Tag Archives: communication

like a boss: five ways to be a better one

8 Apr like a boss

like a boss
Some of us seek out management; most have management thrust upon us.
It’s a curious assumption, when you examine it, that being good at something automatically means you’ll be good at inspiring, organising and leading others to do it too. People are often too busy to think about how their management style shapes their environment and corporate culture. But it’s worth considering. A great start comes from the lovely Kim McKay, who recently said simply that she tries to “create the kind of place I want to work in.”

Here are few of the things I’ve learned – from my own mistakes and those of others – along the way. Oh, and I’ve labelled them neatly with song lyrics for easier recall my own amusement. (Ten internet points if you can identify the songs).

1) too much information
Yes, knowledge is power, but withholding knowledge to retain power speaks of weak leadership. Giving your team as much context as they need to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing encourages them to be proactive (sorry) in solving problems, and to feel empowered. They probably don’t need to know the intricacies of board politics, P&L or whatever else it’s your job to shoulder, decipher and make actionable.
There’s also a fine balance between encouraging staff to seek support for personal problems which affect them at work and becoming their best mate.  Or, as a former boss of mine demonstrated, trying to bond with your team by sharing way, way, way too much information about your personal life (I’m still scarred by her revelations). Your staff have got friends of their own. That’s not what they come to work for.

2) promise you will remember / that promises last forever
As an employee, you’re contracting to make good on what you said you could do in your job application. As a manager, you’re contracting to do what you say you’ll do. If your staffer isn’t performing as you’d anticipated and your workload is heavier as a result, that’s a problem you have to manage: that’s your job. It doesn’t mean all the things you’d contracted to deliver can be postponed or axed. Lead by example, not negative reinforcement. Delivering training, reviews and so on are not performance dependent.
A corporate culture in which management routinely fail to honour agreements to staff (from turning up to scheduled meetings to OT bonuses) is one in which everyone breaks promises. And the knock-on effect is that that will include those made to clients.

3) do you have to let it linger?
We all make bad decisions from time to time. And everyone deserves the opportunity to put things right. That goes for your staff and for you – if you’ve hired someone you think isn’t right, or they’ve screwed up, give them, and yourself a chance to try again. But if it’s still not working, do everyone a favour and put a decisive end to the situation. People don’t perform well in an environment where they feel they’re almost expected to under-deliver, and disgruntled unhappy people spread toxicity much faster than the shiniest happiest person can share positivity.
Be firm, be fair and let everyone go their separate ways without rancour. The only regret I have ever had about firing someone is letting it drag on for far too long, affecting other people in the team. The person in question went on to be much happier in a role far better suited to their skills, and my team flourished without the continual voice of negativity in their midst.

4) wanna walk like you, talk like you
The best managers I’ve had have been mentors too. Mentoring is about trying to empower someone to bring forth the best of her/himself. It’s not about creating a replicant Army of Me. There’s a difference between helping someone develop the skills they need to do their job brilliantly and helping them become brilliant in whatever way they wish. If you can’t accept that your mentee’s strengths or approach may be different to your own, or if they need to develop in an area that’s not your strong suit, the best way you can help is by resigning the post and helping them find someone who can.

5) don’t fear the reaper
Hire people who are smarter than you are. Give them the support, tools, resources and belief they need to excel. Trust them to do their job to the best of their ability (otherwise why did you hire them?) Then you can spend hours in the endless meetings which dog management, safe in the knowledge that they’ve got your back. Trust earns loyalty. People who respect, learn from and admire their bosses are seldom gunning for their job – and if you’re mentoring as well as managing them, you’ll know when they’re ready for a new challenge or a step up. Then you can delight in their success, and be all the happier in the fact it’s not at the expense of your own.

What are your top management skills? Do you agree with my five, and if so, which do you think is most important?

pop nerd quiz results:
1) Kasabian – Empire
2) Badly Drawn Boy – Promise
3) The Cranberries (ugh) – Linger
4) The Jungle Book – Wanna Be Like You
5) Blue Oyster Cult – Don’t Fear the Reaper

telling stories

15 Jan

I recently discovered a lovely Tumblr called “the great untold,” which is a collection of opening lines from the greatest tales never told. It reminded me of a story a beloved great aunt told me as she drifted in and out of senility. The story was long and convoluted; a mashup of several memories rather than a single tale and as it meandered along my attention was beginning to drift when a single sentence pierced my soul.

