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  • The Rap on Sarah Palin - How Sound Bites Fail the Democrats
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  • Michael Phelps Interview - $750,000 missed opportunity
  • Olympics Opening Ceremony - A Lesson in Nonverbal Communications
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What we’re interested in here is the communications strategy the sides deploy. And Ms. Palin’s pre-nomination throws into relief the failure of the democrat’s charge of “inexperience” against her at least in the context of on-air debates.

The reason the inexperience charge fails is that it invites rebuttal and the rebuttal is too easy and too obvious. Larry King Live last night, for example, hosted James Carville, CNN Political Contributor and Obama support and Nancy Pfotenhauer, advisor to the McCain campaign. Here’s an excerpt of the debate

CARVILLE: “I am completely floored by this choice.”

KING: “Honestly put, Nancy — and it’s a fair question — of all the Republicans, is she the most qualified to be next commander-in- chief?”

PFOTENHAUER: “Well, I think that she is eminently qualified to be vice president.

In fact, Senator McCain’s picking Governor Palin, she has more experienced as the V.P. nominee than Senator Obama has as a presidential nominee.”

My issue is not whether Sarah Palin has the experience to be Vice President. It’s that James Carville is a communications strategist and he lost a point on national television that he should have anticipated he would. And, in fact, I saw him and Paul Begala, another democratic strategist lose this point again and again all night. And I’ve been watching democratic strategists lose this point again this morning in the same way.

I see this dynamic frequently when I’m training people to be persuasive in their organizations. We are so persuaded by our own claims that we think they will stand alone, that those we are trying to influence must surely accept them. We forget that we rarely accept someones else’s claims on their face. In fact, every statement we hear triggers a rejoinder from us whether spoken or silent. And it’s the same for our audience.

Tim’s Takeaway

Communications is always at least a 2-part process. If we’re going to be influential, it’s not enough for us to come up with claims that we find powerful. The question you should be asking yourself isn’t, what’s the biggest claim I can make, but what kind of response will this draw from my audience, and how can I draw the response that moves the action forward the way I want.

Keith Rosen recently wrote a nice article listing 10 questions you can ask yourself to improve your communications skills.  Here are a few excerpts from his list.

Am I taking full responsibility for the message being heard by the other person?
Did I acknowledge them?
Did I make my request clear?
Am I checking to see if the conversation was successful?

The thing I want to underscore is his emphasis on being personally accountable for the accuracy of your communications.

This is something I find many people, especially people who are accustomed to dominant roles, reticent to take on completely. Their reluctance shows up in small turns of phrases.

I was working with a woman who believed she put off other women in discussions with them. I sat in a discussion with her and noticed a pattern of dominance showing up in her speech. She would say, “You understand?” instead of “Am I being clear?” And again, ‘You’re just like me” but never “I’m just like you.” In fact, when I pointed out that last comment she said she wouldn’t feel comfortable saying it the other way around, even though the phrases have very similar meanings; it was giving away too much to the other person.  No wonder she had trouble connecting at times.

Tim’s Takeaway:

I’m not arguing for becoming submissive in your communications. Rather, I’m cheering Keith for reminding us that accountability is leadership. If you’re going to lead conversations, that means accepting responsibility for making sure the other person hears what you mean.

Death by Powerpoint is a lively issues these days. In fact, Business Communications Headline News gives us two presentations in as many days with the aim of helping us make better presentations.  Unfortunately, both miss the mark. We’ll look at each from a strategic standpoint to help you understand how they go astray and what you can learn to make your presentations more effective.

You have to hand it to Alexei Kapterev for taking on bad powerpoint presentations and investing the time and effort to give you a solution (you can see his pdf presentation in it’s entirety here). It’s a good start. But his advice is a bit wide of the mark and his execution falls a bit short in particular ways. And understanding those missteps will help you make stronger choices.

Let’s consider Alexei’s central argument. Presentations, he says, are successful when they have Significance, Structure, Simplicity, and Rehearsal. Significance is the core, he tells us. In fact, it’s so much more important than structure that you can use any structure as long as it’s comprehensible and scalable. Alexei also gives us a definition of significance - you have significance if you’re communicating meaning that you’re passionate about.

This conception is backward and it’s just the one that gets companies into trouble when they launch new products. We love our new product, we get our salesforce hyped up on the wondrous capabilities of our new product, and we send them out to meet with customers armed with slide presentations that communicate what our new product can do and how excited we are and they should be.

