Tag: communications

Telephonitis

~ Sasha ~ 16 Comments

Twice in the last week I’ve been on important conference calls where severe “telephonitis” set in.  “Telephonitis” is the process whereby otherwise conversant, engaged, active people become silent in the face of a group conference call.

Maybe someday videoconferencing will become the norm, but I think phone calls are here to stay – at least for the next few decades.

You probably conduct enough business with meetings by phone that this is worth correcting.  Here’s where you can start:

  1. Create an “in the room” role.  You assign someone (or have them spontaneously volunteer) to be the voice of the sentiment “in the room,” explaining to people on the phone what’s going on.  This person fills in the silences with comments like, “Yes, everyone agrees,” or “Angela, you look like you’re not convinced by that last remark, can you tell us what’s on your mind?”
  2. When silence starts to set in, start cold calling people.  This has two effects: making sure you’re hearing from people, and creating an incentive (for those who don’t like being called on) for people to speak up when they have something to say.
  3. Create a norm that when an important question comes up, you’ll go around the horn and ask everyone to say something
  4. Have people who are not “in the room” lead the call.  Keeps them engaged and validates that just because they’re on the phone doesn’t mean they are less important.
  5. Never equate silence with agreement. It’s bad enough to do this in person.  Worse still on the phone.
  6. Keep calls short.  More than 30 minutes on the phone and you’ve probably lost the person dialing in.
  7. Keep groups small.  Less than 4 is ideal, but 6 or fewer seems to work.  After that, see above.

It’s almost impossible to overestimate how hard it is for someone on the phone to stay engaged in a conversation without visual / physical cues as feedback.  And if the person on the phone is not engaged (if they are a listener) or not getting feedback (if they are a speaker), you’re missed the entire point of a meeting – to inform the people who are on the call and, often, to get their input or assent to a set of decisions.

And one last suggestion: if you’re asking people to call in to a conference call at an inhumane time (very early or very late), be religious about starting the call on time.  It’s the easiest way to show respect for people who aren’t in the room.

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Honey, did you hide the Sample Copy button again?

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know for sure, but I’d venture to guess that, given the near-extinction of the VCR, the copy machine has captured the title of Consumer Electronics Product that Most Makes People Want to Scream.

Today, two and a half years after I first used the copy machine at work, I noticed a tiny prompt in the LCD display asking me if I wanted to do a “Sample Copy” before making copies of a single sided document that I wanted to turn into 10 double-sided copies.

Now this is a great idea!  This way I get to see if my copies collate wrong; if I inadvertently clicked the “2 sides → 1 side” icon instead of the “1 side → 2 side” icon; or if the copy gremlins will stop the copy halfway through.

I go for it.  I hit the “Sample Copy” button, it makes one copy, and everything looks great.  Plus, a big question comes up on the screen saying, “Continue to make the remaining 9 copies? (Yes/No)”.  Yes!  9 more beautiful, double-sided, collated copies.  Mission accomplished!  A certifiably delightful copy experience.

This is brilliant.  Small swaths of forest could have been saved had I discovered this little button two years ago.

So why didn’t I find it sooner?  Because the darn copier has so many whiz-bang options for each copy, and it leaves it up to me to figure out which features are going to be most useful to me.  The message missed for me the first 50 times I used the copier.  That’s a design blunder if I’ve ever seen one.

It’s so easy to make the mistake of telling someone everything you know about something in the hopes of getting them as excited as you are about the story.  Don’t be like the copy machine designers and fall into this trap.  The person you’re talking to (one on one, in a group presentation, on your website, in a job application, on your blog) doesn’t live and breathe this stuff every day.

Instead, tell people what they need to know with the right level of information, detail, and complexity to meet them where they are.  Know what point to raise up in big, boldface letters , so that they hear your message the first time, and not two and a half years after they first meet you.  Be relentless about what you cut away.

(Oh, and don’t forget that at least some of what you need to put in boldface will be different for every person and group you meet.  That’s where things get really interesting.)

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You are at the top of my list

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

If you’re trying to get someone’s attention for the first time, it’s hard to stand out.  People are flooded with information, emails, RSS feeds, tweets…how do you make yourself heard or seen?

Why not try being unbelievably responsive?  If you meet someone for the first time and four days later send an email to say thanks and follow up, the timing of your note communicates, “The time I spent with you really wasn’t that important.  Those things we said we’d do?  Probably not going to happen.”

Even worse?  Waiting four days and sending a lackluster note.

