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Communications

Trips, Sniffs and Nerves – Managing You, So You Can Manage Your Message

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Nerves are the most common obstacles to the successful delivery of messages. Managing them can often make a difference in how your message is received. The trick is to acknowledge your nerves. If you are feeling a little nervous before a meeting, you may want to take something to settle your stomach. Sometimes eating a few soda crackers does the trick, while other people find using chamomile or mint tea may work best.  Have a breath mint in case your nerves set off a case of bad breath. Don’t have that extra cup of coffee or caffeinated soda, it will only add to your overall jumpiness.  Whatever you do, don’t pop a piece of chewing gum in your mouth, not only can it make any nausea you are feeling worst, you may also find yourself chomping away unattractively.  If you can’t seem to shake your nerves, tell the people that you are meeting with or presenting to that you are a bit nervous.  They are human and can relate to nerves and what’s more, they will generally work to put you at your ease.

If that won’t work, try some of these calming tips:

  • Do some deep breathing exercises, shoulder roles and neck stretches.
  • If your face tends to go red when you are nervous, consider wearing a red or bright shirt to offset your face.
  • Keep your food intake to simple non-fatty foods.
  • Never drink alcohol before a meeting.
  • Avoid taking medication that will make you drowsy.
  • Visualize yourself speaking, imagine yourself confident and assured.
  • Realize that people want you to succeed; they want a good meeting as well.
  • Forget about yourself, the audience is not meeting with you to see YOU, they want to hear your message so focus on your message not you.
  • Try to think ahead of all the possible questions you may be asked.
  • Be yourself, be genuine and natural.
  • Bring cheat notes for yourself in case your mind goes blank.

Keep in mind that all of the adrenaline moving through your system can be used to your advantage. With the extra energy, you are producing you can add passion and excitement to your discussion. If you have done your homework then you are operating at an advantage. You know your audience because you have researched them, you know your presentation content because you have practised it.  You have briefed the participants about what you will be discussing so there are no surprises because surprises at work are a bad idea.  In short, you are prepared for the meeting/presentation.

So now that you’re calm enough to string together a sentence, keep in mind a few things. Little things can easily distract you and others, so don’t do anything that will take away from your message. Wear clothes that are neat and tidy but most of all comfortable. Don’t get caught having to adjust a too tight tie throughout a meeting.  Continuously adjusting your tie can turn into a nervous habit that is distracting and has the additional side effect of making you look like a liar…or a bad Rodney Dangerfield impersonator.

If you have a series of meetings on the same day, wear sensible shoes. Stumbling into the arms of an unsuspecting colleague because the heels on your shoes are too high or your shoes are too tight and your toes have gone numb won’t help you to focus on your issues. Falling flat on your face isn’t exactly going to put you in the right frame of mind either.

Make sure your clothes don’t  detract from your message.  It would be unfortunate if, after taking the time to craft a smart message, the only thing your audience can remember is a low cut blouse or a shirt so loud it should have come with ear plugs.

Bring tissues.  There is nothing more distracting than a runny nose. Not only will you start to sound like a bloodhound on the trail of a fox, but your sniffling will distract you and everyone else in the meeting. On a similar line, avoid strong perfume or a heavy aftershave.   No matter how appealing the scent, in a small enclosed space it can be too much of a good thing.  There are also people with sensitivities or allergies to scent and a brief whiff of a strong cologne can give them a vicious headache or other unpleasant side effects.

A friend of mine was recently telling me about a colleague who had a violent reaction to the smell of chocolate.  Her reaction was so strong that one day when someone accidentally brought it into her space, she took one whiff and was out of commission for three days. Talk about leaving a lasting impression.

My best tip? Try to remember that you are in charge of your message and if you deliver it with confidence, then that’s how it will be received.

Do you have any memorable first impressions or meetings that have gone wrong or right stories to share?  I’d love to hear them.

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Communications

A Simple Lesson About Brand Taught By Disney

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Day One of Our Disney Trip - Miami 165I went on a Disney Cruise with my kids in February. I specifically chose Disney because my husband wasn’t going with us (he’s busy working on his master’s thesis). I felt that if I was going to travel alone with my kids to unfamiliar places, I needed to have some back up. I needed to be completely confident that no matter what happened, we were covered. I wanted the comfort of a solid brand. Disney does that. It gives me comfort. Disney says you can feel safe taking your kids onto that giant ship and your first cruise.

