Tag: communications

Seeing the Elephant

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

It’s easy to assume that the more senior you get in an organization, the more you can see the whole.

This is only partially true.

It’s true that you have more access to a facsimile of the whole, whether through dashboards of KPIs or access to other senior people who run major functions.

But all these inputs are at best proxies for what’s really going on. While they serve as early warning indicators that can tell you where to dig deeper, they often lack texture, nuance, and context,  and are at best a fuzzy representation of the whole.

This is why it’s doubly important, no matter where you sit in an organization, to let go of the notion that the senior folks “just know more stuff” and, therefore, that they don’t have much to learn from or don’t need to hear from you.

The reality is each of us sees our own small, unique part of the elephant, and beyond that, we all have massive blind spots.

For any of us to truly understand the whole, we must travel far and wide, within and outside our organization, and hear what everyone has to say.

And we must engender a company culture that encourages everyone to speak up and share what they see. This culture must be reinforced daily—in how 1-on-1s and larger meetings happen, in what is said in which Slack threads, in how questions are asked and answered. The lifeblood of this culture is people who model brave behavior, sharing the important details early and often.

It’s so tempting to paint the pretty picture of what’s going on in our little neck of the woods, to assume that “nothing to see here” is the right, safe message.

Picture, instead, the power of describing the salient details, the bits that only you know, and partnering to connect that up with the whole.

Only together can we see the whole elephant.

Top 10 Slack tips for new users

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

After a couple of failed attempts, I’ve finally migrated to Slack for all communication at work. It’s not perfect, but I’m confident that it’s an improvement on email.

The benefits are significant. I spend much less time in my inbox –  it’s no longer the center of my work life, no longer a weed I have to hack back to submission.This is the main shift I’ve experienced, and it’s a big one.

It’s also cleaner to have email be for external correspondence, separate from Slack, which is internal. This makes it easier to track things and easier to know why I’m going into my Inbox.

Plus, Slack, in addition to feeling lighter and more responsive, has huge benefits in terms of transparency (easy to ‘see’ what is going on in channels even if you’re not the recipient of a message) and for new team members (who can see and search history).

This is my second attempt at Slack. After failing the first time, I’d been intending to shift over for more than a year but couldn’t muster the courage. I ended up following some braver folks at Acumen, and I’m very happy with the results.

In case you’re about to jump in, or thinking about it but not sure if it will work, here are my suggestions about how to achieve Slack success.

  1. All or nothing: this is the most important one. On the day (after you’ve set up Slack, channels, etc.) move your entire team to Slack. You can start with one team, not with your whole organization. But it won’t work if half of your team is on Slack and the other half is on email.
  2. No more email for internal communication: this is connected to #1. You have to agree that, for a period of time, everyone is going to use Slack for everything. Here’s a cue: if you find yourself sending someone an email and a Slack message because you’re not sure which tool to use, something’s wrong.
  3. Three month trial period: when we started, I hoped a two week trial period would be long enough. I was told I actually needed to give it three months. That was good advice.
  4. Set up the channels right: Have someone on your team/in your organization set up the right channels at the outset, a person who is detail-oriented and likes that sort of thing.
  5. Create a Learn Slack channel: Create an #all-learn-slack channel where folks can ask questions and your super-users can answer them. This eases the onboarding and empowers your super-users to do an important job
  6. Use the Google Docs or Dropbox integration: Slack has a million add-on tools. If you’re using Google Docs or Dropbox for shared files, integrate them into Slack. This allows you to see GDocs comments directly in slack, upload links to Dropbox files instead of the whole files, and a bunch of other magical things.
  7. Download the app: Slack is good on desktop but feels optimized for iPhone/Android. You definitely want both the desktop app and the phone app for the best experience.
  8. Be ready to ‘tether’ your laptop more: Slack doesn’t work offline. This is a bummer and the one major drawback. If, like me, you have a chunk of time each day when you’re offline but on your laptop (say, on a train), you’ll want some way to get online. I’ve been using the Personal Hotspot on my iPhone through AT&T nearly every day. It’s intermittent, but workable, you just need a cellphone plan with this option. Same thing goes for flights – you will want to pay for wifi more often.
  9. Use the ‘star’ ‘reminder’ ‘mark unread’ or ‘pin’ tools: the biggest adjustment I’ve had in Slack is the (bad) email habit of reading emails when I don’t have time to respond to them. I find it a bit harder to re-find things after I’ve read them in Slack, and am using the Star a lot to keep a running list of things that I have to go back to. I’m guessing that a combination of all four of these tools will work for me once I master them.
  10. Use Slack help: one of the best things about Slack, which is completely counter-intuitive if you’ve been living in Windows land, is that (nearly) every question you might has an easy-to-find answer. Start with the Slack Help Center and go from there.