Everyone is in constant triage mode.  But everyone, up to our BlackBerry-touting President of the United States, responds to some people right away and some people later on (or never).  So you have a chance each and every time to stand out from the crowd by being fast.  This says, “you are on the top of my list.”

This doesn’t apply to every email you receive – then you’re a slave to your Inbox.  But for the people who are most important to you (you’d know who they are, don’t you?), you’d better be writing back in 24 hours or less (immediately is good too).

Last Sunday I spoke on two panels at the Harvard Social Enterprise Conference.  I gave out almost an inch of business cards after my panels.  I promise you I will think very differently about how to respond to the people I heard from a day or two after the conference and the person who, two months from now, is going to write to say, “we met back in March and…”

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44 reasons I blog

~ Sasha ~ 13 Comments

“Why do you blog?”

I get the question a lot.  So here’s a list.  I originally wanted to come up with 99 reasons, but 44 is where I ended up.

(If you have serious additions to the list please comment and I’ll approve.  I’d still like to get to 99, and if I do I’ll repost the whole list as “99 reasons we blog”).

  1. It improves my writing
  2. It forces me to learn how use new social media tools
  3. It occasionally gives me a reason to fiddle with some HTML code
  4. It’s practice creating a written end product faster
  5. It’s a chance to experiment
  6. It’s a chance to work on my storytelling every day
  7. It’s a discipline
  8. It’s a megaphone
  9. It’s challenging to build my own tribe, from scratch
  10. It makes me to be more aware of and informed about topics that interest me
  11. It makes me a contributor to a community I respect
  12. It’s a chance to go from observation to synthesis every day
  13. It’s a diary of where my thinking is every day – and over time a reflection of the arc of where I am in my life
  14. It’s a platform…who knows where that will go?
  15. It’s free
  16. It’s become a daily habit, and I’d miss it if it were gone
  17. It makes my mom proud
  18. It’s fun to have people email me interesting things and say, “You might want to blog this.”
  19. It teaches me…about people, about writing, about technology, about storytelling.
  20. It’s an act of letting go – to take an insight and put it out in the world, asking for nothing in return
  21. I felt like I had something to say, and it turns out that I do
  22. I think storytelling isn’t just interesting, it’s important
  23. I started without a plan and in a short time have a good-sized group of readers – which means that there are a lot of people out there with shared interests who want to come together around these ideas.
  24. I don’t see anyone else out there linking up marketing, storytelling, influence, nonprofits, philanthropy, and social change…and I think these things are intimately related.
  25. I may inspire people I’ll never have a chance to meet
  26. I can share wonderful, undiscovered gems with others
  27. I’m a little compulsive
  28. I think the reality of how philanthropists think and make decisions needs to be better integrated into the dialogue about what philanthropy “should” be
  29. Marketing, storytelling, influencing, tribe-building, leading, creating, experimenting, sharing, testing, getting instant feedback…all good ways to spend my time.
  30. More people read my blog every day than read my college thesis – and that took a year to write
  31. Every so often, someone I don’t know emails me to say that something I wrote helped them
  32. Every so often, someone I do know tells me to keep it up
  33. Once you feel like (some) people are listening to you, it’s very hard to give that up
  34. Unexpected posts often strike a chord with people…and the ones I love can bore people to tears
  35. Learning what does and doesn’t work in spreading ideas online at a very low cost…THAT’S a skill that will only get more important over time
  36. Maybe, someday, if I keep at this for a few years, they’ll be a book in it
  37. And even if there isn’t, if I have a tribe of thousands of readers sharing what I’m writing with their friends, why exactly would I need to write a book?
  38. Traditional newspapers and magazines are dying a slow death.  Even if blogs aren’t the end game, distributed, independently-created content is.
  39. Beats the heck out of a resume as a portfolio and a calling card (Malcolm Gladwell suggests that blogs are the new resume…Seth Godin says maybe you shouldn’t even have a resume.)
  40. Looking back, I can’t tell which posts I thought would be “good” or “bad”
  41. Won’t it be cool 5 years from now to look back on 1,000+ posts?
  42. Now that I know I can blog, I’m not afraid of Twitter (@sashadichter, by the way)
  43. If it takes 10,000 hours to get good at something, now’s the time to start logging those hours
  44. We need more hope in the world, and I’d like to be part of that hope

(HT to the SAMBAers’ Hamster Burial Kits & 998 Other Business Ideas for the long-list idea)

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Wow, I love Google forms

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Occasionally, I cannot resist sharing a Google jewel that I’ve discovered.  This is a small one, but it’s so darn useful that I cannot resist:  Google forms.