We had a wonderful time – an excellent vacation complete with 200 plus photos. Based on the conversations I’ve had with different people both during and after my cruise, chances are I would have had an equally wonderful time on a number of other cruise lines too, but that’s not the point. I would not have taken another cruise. I took the cruise because of Disney. When you build a powerful brand, amazing things happen. Grown women dress-up like princesses, executives laugh like pirates and people take risks on new ventures based on your reputation.

So how do you get your brand to where you want it to be? Well if you’re a communications professional working in an association or not-for-profit, the most difficult things to accept are that a) good brand building isn’t up to you and b) you can’t help it along with advertising or promotional work. The best thing you can do to improve your brand is to talk internally. Your brand isn’t about what you portray, it’s about what you do and what the public and your clients perceive about you.

Let’s go back to the cruise for a minute. As you can imagine, if you put thousands of people in a confined space and throw hundreds of over-excited children into the mix, things don’t always go as planned. There were melt downs and temper tantrums, not to mention some of the children‘s bad behavior, but those things never got in the way of service.  The staff was always pleasant, funny, innovative and even on occasion suitably sarcastic. They got adults to laugh off situations that can quickly escalate into anger and distracted children who were revving up to whine. At one point, my 15-year-old came back from the breakfast buffet angry because another passenger had been rude to the server at the counter. When I asked him how the server dealt with the rude passenger, he said, “He just kept trying to do what the passenger asked.”

And there it is in a nutshell. You build a good brand by giving customers what they are asking for. My son didn’t want a scene at breakfast; neither did any of the other passengers at the buffet, so the server did his best not to create one. The result was that my son was angry at the passenger on behalf of the crew member. When a four-year-old girl had a fit while the ship was debarking at one of our island stops, the staff immediately distracted her. They got her attention focused on them and not her parents and managed to keep the rest of us moving.

So if you want to build a strong brand, build a strong service orientation into your team – even if that team only serves internal clients.  Make your raison d’être centred completely on helping your clients be successful. In health care we call it client-centred care, but experienced business people and the folks at Disney simply say, the customer knows best.

Lessons learned

  • Good brands come from good client centered experience.
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Communications, Government Relations

Lobbyists are Liars and Cheaters

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lobbying myths

Lobbyists are liars, cheaters focused on bending government to their personal interests. They are the dark side of any political engagement. When they are very good at their jobs they can influence not only government policies, but also force cultural change and remove our essential rights.

Rights like, the right to drive drunk, the right to litter or the important right to abuse our children.  In Ontario, they have already stripped us of the right smoke in our own cars when children are present and to smoke where people have to work. What about those lobbyists who insist that recycling is better than building bigger landfills or those slimy buggers who lobbied to make us wear seat belts?

OK, misconceptions about lobbyists is clearly a pet peeve of mine and no, not all lobbyists are as pure in their pursuits as those just mentioned, but neither are they evil doers bent on shoring up corporate interests. Despite this, the myth of “bad lobbyist” is a persistent and frustrating one. Like every profession there are those individuals we could all do without, but generally, lobbyist are a smart and strategic group of communicators doing good work. I’m quite proud of that aspect of my career and it completely lines up with my current work for a national charitable organization focused on serving Canadians.

Lobbyist are often officially defined as those paid to represent a particular group or interest. Given the complexities of the government, it is not unreasonable to assume that an organization might seek the assistance of those who specialize in understanding government to represent them.  Paying someone to lobby or accepting money in order to lobby is not suspicious behavior. Despite this, lobbyists carry with them the expectation of bad behaviour.  I have actually had people laugh in my face when I’ve raised the issue of lobbying ethics, but keep this mind the next time you think about lobbyists.  What other communications professional is obliged to complete a public explanation of their activities and intent before and every time they initiate their business practice?

Another pervasive myth that surrounds government relations is the discussion of access.  The myth runs something like this, a good lobbyist is someone who can get you access to government officials.  What this implies is that access is limited, content irrelevant and objectives extraneous. It says that your issue, its effect on the public and any informed solutions you may have to offer are irrelevant if you don’t have a personal friendship with the right government official or enough cash to hire the right lobbyist.

