’re not willing to do anything about it, it’s just meaningless words. If I can get one good,  real, physical action or behaviour out of a workshop, book, article, or seminar, then I’ll count it as good and try to merge it into my daily practise.

I was writing another blog post about remembering names, and I realized that the example I wanted to use was also a perfect real-life example of how following your passion leads to success. Until now “follow your passion” was one of those leadership mumbo-jumbo phrases that meant nothing to me, because I didn’t know what it looked like.

I had the privilege of watching Bob Gray at the PMI SAC conference. As a kid he wanted to be magician. It was his passion and obsession. It drove his parents crazy, and he spent all his time and effort learning magic tricks. One of the tricks he learned was how to read minds. Turns out that the clairvoyance and mind-reading that stage magicians do is really a memory trick. If you can learn to memorize things, then you can seem to read peoples thoughts.

Bob has trained his memory to a phenomenal level. For example he can tell you the capital, population, and major exports of any country in the world. He’s also in the Guinness World Book of Records for being the only human who can speak backwards. That is, if you give him a word, he can speak it backwards to you. Not just by inverting the word and speaking each syllable from back to front, but in such a way that if you recorded him and then played the recording itself backwards, it would sound like the original word. I suspect this is also a memory trick. Since there are only so many distinct sounds in the English language, memorize each of them and their corresponding backward sound . . .

Neat trick, but so what?

When Bob ‘grew up’ and stopped being a stage magician he got a real job with a health club. Part of his job was sales. He was so good at it, that the head office asked him to teach other employees how he did it. He used this childhood magician training to remember his clients’ names. Not only their names, but also their spouses’ names, childrens’ names, hobbies, what they did for a living, and other details. Because he knew his clients names, they were more likely to sign-up and renew their health club membership. Somebody at that club cared about them. That turned into more sales and success for Bob, which in turn resulted in recognition and appreciation from the company.

Now Bob makes a very comfortable living travel to conferences and giving workshops on memory techniques. Again, he used his performance experience as a stage magician, springing from his childhood passion, to get his point across in an entertaining and memorable way. I watched him teach a room of six hundred people a better way to remember peoples names in less than an hour, and we had fun doing it.

So what?

Bob followed his passion. Even when he had to get a “real”  job which had nothing to do with being a magician, he used his natural talents and passion to help make him more successful in that job.

So what?

Bob is an apparently happy, well-adjusted, and financial secure person who enjoys his work. This is certainly one definition of success, and Bob achieved it by leveraging his talent and passion for magic, entertaining people, and sharing.

What’s your talent, and how are you using it in your life?

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Posted in behaviour, setting goals

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So What

Posted on December 7, 2009 | 1 Comment

“Leadership training is like first-aid training. You never know when you’re going to need it, but when you do, it could save a life” – General Lewis MacKenzie

A frustration many of us experience when taking all this wonderful training and realizing a week, month, or year later that we don’t even remember the instructor’s name. Early on I figured I’d either have to start finding a way to carry out something, anything of what I’d leaned, or stop wasting my time and my employer’s money by not going to any more trainings.

I’ve been to a lot of training in my life. Starting at age thirteen in Air Cadets (I was a geek from an early age), on through working my way through university in the Communications Reserve, and then working my way up the corporate ladder. I’ve leaned team building, listening skills, and project management. I’ve been to lunch-&-learns, off-sites, and conferences.

I don’t remember or use most of what I was supposed to learn at most of these conferences, but I got something useful out of all of them. Even the bloody awful ones. I did this by applying the “so what?” question.

The “so what” questions will help you figure out one thing, anything, that you can take back to work with me and put into action the next day. Something you can write down in one sentence on a yellow stickee note and put up on your computer monitor and practise daily until it becomes a habit. If the class was active listening, the summary was “pay attention”. I might summarize the basics of project management as “who does what by when”.

What happens if you don’t apply what you’ve learnt? I’m talking in general now, not just in terms of management and leadership. It takes about 30 days of daily practise for a habit to become ingrained. Even as something as simple as flossing your teeth. We all know that it’s important for dental hygiene, but some of us have a hard time doing it every month, let alone every day. Yet once it does become a habit, something we do without thought or hesitancy, it become effortless.

It seems trivial and over-simplistic to put a one sentence reminder on a yellow stickee. But that sentence (or image or sound) is a trigger for everything else that came before it. Leaving it up on your computer monitor (or bathroom mirror, or dresser) reminds you the entire experience it came from.

Becoming better at what we do, if it’s welding or managing welders, is also a habit. It requires focused, disciplined effort, feedback, and practise. After a while it becomes automatic, like driving a car or flossing your teeth. Then you’re ready for the next change.

In our busy lives, the thought of adding one more thing to an already long list of things we feel bad about not doing is not appealing. Yet doing the same thing day after day, when it’s not working, is not going to make things better either. Making things a little better every day is like compound interest. Doing something a little better every day you do it adds up a lot over time.

If a big goal is so overwhelming that it doesn’t seem possible, break it down into smaller goals. Find that one little thing that you can do better, and practise it until it’s a habit. Then move on to the next one. One at a time, over time, is the fastest way to improve.

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Posted in continous learning, continuous improvement, productivity, setting goals

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The Tragedy of the Welder

Posted on December 2, 2009 | 2 Comments

When I started my corporate career, I was a programmer. I figured I’d sit in a dark room, and every once in a while somebody would slip a pizza under my door. I’d be left alone to do my work. Things didn’t turn out that way. I ran into what Mark Hortsman calls “The Tragedy of the Welder”.

It goes something like this:

There once was a welder who was very good at his job. He enjoyed welding, his work quality was high, he worked fast. He delivered results, and his bosses were happy.

Because Joe was good at welding, his bosses wanted to reward him. They promoted him, gave him more money and more responsibility. This included some other junior welders to work under him.  Instead of doing what he enjoyed (welding), he found himself spending more and more of his time doing paperwork, sorting out problems with his staff, dealing with missed deadlines, anything but actually welding. Joe soon found that he wasn’t enjoying coming to work as much as he used to.  Some days he didn’t even want to go to work. He thought maybe he should quit and find another job. Go back to just welding.

He wasn’t happy, his bosses weren’t happy, and the other welders started wondering when Joe became such a jerk. He wasn’t one of the guys anymore, nor good at his job. Now he was just another know-nothing manager. The best welder wasn’t welding anymore, and he wasn’t really enjoying being the boss. Morale dropped. Production and quality fell.

It wasn’t Joe’s fault. He didn’t let the promotion go to his head. He was still trying to good job, because he enjoyed being good at what he did. That’s part of what made him a good welder to begin with, and people respected him for it. What he didn’t have were the skills to be a good manager of welders.

Being a manager & leader is different from being a good welder, or any other skill. It is also a skill in itself, which means it can be learned, practised, and measured.

There is a lot of management & leadership theory out there. Much of it is useless. Most of it fails the “so what?” test. The theory sounds great, or makes us feel good for a while, but so what? How am I supposed to use theory to get things done? What’s the benefit? What’s the deliverable? What does this theory look like in practise?

Theory doesn’t tell us what we really want to know – what to do, who does it, and how you know when you’re done.

I’ve run into a lot of leadership in theory and in practise. I learned the most from my mistakes and others’ examples. I learned to apply the “so what” rule to figure out what works and what doesn’t, and to get work done through other people. While individuals sometimes create great works, nobody works alone (not even Michaelangelo). People working together execute all significant, worthwhile human endeavours. Which means somebody, or several some bodies, lead and coordinate that effort.

Next time: applying the “so what?” test to management theory.

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Posted in behaviour, leadership

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