“Of course,” she said, “that was when the lieutenant’s monkey got out.”

It remains the greatest punchline I’ve ever heard.

So much is contained in that sentence: a magical sense of other-ness, exotic climes, a bygone age, a yearning for lost Empire, my aunt’s delightful deadpan pragmatism, her sense of decorum and her secret, irrepressible love of mischief. And everything’s better with monkeys.

Neil Gaiman says that there are only four words every storyteller wants to hear: “…and then what happened?”

We’re losing the ability to tell stories. I don’t know if it’s a consequence of the over-communicated self, continually babbling into phones and on Facebook about minutiae, or maybe it’s that less people read novels, but it seems to me many of us lack the ability to create narratives about our own lives. Being the articulate author of your own story is important, not only because it reminds you that everything is a choice, that your story is the consequence of choices you make, but also because it’s so damn tedious not to be. Those interminable tales with no clear purpose and no end in sight, no sense of having edited the irrelevant or selected only the choicest anecdotes for the listener’s pleasure. Assigning equal weight and significance to everything is the hallmark of a desperate bore.

I think it’s fundamentally disrespectful; I have enough pointless shit and tedious detail in my own head without having to take on someone else’s as well. Telling a good story is a way of demonstrating your desire to please and entertain your interlocutor. A story is a gift.

Bring back the lost art of the raconteur.

The reminiscences of elderly people often return to a particular place and time.  Caring for people with Alzheimer’s or senility, I noticed that the events of many years ago seemed more real and relevant than the present to them, and those were the stories they wanted to tell over and over again. When the mind starts to disintegrate, it’s as though we seek refuge in the time we lived most intensely in the past. Those happy times comfort us, shore us up against the dying of the light.

I wonder what that time will be for me, and whether I’ve already lived through it.The Lieutenant's Monkey

you know you are a dreamer…

31 Aug

I had a funny dream last night.

I know this is a socially unacceptable opening gambit (unless the dreamer reveals they dreamt of having sex with their interlocutor), but it illustrates a point, so be patient.

In my dream I was tasked with teaching an alien about the idiosyncrasies of modern life. It’s not clear whether this was an alien in a cultural or planetary sense, but in any case, I was explaining how various colloquialisms were used. At the point when the alien asked why there were two instances of the word “epic” to refer to a situation that seemed anything but, I woke up laughing.

epic comment thread is epic

I’m obsessive about language, the way it shapes our thinking, the way it transmits meaning first and a rich set of semiotic data second and the way it changes and evolves.

But when marketing people get a hold of it, bad things seem to happen. I think it’s time to say that we are losing touch with those with whom we seek to communicate.
Watching 4chan founder Christopher Poole painfully and painstakingly articulate the in-jokes and slang that make up the fabric of a world built in text,

“It’s a joke?”

“Yes.”

…I’m reminded of my own attempts to explain my own work to my parents and friends.  To say “I work in digital” is as meaningless as “I work in analogue,” unless you’re a watch maker.
We’re privileged to work in this industry, but we need to reconnect with reality: in the real world, barely anyone has read the Cluetrain Manifesto; Cory Doctorow is not famed for his bedtime stories;  people watch a funny video their mate sent them, not “a viral”.

You’re dreaming if you think your preoccupation with Insanity Wolf or Julia Gillard’s belatedly conversational use of Twitter is shared by your non- industry peers.  My non-digital industry friends are architects, film makers, journalists, teachers and rocket surgeons; they spend plenty of time on the internet for business and pleasure but online meta-subcultures pass them by, and what’s more, they’re not wishing they were in on the joke; they find it – brace yourselves, Digerati - faintly risible.

All tribes need their own language to define themselves, particularly those nascent groups who seek to firm up their identity; people who work in what’s ultimately still an emerging industry gain strength and a sense of belonging through shared slang.  So what?

So perhaps we need other ways to define ourselves: a code of conduct, agreed-upon professional standards of practice…? Just a thought.

By describing the work we do with jargon and obscure terminology, we’ll lose the ability to reach the people it’s our job to talk to.

By that I mean clients and punters alike: if we don’t talk human, we can’t talk to humans. And if we refer to our professional practice in arcane buzzwords, we can’t expect the true value to be understood.