If you work in a nonprofit (or even if you don’t), you’re constantly bringing different groups of people together for different reasons, and there are lots of complicated and expensive tools out there for managing big events.  But it seems like keeping track of which 15 people will come to a roundtable discussion you’re holding requires lots of emails back and forth, which has always struck me as terribly inefficient in this day and age.

Once again, enter Google.  Already, with Google docs, they’ve created an online way to share documents, spreadsheets, etc. in a way that meets 90% of the collaboration needs you’ll have in the workplace – without Windows Vista and a Microsoft Exchange server.

And with Google forms, you can easily (I mean in less than 60 seconds, and it’s free) create an online RSVP that pops right into a shareable spreadsheet.  If you want to see one I made in less than a minute as a demo, click here.  And here are the instructions for how to create your own.

(And yes, I know that Evite and Pingg and the like exist, but I don’t want to ship someone off to a third party website which has ads and who-knows-what content.  I just want to know if they’re coming to the breakfast we’re hosting).

I know that in the grand scheme of things this is very very small, but it’s also very useful.  And since I’m thankful to the person who inadvertently showed it to me, I thought I’d pass it along.

Ask 3 questions to practice listening

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

There are gobs of advice out there about how to communicate better – whether in meetings or in presenting to big groups or even just in email.  This is important stuff, some of which I’ve blogged about before (most popular seem to be Start with the Punchline, Please and 10 Obvious Tips for Email (that Most People Don’t Follow).

What about listening?  Does anyone out there teach how to listen better?  Does anyone even ask it of you?  It’s amazing when I reflect on my MBA curriculum that – outside of a dim nod to focus groups and the CEOs who “got out to spend time with customers – listening skills weren’t even recognized as something worth cultivating.  Maybe we needed to invite some more cultural anthropologists into the classroom, or it could be that the whole value proposition of business school is to churn out people who can talk their way into that first investment banking job, but listening is getting short shrift as a skill needed for personal and professional success.

Listening starts with the recognition that you don’t have all the answers, and that you have something to learn from the person who is talking.  It requires you to be present, to be active, and to care what other people think.  And, perhaps most obvious, it requires you to keep your mouth shut unless you have something really valuable to say.

If you think that you might not be a good listener, try this: in your next conversation, or the next time you meet someone new, ask three questions in a row of that person (instead of, when they tell you something, saying, “It’s funny, the same thing happened to me the other day….”).  This is a little heavy handed, but doing it will both force you to practice and recognize if your impulse is to turn the conversation back to you.  People love to be heard – so give them that chance.

I had barely thought about this until two years ago when I started working at Acumen Fund, where listening is one of our core values.  We start with the premise that the only way to really break the back of poverty is by listening to poor people to understand who they are, their needs and preferences.  This serves two purposes: on a practical level, it forces the enterprises we invest in to create products and services poor people both want and need.  More fundamentally, it forces us, and the enterprises we support¸ to respect poor people, to afford them dignity, and to recognize them as fully capable human beings with real aspirations for their own lives.

You don’t have to be in the business of serving unmet needs of an underserved population to have this be important or possible.  Start small.  Listen to your co-workers, your boss, someone who works for you or the customer or student or parent or donor you’re meeting for the first.  Really hear what they have to say (and really listen for what they really mean but are not saying).

If you’re the kind of person who says something in any meeting you attend, practice going to meetings and saying nothing.  (And if you tend to keep your mouth shut, listen harder and practice saying something.)

We all play different roles in different settings – are you in a 1-on-1 meeting with your boss; presenting to a big group as an “expert” on a topic; or in a brainstorming session with peers?  It’s so easy to focus on the different things we’re supposed to say in each of these situations.  Don’t forget that you have to practice listening too.

I have no idea what “DA and Operator Services” are

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Here’s the text from some SPAM I got yesterday:

[You’re invited to a] special conference that will focus on defining new strategies to not only sustain current DA and Operator Services operations, but to generate new directions for future revenue growth.  We believe our industry is on the cusp of a major paradigm shift.  These two days will be dedicated to spelling out how DA and Operator Services organizations can benefit from that change and provide an exclusive forum unparallel in networking opportunities.

I have no idea how I got on this list, and I had to read it over three times to figure out what “DA and Operator Services” means.

Clearly I never should have received this email.  These folks bought a list and spammed people.  First, they’ve violated the core tenet of permission marketing, which Seth Godin describes as “Anticipated, personal and relevant messages delivered to people who actually want to get them.”  But that’s not my point here.