All of this has made for a smooth transition to Slack, better communication, and time and energy freed up for the important stuff.

As a bonus, here’s the Masters of Scale podcast about Slack: The big pivot – Stewart Butterfield, Co-founder & CEO of Slack. It’s a good one.

A Bad Joke About Marketing and Communications

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

A marketer and a communications professional walk into a bar.

“You have any new stories?” asks the communications professional, harkening back to his days as a journalist and imagining breaking news.

“I’ve got this story,” replies the marketer. “And this other one and a third one.”

The communications professional shakes his head and sighs. “Not new!” he barks. “How many times do we need to go over this? We already wrote about all of those. Don’t you understand? We need NEW stories to tell, to keep our audience engaged.”

The marketer looks down, chastened.

And then she takes a deep breath, musters her courage, and says, “But…even though we’ve told those sorts of stories already, our audience isn’t behaving differently. Not yet. Some of them are, just a few. I think we should keep at it.”

“Keep at what?”

“Keep pushing to make a change – in their actions, in their perception, in the conversation they’re having. That’s what matters, isn’t it?”

 

It’s not a great joke. It’s a pretty terrible joke, actually.

But, if you’re a producer of content, or working in a nonprofit or a business that has a story to tell, you see these two characters have this conversation every day (even if just in your head).

The died-in-the-wool communications professional, properly trained as a journalist or an editor, thinks about phrases like “exclusive” and “this just in!” He imagines big stories with new angles, things that have the chance to break through all the noise and get everyone’s attention.

The marketer, on the other hand, is thinking on a different level. She’s more interested in speaking to a very specific audience and chipping away, day by day, with a consistent message designed to drive a specific set of actions with that audience. She doesn’t care much about “everyone.”

Both the communicator and the marketer trade in stories, and both of them have important roles to play. The risk is that the hunt for the ‘next big story’ brings with it lots of places to hide, since 99% of stories (no matter how good they are) don’t break through, and since even breakthroughs are often like fireworks—beautiful, but ephemeral.

In the end, it’s really really hard to let yourself off the hook if your metric is demonstrable change in the attitudes and behaviors of the people who matter most to you.

And that’s no joke.

“They Just Don’t Get It”

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

What do you do when the values, the culture, or the (new and improved!) strategy of your organization aren’t translating into the behaviors you’d like to see? What steps do you take when the shifts in thinking and action that you worked so hard to develop aren’t visible in how people show up every day?

Often, when a message isn’t resulting in visible change, it’s tempting to rewrite or to double underline the message. A diagnosis of a communications failure means that it’s time to communicate more and better – to shout more loudly clearly until the message lands.

But what if something else is going on?

There’s a theory that each and every organization is perfectly aligned to deliver exactly the results that it wants to deliver. Not the results (and accordant behaviors) it says it wants, but the results it actually wants.

Under this view, it’s not that people aren’t hearing the message. Rather, they are attuned to multiple messages on multiple levels, and the messages that are landing the most are the ones that are 100% aligned with the way they’re behaving today.

If this is what’s happening, then shouting louder accomplishes nothing. Indeed, it could feed a credibility gap if you insist you want a set of thing but your day-to-day actions, policies, or language express something else.

The bigger lift is to look in the mirror and ask if the new message is true:

Where do we talk about a set of values but fall short of demonstrating them?

Where do we espouse that we want to see a set of behaviors and then fail to support the people who try to demonstrate them?

