Tag Archives: communicator

Communications, Internal Communications

E-MAIL Versus Communications

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It lurks, waiting for the unsuspecting communicator.  Its disguise, the quick and easy transition of words or documents from one place to another. Yet it has an insidious power that can transform grown men into small-minded bullies or professional women into petty tyrants. Yes, I’m talking about e-mail.  If we’re totally honest with ourselves, we would see email for what it really is, a supervillain.  I’ve seen the horror it can do.

I’ve run down a hallway shouting to colleagues to, “STOP SENDING E-MAILS” when a chain of emails with some of our stakeholders across the country escalated into war. It’s not that I don’t enjoy a good joke and really, email fights are always funny in retrospect. It is just that when you make your living building relationships, you don’t have much humour about watching years of cultivation, goodwill and hard work go up in flames because of a few poorly worded emails. It’s not just your external stakeholders who can be affected by it either. Internal emails are probably among the most prolific contributors to poor morale.

A poorly worded or too widely sent email can spiral a team into chaos. I’ve coached managers on what to say to chronic email abusers and I’ve had to soothe frustrated team members when someone showed disrespect to them in an email. There is also the abusive reply all function. Imagine the chain of events that unfolds when thousands of people receive a shrill email questioning management on a decision that impacted the whole organization. I still wake up screaming.

Or there is the unjustified anger that follows when someone sends an email with directions and subsequently does not get the behaviour they want. If I hear one more time, “But I sent them an email!” I may get dangerous. For the record:

  • Sending does not mean people received it.
  • Receiving it doesn’t mean they read it.
  • Reading it doesn’t mean they understood it.

There are protocols associated with email use that is a Google search away, so I won’t belabour the point here, but keep these lessons in mind.

Lessons Learned

  • Read it out loud, if it sounds obnoxious, it is. Don’t send it.
  • A smiley face after being obnoxious doesn’t make the email less obnoxious.
  • How many people really need to see your message? Do the math and don’t add anyone else.
  • If you’re getting angry, stop emailing, pick up the phone or walk down the hall.
  • If it’s urgent, important or a risk issue, don’t email, pick up the phone or walk down the hall.
  • E-mail is a temporary short-cut for sharing information, not a substitute for good communications or good relationship management.

Have any e-mail nightmares to share? Do you LOVE email or are you a careful user?

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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

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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