And it’s not just new product roll-outs. Most companies follow the same process for introducing anything new, even internally - recruitment policies, professional development processes, financial management tools, and on and on.  This is the organizing conceipt of most introductions for new things - “We have a new thing, we’re excited about it, you should be too, let me explain it to you.”

This presentation backbone reliably fails.

There are two reasons. The first is that it focuses our presentation on us and ours, while our audiences, at heart, care about them and theirs. So while we’re presenting, they’re running a constant internal inquisition that begins with the question- why should I care?

The second reason is that audiences are always weighing what we’re offering against what they think they’ll have to pay (even metaphorically) to get it. And when we lead with the features of our product/initiative/process/breakthrough, they sense it as an attempt to load up the “what you get” side of the scales. That provokes them to respond with concerns about the price we’ll try to extract (in money, time, burden, etc.). Even when we lead with the benefits we have to offer, they’ll be questioning whether they really want them, and hence, should be willing to pay for them.

What’s the alternative?

First, take the initial focus off of your offerings and shine the light instead on the problems the audience is having. When you direct your audience’s attention to all the problems they’re having they’ll interpret those problems as costs they are already paying not to have your offer. And they’ll begin to respond by wondering what they could get to solve those problems. That’s your opening to offer benefits and that would help them, and then the features or capabilities that back up your claim to provide the benefits you say you have.

The fundamental structure is not wide open, then, for most of the presentations you’ll give. Ninety percent of the time, you’ll want to give some form of Problem-Agitation-Solution presentation. It’s not surprising that most successful direct response marketing campaigns take this format. There are others you can use, but they are generally special cases and they work when the audience is already highly motivated to get what you have.

Tim’s Takeaway

The admonition to start and end with the audience is not simply hopeful or abstract. It’s a directive you should take seriously. And your structure and content should reflect it. Start your presentation with your audience’s problems, then develop those problems until you’re confident they would be asking for solutions if the format were open to it. Then you deliver benefits, and not until then. And finally, you back your benefits with the features of capabilities you’ve incorporated so your audience can feel assured you can deliver.

There are good reasons to limit bullet points, use images instead of text, and the rest. Presentations built on the aesthetics espoused by people like the folks at PresentationZen are generally more engaging.

Text, though, will serve you if it really serves the audience. And a 45-minute string of the most appealing pictures ever won’t persuade most audiences if the pictures don’t surface problems the audience has, develop those problems into urgency, and offer solutions that the audience now realize they want badly.

These August evenings, the 8th through the 24th, my family turns our television to a fierce competition. Not only among nations, but among stations as well.

My wife, Lisa, is an avid Olympic fan. She wants the maximum amount of action for her viewing time.  In our market, the Olympics are carried by three stations–King 5, the local NBC affiliate; the USA network; and CBC, our Canadian channel. Lisa will spend the evening with one hand on the remote switching between stations whenever she thinks the coverage wanes on the channel she’s watching.

Airtime in primetime hours on NBC during the Olympics is worth (according to MediaDailyNews) $750,000 a minute–yes, a minute. Not the $1.7m a minute the SuperBowl commands, but still a big pile of coin.

That’s why NBC put together a team of knowledgeable, experienced, charismatic correspondents to explain, comment on, and add color to the 2008 Olympics–to make Lisa tune our set to our local NBC affiliate and keep it there throughout the 17 nights of competition and especially the commercials that fill out this summer’s Olympic telecast and generate the revenue for NBC.

And Monday night, they dropped the ball.

It was one of the clearest examples I’ve seen of not understanding how emotions work and not being able to take advantage of that knowledge to create connection and communications.

There was Michael Phelps having just won his firt gold medal in swimming. Andrea Kremer intercepted him as he came out of the pool area. He was nearly shivering, his voice just a little shaky. We all, especially my wife Lisa, wanted to know what it was like to start his hunt for a record 8 gold medals in a single Olympics.

“What are the emotions running through your mind?” Andrea asked. “Happy and excitement,” Michael replied.

You won’t a picture from the interview or quotes posted on the internet. It fell flat–didn’t deliver. It may be a small thing. Michael has been interviewed lots of times during these Olympics, a press conference virtually every day in addition to the comments he’s had for color reporters following events.

But that interview didn’t hold my family over to the next commercial break. And if other rabid fans reacted like my wife did, lots of people switched away. And that means loss of revenue for NBC and future networks who carry the Olympics. And not a trivial loss.