Where do we come up short in living the message?

And what this means is

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Whether you are presenting slides or sending out a dashboard to your Board of Directors, every single time you share numbers or graphs or a table, it’s your job to start with simply explaining “this is what this means.”

Of course, in the best cases your slides and numbers will speak for themselves. And, in case they don’t, or they don’t do that job well enough, it’s your job to make sense of them for your audience.

When giving presentations, adhere to the discipline of “clearing a slide” each and every time: name each axis, or each column, or what that trendline represents. Actually say out loud, “on the vertical axis we have fourth grade test scores, and on the horizontal axis you’ll see January 2014 and 2015 – so we can see the effect of the new teachers’ aides who started in March 2014.”

Some goes for piles of data you send to folks: verbally, or in writing, communicate as if they aren’t going to read the attachment. Because in the worst cases, they won’t, and even if they do, they don’t have the context you have for understanding the story the data tell.

Minimally, this sets people on the right path towards looking at the numbers with your guidance and insight. But what you’re actually doing is framing what the numbers mean, guiding and controlling the story that they tell.

On the continuum of data, information, and meaning, you’re in the meaning-making business each and every time.

15 ways you can reach me

~ Sasha ~ 9 Comments

Today a friend apologized to me for not seeing a Skype text I’d sent him last week (no problem). This got me thinking about the incoming communication tools that I have, all the ways people can reach me.

  1. Work email address (Outlook)
  2. Personal email address (Gmail)
  3. Blog email address (Gmail)
  4. Blog comments (WordPress)
  5. Spam/shopping email address (Yahoo)
  6. iPhone text
  7. WhatsApp (including a few groups)
  8. Twitter (DMs, RTs and mentions)
  9. Skype calls + texts [oh, and I’m testing Viber]
  10. Facebook (and I don’t use the messenger app)
  11. LinkedIn messages
  12. Work phone + voicemail
  13. Cellphone + voicemail
  14. Home phone + voicemail
  15. [Local cell phone while traveling abroad]

Fifteen different communications tools, and I’m not that active on any of the social media platforms. Nor does this make any reference to my going out and seeking news, updates and information (blog RSS feed, Twitter feed, Facebook feed, LinkedIn Feed, etc.).

This feels like an insane list. I guess Facebook and Google want to consolidate everything for me so I’m not jumping between platforms, but I don’t trust either enough to have that feel like a good solution.

Is this just the way it is, or am I missing something?

I’m curious: how many ways can you be reached?

(p.s. Eric Schmidt wrote a piece for Time about email, which includes the maxim “Clean out your inbox constantly.” I totally disagree. Where do we draw the line in terms of our incoming communications streams, and when are we supposed to do real thinking and work if we’re triaging 15 (20? 30?) feeds all day long?).

Three email rules and the bcc courtesy

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

Bcc: (“blind carbon copy”) has been with us since the beginning of email (as in this great ARPA email standard from 1977).  Even before email (yes, there was such a time), written office memos would be sent to recipients without letting others know they were on formal copy.  While it’s difficult to uncover the original intent of the bcc: email field, consensus seems to be that it was created for mass emailings to large email recipient lists.

So, how do we use these fields today?

While email tips and tricks can seem like small potatoes, we’re all overwhelmed by our Inboxes and like it or no, email is integral to how we communicate and, consequently, to how we build relationships.

Sadly, people routinely miss the opportunity to be “good emailers” (psst have you signed the Email Charter?  If not, you should and be sure to sign up for their mailing list.), so I thought I’d share three simple email tips that feel like table stakes to me – plus a bcc: bonus for kicks:

  1. Have as few people as possible receive an email.  This is not the same as copying people to make sure no one gets offended.  Just like a good meeting, the best emails have exactly the number of people needed to make a decision – no more.  (and last time I checked, you almost never want seven people to make a decision).
  2. Use the subject line to communicate something.  People are generally terrible about this (e.g. email chains that go on for weeks titled “RE: question.”)  Write specific email Subject lines and don’t be afraid in your reply to re-title emails you receive (e.g. take that RE: question email and turn it into “June 5th breakfast details [Re: question].”)  Occasionally I’ll even dip into the convention-breaking practice of letting someone know that I’m emailing just them to help a note stand out from the crowd (e.g. “Pankaj – June 5 breakfast”).
  3. Differentiate between the To: and Cc: fields.  To me, the To: field means “I expect a reply from you” and Cc: means “I don’t expect a reply from you but you do need to know about this.”