Instead, I’d like you to ask yourself: how often do I say or write sentences that are the equivalent of “This special conference will focus on defining new strategies to…sustain current DA and Operator Services?”  You know, sentences like, “Our M&E team’s analysis showed significant impacts on women’s empowerment indicators and childhood mortality statistics in line with our broader pursuit of the MDGs.”  Huh????

Language defines who’s in and who’s out.  There’s someone out there for whom “DA and Operator Services is self-explanatory.”  That person ain’t me.

There’s also someone who knows what M&E (“monitoring and evaluation”) and the MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) are.  But that person probably isn’t most people, and you have to be very conscious of when you are and are not speaking to a specialized audience.

In truth, even the people who get the acronyms would benefit from you speaking clearly and using plain English.  Acronyms and industry-speak are usually a crutch, and there’s almost always someone in the room who’s too timid to admit that they don’t know the acronyms and what they mean.

Better yet, you might discover that writing (or speaking) in a way that most people will understand forces you to sharpen your own thinking AND makes you a better communicator to boot.

(Oh, and if you’re desperate to go to the “DA and Operator Services” conference, let me know.  I’ve got all the details.)

Mind the Gap (Something for something)

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

A reader emailed me with information on this entry from the BusinessToolsBlog, Donate to Charity with Your Mouse, Not your Wallet.  You click on links and the charities get money.  The reader asked me if I agreed that this was a promising way for people to get involved in and support organizations they might not know about – specifically because  people could support charities without much effort, and over time this would introduce them to the idea of being more philanthropic.

I’m torn about this. On one hand, there’s an economic value in just about everything you do online, so if someone wants to take that value and transfer it to charitable organizations I think that’s a very good thing.  And there is the distant possibility that by coming across one of these sites, someone might learn about a new organization and get involved in a more significant way.

But I’m unconvinced that this will open many people up to giving and to supporting organizations with their time and energy.  To the contrary, I worry that this reinforces the notion that you can get something for nothing, that change can come without effort and sacrifice.

This is the same hesitation I feel about the Gap’s Inspi(RED) t-shirts and other products that make donations to worthy causes – happy that the money is going to the cause; hopeful that the act of buying the shirts (or the water or the cereal) is educating people about and motivating them to act to support the cause; but worried that we might delude ourselves into thinking that this is enough – worried that buying the “responsible” shirt acts as a salve on our sense of responsibility to others, and worried that when doing something “good” becomes a fashion statement, we can loose sight of the impact in favor of the fashion.

And, by the way, here’s what the NY Times reported last February about the RED campaign:

In its March 2007 issue, Advertising Age magazine reported that Red companies had collectively spent as much as $100 million in advertising and raised only $18 million. Officials of the campaign said then that the companies had spent $50 million on advertising and that the amount raised was $25 million. Advertising Age stood by its article.

You see how tricky this gets once you get into the details.

It strikes me that buying is one thing, giving is another.  As long as they are complementary we’re in good shape.

But I worry they might be substitutes.

The best rejection letter ever

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Next Monday, Seth Godin (marketing guru, innovator and all-around fabulous guy) is starting his alternative MBA, so I was curious to learn how the unorthodox application process had played out.

The online applications (mostly Squidoo pages) are amazing – energetic, personal, compelling.  I was more amazed still by what one candidate described as “The World’s Greatest Rejection Letter” from Seth, which reads:

You are amazing.

I’m stunned.

Bowled over.

Amazed.

And optimistic about our future (and yours).

The applications I received were astonishingly good. Thorough and honest and clear and direct. They were motivating and demonstrated just how much people can do when they put their minds to it. I read every word of every application and I learned a lot.

If I had 60 seats, I still would have had too many people awe-inspiring applying. Unfortunately, I have nowhere near that, and so I had to make difficult, irrational and not particularly fair choices. Alas, I’m going to be unable to work with you in 2009. There are still interviews and such to go through, so I don’t have the final group selected, but I thought the fairest thing to do was let you know as soon as possible.

The good news, and I hope you think it’s good news, is that you don’t need me. As I said before, I have no magic wand, no secret recipe. Your decision to just make it happen, to push forward, to change… that was the hard part.

Go. Do that. Blow them away. I fully expect it will happen.

Thanks for taking the time and thanks for understanding.

Seth

PS I’m going to post on my blog about how stellar each of you are… and I’m linking to a Google listing of applications (all of them, accepted and not). If you don’t want to be seen by others, you should delete your lens (if you made one). But I think you should be extraordinarily proud of what you’ve built and what you’ve done… and you might even get a new gig because of it.