A client said jokingly in a meeting recently “can we have all that Web 2.0 shit?” He was making an astute observation; piling on buzzwords for their own sake does no one any favours.  Flogging  mechanisms and tactics that aren’t relevant and won’t achieve specific objectives inevitably discredits the whole industry.  You can forgive people for thinking social media is a magic bullet when we obfuscate its meaning.  But it’s our job as communications professionals to create clarity.

At times it seems as though the whole industry is in the grip of a shared hallucination. Just because a conference your boss went to impressed upon her the need to have a corporate blog, a YouTube channel and a set of the finest vestments cut from fabric only very clever people can see doesn’t mean we shouldn’t challenge that. Your responsibility is to advise and consult on the best course of action for your clients’ needs.  Regardless of whether other chartered accountants give tax advice via Plurk, your professionalism requires you do what is needful and effective.

It’s time to wake up.  Let’s restore some perspective, stop using gibberish and call what we do what it is. We communicate. Do that. 
Better still, do it brilliantly.

Alternative ending: In the 1972 film Death Line, an inbred tribe of mutants roam the London underground croaking the last vestiges of human speech they’re capable of. “Mind the gap” they gasp in a hideous mockery of the words they had once mastered. Let’s not be those guys…

how to understand what women want

15 Jun know thyself

My response to Mark Pollard’s piece on getting a man to open up – apologies for the crass generalisations and largely hetero bias.

highly scientific Venn diagram

highly scientific Venn diagram

Some of my best friends are men, clever and inspiring fellows all, but even they sometimes struggle with what might seem very simple: communicating with the women they love. The specious logic of the “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” hypothesis starts to seem seductive – why should something this fundamental be so difficult unless we are, in fact, speaking different languages…?  Men, this post is for you…

He said, she said…

Women, by and large, are operating on a higher emotional plane than men; we’ve long since accepted complexities that you men are still grappling with. We don’t mind too much; we’re waiting patiently for you to catch up, and then what a joyous world it will be.

We’ve skipped lightly over the blatantly obvious and are dealing with the abstract.  Unfortunately, what this looks like to your average man is that we are saying one thing while meaning something completely different.  It leads to what can appear bewildering semantic hair-splitting.

“it’s not that I want you to do the laundry / watch this Balkan arthouse film with me / call your mum, I want you to want to do it”.

To which you may reasonably enough reply “but of course I don’t – I’ll do it because it must be done, but don’t expect me to be overjoyed about it.”  On a practical level, this is fine, because the outcome has been achieved, the problem solved. But then why is she sulking, sobbing or zipping off down the street with an ominously loud clickingclacking of the high heeled shoe?

Now hear this…

What’s wrong with this picture? You’ve tried to solve an emotional issue with a practical outcome. You haven’t listened to what’s really being said.

We’re speaking in poetry while you’re more prosaic; it’s a high art form where the spaces in between are as important as the words.

I heard a story about a woman married to an autistic man; she was tired and exasperated beyond measure by his inability to read her emotional responses. Having to rationally explain during the heat of the moment that she was upset or angry was proving difficult, and she feared that it would ultimately lead to a cooling of both negative and positive sentiment, leaving her an automaton in a marriage without passion.

Her solution was to hold up cards with the name of the emotion on them; this seemed less disruptive than vocalising and she was able to express herself and be understood.

Women need to give clearer cue cards; men need to work harder at reading them.

We understand intuitively that things (events, tasks, objects) often represent deeper concepts. You’re confused because we asked a friend’s advice about that thing at work and you can’t figure out why you’re annoyed about something which has ultimately nothing to do with you; we already know that you’re hurt because by not asking you, we seemed not to trust you.
Incidentally, the reason we didn’t ask you is because we just wanted to vent, and you have this insistence on solving problems; we need the space to be heard more than we need the answer: listening shows you believe the speaker to be worth hearing.

When we ask you to do something, spend five seconds figuring out what that thing might stand for. Is it demonstrating how much you value us? Is it your commitment to our family, the kids, the dog?

Essentially, this is the blueprint to get out of any onerous task. Figure out what the deeper issue is and solve it in a way that makes you happy too.  Demonstrate that you love the home you share and you’ll never have to go shopping for soft furnishings again (unless you want to).

I’m not saying it’s easy; I’m saying it’s an effort worth making. And you might just find it helps with other stuff too.  Whether you prefer this wisdom to come from the Matrix or from Plato, above all things, know thyself.

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