So what do we do about bcc:, that murky backwater of email etiquette?

Recently I’d been evolving to the conclusion that bcc: should be avoided altogether.  It feels sneaky (by definition the recipient doesn’t know you’ve done it).  And even if you don’t care about that email moral high ground, there’s the practical risk of the bcc: recipient replying all, which is never a good thing.  So “secret” bcc: is off my list of good email practice.  If you need someone to see a note you can just forward it from your Sent mail.

Lately though I’ve started to observe a use of bcc: that increases email peace and harmony. It works like this.  Say a (small!) group of people is copied on an email introduction:

e.g. Christine is being introduced to Joaquim by Alejandro.

Alejandro writes an email to Christine and Joaquim, maybe others are copied for some reason.

Now, Christine and Joaquim both want Alejandro to know how much they appreciate the introduction AND to communicate that they’ve not dropped the ball.  So naturally they ‘Reply All’ on this note, which is all well and good until 17 emails go back and forth and poor, well-intentioned Alejandro (and maybe a score of other folks) is copied on this whole mess for weeks on end.

The new-and-improved way to handle this is for Christine to respond to the note like this:

 (moving Alejandro to bcc:)

Joaquim, it’s great to meet you.  How about we find a time next week to meet – maybe next Thursday morning?

Voila!  Alejandro is in the loop for this one step and is satisfied at his successful email introductory prowess, and as a bonus he’s off the hook when Joaquim inevitably replies that he’s going to be deep-sea diving off the coast of Papua New Guinea next Thursday so maybe he can talk to Christine when he’s back stateside.

(you get the idea)

Happy emailing.

Stories, Facts and Synthesis

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Break down any presentation and you’ve got three building blocks: stories, facts and synthesis.

Since we’re generally not comfortable as storytellers, and since it feels safe to report on the facts, lots of presentations divide up the pie like this (“we did this and then this and then this.”)

There are two shifts we can make across the board so that we can connect with our audience.

The first is to radically change the balance between the three layers of the pie – spending about equal time at each level.

The second, equally important, is to realize that your facts are only there to work for your stories or to support your synthesis.  That means you only share facts that serve either to substantiate a point that a story makes someone feel; or you share facts that serve as a jumping-off point for synthesis (aka “the big picture” or “the takeaway”).

Facts that aren’t working for you are facts we don’t need to hear.

Friction

~ Sasha ~ 7 Comments

Reflecting on the last two days’ posts – one on the long, hard, stupid way and one on mobile gift giving, I’m left with the notion that if we’re going to bring on serious partners to solve serious problems, then we actually need some friction.

That is: Kony2012 is essentially frictionless.  It spreads like wildfire.  But the disconnect between the apparent ease of “doing something” about Kony (“buy your Kony action kit”) and what it will take to address all the complexities in Northern Uganda and beyond is….stark, to say the least.

It seems like we have three options:

  1. Confine high-velocity, frictionless stories to ideas that are pretty simple
  2. Use high-velocity, frictionless stories as the hook to get people’s attention, and then start a longer, more engaged dialogue
  3. Decide that real solutions will require embracing complexity from the get-go – so a big push to engage with an audience that craves simplicity is actually not time and money well spent.

Which do you choose?

What you’re not

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

This sign is in the window of a great omakase sushi bar in New York.

Eight words and you know what you’re in for.

Saying what you’re against is a great shorthand way to describe yourself.  You tap into all the emotions that the thing you aren’t (whatever that is) created in the years before you arrived.

Of course, you’re limiting yourself to the people who don’t like the thing that you’re standing up against, but that’s probably enough for now.

I don’t love the negativity this approach implies, but at least you’re standing for something and people will grok you pretty quickly.  It’s a start.