Since I’m proud to take (and share) heaps of advice from Seth, here’s some more: suggestion #6 from his recent blog post How to send a personal email:

6. Don’t talk like a press release. Talk like a person. A person is reading this, so why are you talking like that?

This is a trap we ALL risk falling in to, and it’s one of the easiest things to change about how you communicate with people.  Why in the world would you send out an email that includes a sentence like: “Due to the overwhelming quality of the applicants this year, we had to make some very tough decisions and we regret that we won’t be able to invite you to interview at this time?”

I think it’s because people (and organizations) worry that personal will become informal, and between the relative risks of seeming too boring vs. too unprofessional, boring is a lot safer.

Fair enough, but recognize what a huge opportunity you’re missing.  Think about how many emails you personally send out a day.  Add to that the emails your organization sends out, the content from your website and your Facebook page….you get the idea.

Your opportunity is to make it personal, to treat the person on the other end like a human being.  They’ll be so surprised that already you’ll have distinguished yourself from the pack.

And if you missed it, here are my 10 Obvious Tips about Email (that most people don’t follow).

Start with the punchline, please

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

I had two half hour conversations today that were completely upside-down.

In both cases I was talking to people I didn’t know very well, and I had agreed to (not set up) the calls.  Both people were smart, capable, and successful, which is what made the conversations that much more perplexing.

In retrospect, if I were to draw up an agenda for the call it would look something like this:

Minutes 1-2        Introductions and pleasantries

Minutes 3-15     Background information by the caller

Minutes 15-20  Discussion of potential synergies / overlap

Minute 21           By the way, I also called to tell you….. (the punchline)

Please, please, please, reorder this agenda and put the punchline upfront (in minute 3)!  Tell me why we’re talking at the start of the conversation.

For example, let’s say you’re having an informational interview.  Respect the time and intelligence of the person you’re calling and start out by saying, “I’m really interested in the sector you work in, and I’m trying to learn more about how I might transition from my current role.”  That’s so much more helpful than pretending you’re not looking for a job.

Similarly, if you’re trying to create a business partnership, why not lead off with, “So-and-so suggested we talk because, even though we’re in different lines of business, there’s a real overlap between the types of people who are interested in what we both do.  I’d like to explore that overlap, but first why don’t I tell you more about our organization so you have a little background?”

This sounds obvious, but so often people “bury the lead” of their story and lose their audience in the process.  This happens in presentations, emails, conversations, you name it.

No one wins if you drone on about all your thinking, your deductive process, your analysis, and then say, “So what this all means is…”  You’ve lost me by then.

Here’s why I think this is harder to do than it looks:

  1. People are sometimes nervous to ask for things. The padding up front is a great way to stall.
  2. Being direct, but doing it with grace, is tricky. If you want to ask for something, be direct, but don’t be so direct/blunt that you put someone off.  (and if your ultimate ask is for someone’s investment or their business, you don’t necessarily lead with that ask.  You start with asking for their time, attention and consideration).
  3. It ain’t the same every time. Doing this in the right way also depends on who you’re talking to, your relationship with them, their personality type, culture, etc.
  4. People confuse building rapport with sharing information. Building a rapport is very important;  but this is not the same thing as sharing a bunch of random information, which is potentially distracting without the right context.

When someone puts the punchline at the end, you find yourself having a whole conversation that communicates something like: “Ignore the man behind the curtain and pay attention to this semi-interesting, semi-distracting stuff I have to say first.  This will show that I’m smart and credentialed and doing important stuff, and it will make you more likely to accept what I’m asking of you once I get around to it.”

Sure, I’m interested in what you have to say and all the great work you do.  But the man behind the curtain is often the whole point, so let’s both acknowledge he’s there and get on with it.

If I know nothing about why we’re talking, think about how hard I have to work to make sense of what you’re saying.  While you’re going on about who you are, what your organization does, what’s been going on in the last three months, I’m sitting there trying to figure out “What part of this story matters?”

Pretty soon, you’ll lose me.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

On the flip side, if you find yourself the victim of a buried punchline conversation, the time to perk up is when you hear ANY sentence that starts with:

“By the way…”

“Oh, and one other thing…”

“I’m not saying that…”

…or any other big disclaimer.

That’s the verbal billboard that screams: WHAT I’M ABOUT TO SAY IS THE WHOLE POINT OF OUR CONVERSATION!!