If that’s true, I want to know who died and left professional lobbyists in charge of my rights as a citizen? Having a lobbyist with good contacts in government can facilitate the timing and effectiveness of your meetings, speeding things along, but it shouldn’t be and rarely is, a requirement for meeting with elected officials or civil servants. If effective government relations are reliant upon hiring a lobbyist who has some prior affiliation with the ruling party, do you really want that government?  Fortunately, if access to politicians ever becomes reliant on prior relationships it’s easy enough to fix. Remember who your friends are during the next election…

Lessons Learned

  • Great things can come from lobbying.
  • Real lobbying is not about selling access.
  • Good governments (and good politicians) are never afraid of hearing your opinion.
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Communications, Internal Communications

Are You Thinking About Creating Misinformation?

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Misinformation GraphicsIt occurred to me that the number of articles I was reading on weekly basis was growing at an incredible rate. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever consumed as much new information on a regular basis in my life.  Not even in my university days when trolling through the stacks for the best and most insightful articles was a regular occurrence did I read so much. If you’re reading this from Facebook, LinkedIn or Stumbleupon, you probably know what I mean.

On any given day, I’m getting smart tips from social media gurus, insights from those in the communications or marketing fields. Thought provoking pieces from political pundits, updates and comments on Facebook, not to mention the range of topics I cover when playing on Pinterest or Stumbleupon. In addition to my own pursuits, my friends are regularly sharing links to interesting articles with me too. I don’t think I’m alone in these habits.

It should come as no surprise then that we are seeing some interesting trending towards the popularization of information graphics.  The general idea of an information graphic is to deliver multiple messages in a snapshot. They are hardly a new concept, but the mechanisms for creating them are more readily available now. Today, all you have to do to create an information graphic is import the content you have in mind into a program and tada, an information poster is produced.

I work in an organization that has thousands of people operating out of different locations. Its my job to get messages to them on a wide range of topics and in a manner that they will actually digest. Information graphics seem like the perfect solution.  All the best parts of a poster, but also a way to convey multiple messages. What could be better? Great idea right, well, sort of.

Last week a friend of mine sent me an information graphic of her resume. I was fascinated to see how these documents worked in action when I knew the content. The resume looked ok, but there was one problem.  Her new resume didn’t come anywhere close to demonstrating how smart or experienced she was. In fact, if anything, it made her seem more junior. Taking her 20 plus years of brilliance and distilling it down to a couple of awards and statistics that at best was of passing interest. I started looking around for better versions.  I checked out a range of information graphics from those meant to impart pearls of wisdom on social media to those intended to act as an organizational dashboard. When they work, they are brilliant, clear, concise and exactly what you need when you’ve got a lot to say in a little bit of time. The problem is, for the most part, they don’t work well and that’s because they are created on the principle that you can apply a one size fits all mind set to communications.

After all of these years of talking about getting more effective at the knowledge transfer process, it’s almost as if we now seem intent on turning information back into data. That’s effectively what most of these information graphics do. They obliterate relevant information and highlight irrelevant statistics. In one instance one of the stats that showed up was the number of cups of coffee the applicant required to get started in the morning. In my personal favorite, the creator of the graphic effectively argued that the reason small businesses should embark on social media was because everyone else was doing it. Really? Are we in elementary school? I’m sure I could come up with more sound reasons, but then those reasons might not have convenient numbers.

To be clear, its not that I think information graphics are a bad idea, on the contrary, they can be brilliant. What I think is that like any communications medium, you need to use your brain. You can’t just stick your information into a formula and get good results like magic. Communications has always been about understanding your audience, knowing your objectives and speaking to them clearly. How does a one size fits all solution do that effectively?

I’d love to hear from you if you know of some examples of brilliant information graphics. Drop me a line on the blog or LinkedIn.

Lessons Learned

  • It isn’t better to look good than to be good. Don’t use statistics where a sentence would be clearer and pie charts where a picture would do the job better.
  • No matter what medium you use to communicate, you have to keep your skills as a communicator in the forefront.  If you want to use clever graphics to deliver a message, talk to a professional about designing one that meets your particular needs.
  • Take a note of those who have used information graphics effectively and find out how they did it. Canadian Blood Services has done a brilliant job of it for years.
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Communications

3 Tips for Creating the Right Mood For Your Message

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This blog entry is a bit of a departure for me, but the experience illustrates so well how setting and approaBook Clubch can influence how ideas are communicated that I thought I would share the experience.

I recently joined a book club.  I am not a fan of book clubs.  They remind me of being in school and having to read books that are informative, but really boring. Simply not my idea of fun. So I’ll say that I went into the process with some trepidation, however I went because in this instance, my friend Jen Hunter, a dynamo who defines optimism, was leading the club.  Jen was also hosting it at a cool new venue, the Hub Ottawa. The book also had an intriguing title and I thought, if a book club could work for me, this was its best shot. The book, The Art of Possibility is a wonderful read from Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander. It will make you laugh, cry and show you how to see the possibilities in every situation.

As it happens, just as I was starting to read the Art of Possibility, another dynamo friend of mine, Leslie Turcotte, suggested that I take a look at a TED presentation by Amy Cuddy, “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are”. The presentation explored how we could boost our own self-esteem or sense of power by changing our body posture.  The first chapter of the Art explored how we could give ourselves an “A” psychologically and consequently improve our performance. It seemed obvious to me that they were two ideas that should be joined.  I shared the TED presentation with Jen and she shared it with the book club members.  We all laughed at the antics that followed in our private worlds as we implemented the suggestions from the book and the presentation. Worlds destined to collide, collided and the only reason they did was because I received an invitation that worked (and I opened my mind to the possibility that a book club might be an enjoyable experience).

I should add that in addition to the book being a good choice, the book club members were smart, funny and insightful.  Nothing boring about this crowd.  The setting at the Ottawa Hub was thought provoking and in fact, the way we explored the book using a “World Café” style, was engaging.  So the book club in no way resembled what I imagined book clubs to be,  obligation and boredom. I am now optimistically looking forward to the next meeting of the book club and the newest book.

Lessons Learned

  • The best communications in the world will fail if the audience is unprepared to listen. It’s your job as a communicator to make sure they are prepared to listen.
  • Find vehicles that deliver old messages in new ways.  If you’re planning an event, consider what you can do to raise its appeal or intrigue your audience. It could be a clever invite or an unexpected theme, venue or approach.
  • Find multiple ways of delivering the same message.  People learn in different ways and by approaching the same message in different ways you are more likely to a) be understood by a wider group of people but also b) reinforce your message for those who can take it in multiple ways.
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Government Relations

Warming Up The Audience Before Delivering Your Message

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As a consultant I have walked into rooms where the temperature was so cold I debated getting gloves, but whether I’m lobbying or speaking at an event, I always warm up my audience before delivering my message. When they’re warm, I’m hot.

A Story from the Field

The CEO of the large pharmaceutical company was anxious to meet with an Assistant Deputy Minister (ADM).  His company had considerable concerns around a regulatory process and he wanted to share their proposals towards addressing that challenge.  He knew that in the weeks prior to his meeting there had been quite a bit of bad press about the program the ADM was responsible for. What’s more, the bad press had resulted from many unfortunate and accusatory comments leveled directly at the ADM by another pharmaceutical company.  It was of little surprise to the CEO when he was only granted 30 minutes for the meeting, and even less of a surprise when 30 minutes was reduced to 15 minutes once he arrived.

Rather than launching into his proposal, he started the meeting by explaining that he understood the challenges the department faced.  He explained that he thought the press coverage unfortunate since it did nothing to contribute to an open dialogue between his industry and the department.  The ADM who had started the meeting with her hands folded across her chest and her lips so tightly pursed she might have produced diamonds from coal, slowly began to relax.  When her assistant came into the meeting to get her after 15 minutes, the ADM shook her head and the meeting proceeded. By the time the CEO explained that his company funded a group of independent scientists who would be available for an exchange program with the department due to their specialized knowledge, 45 minutes had elapsed. The ADM was leaning forward attentively and asking about how the scientists were chosen and how the exchange might work. The meeting ended after an hour and there were smiles all round.

As government relations exercises go, I have rarely been so impressed with a client for turning what could have been a disaster into a triumph. When we were told we had 15 minutes I wasn’t sure if he would stay or walk out, but he was a total trooper.  Its a lesson that has stayed with me.

Three Tips For Managing First Meetings

  • Assume nothing about your audiences knowledge of you; make sure your position/attitude is clearly stated at the beginning of the meeting.
  • Read the body language of the person you are meeting with and respond to it.
  • Establishing rapport will serve you better than any well practiced pitch.

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