There are questions you could ask that would predictably draw a more engaging response. Asking how he’s reacting, for example, will generally get you more. “Wow, Michael, there’s number one, what’s your reaction to your first big win?” People like to talk about their reactions and the question isn’t as narrow as emotions. They’ll tell you about their physical reaction, their emotional reactions, and their thoughts. And you’ll get a sense from their answer of which of these they’re attending to most.

Another way to encourage people to reveal themselves is to note the reactions you can see and ask what’s behind it. “Michael, I notice your voice is a little shaky, your eyes are watering up a bit. Where’s that coming from?”

Not every discussion merits a word-by-word examination. Else, we’d never be able to walk through a social event at ease. Some discussions do, though. When your boss says, “you know, I picked you myself and I have to say I’m really disappointed.” When your patient says, “I’m gonna sue you and this hospital.” When you have a one-on-one interview with the greatest athlete in Olympic history and your time is worth $750,000 a minute.

Tim’s Takeaway:

Especially if you work in an area where the stakes are high, it’s worth your time to craft communications that serve your needs. Communications is a skill like any other. There are frameworks for communicating that can reliably produce the kind of outcomes you want.

As much as the Chinese hope to win many medals in these Olympics, they also hope to use the

Olympics as a kind of coming out event, to let the world know that they are back. And the opening ceremonies were an auspicious start–a tutorial in nonverbal communications.

You likely saw the opening ceremonies. And I won’t add to the commentaris which are readily available on the internet. Our particular interest is communications, so we’ll focus on the messages that China was able to send subtextually through their staging of the Olympic Opening Ceremony.

1. While the US and Europe may be in a recession, we have the wherewithal and will to construct a magnificent Olympic Village including a stadium outfitted especially for one night’s celebration.

2. We also have the resources to invest as much in one four-hour production as American spends on a big budget summer blockbuster.

3. We are many.  China is large enough to field a production with

15,000 performers including, expert drummers, Tai Chi performers, lighted dancers, and artists of many stripes.

4. Don’t think we are backward. We have remarkable expertise to bring to bear, even in technology. China showcased the largest LCD screen ever displayted.

5. We can be remarkably disciplined when we want to be. The Chinese memorialized their historic rise as well as their development of technologies such as paper and print block.  Perhaps the biggest surprise was that the swift and intricate choreography of the blocks–now a set a waves, now drops in a pond, now a chinese character, now the great wall–was in fact, not the work of a computer but a highly trained troupe of human performers.

Tim’s Takeaway:

There’s a saying in screenwriting–show, don’t tell.  In other words, don’t tell me your protagonist is compassionate; show me your protagonist passing up a raise to help a co-worker. Whatever message you’re trying to send in a screenplay comes across much more powerfully in action than in words. The Olympic opening ceremonies were a terrific example of that maxim at work, the messages that China was sending to the world came across much more powerfully enacted than they would have in any written statement or flowery speech. 

Tara Parker-Pope, a journalist and blogger for the Well Blog on the New York Times, has been writing post after post this week on the growing recognition of how deep the rift is between doctors and their patients. Every post she writes get upwards of 150 comments. Her article summarizing the problem has attracted over 300 comments since she posted it Monday. There’s so much spleen being vented by readers on the web pages of the Times right now that it brings new meaning to the old joke, “what’s black, white, and red all over?”

Patients are upset, yes,

To the Doctors who say their patients don’t trust their medical knowledge I, as patient, say stop acting like you know everything - you don’t, so admit it and we patients may stop distrusting your quick off the line, glib diagnosis.
— Posted by Tom in California

but not just patients. Tara cites a Reader’s Digest article that excerpts doctors’ comments about dealing with patients. Much of it is poignant or insightful.

Though we don’t cry in front of you, we sometimes do cry about your situation at home.
– Pediatrician, Chicago

And there’s impatience with patients as well.

So let me get this straight: You want a referral to three specialists, an MRI, the medication you saw on TV, and an extra hour for this visit. Gotcha. Do you want fries with that?
–Douglas Farrago, MD

There’s almost too much to process and comment on. I’ve spent years training doctors and other medical staff to have conversations with patients that are both efficient and empathetic, though, and two things ring out to me, one about the healthcare industry and another about the fundamental nature of this conflict.

First, there’s the insightful comment by Shelley Holloway, a global customer service analyst. “Guess what folks?” she says, ” The medical field is a Customer Service Industry! … When I or my employer pays for a service, I want excellent treatment/response just as I would for any product/service I might buy.”

I think Ms. Holloway is right on. The healthcare industry is a customer service industry. If you need proof, here are just two observations.  According to a 2004 Harris poll, what patients valued most—even more than their doctors’ training and knowledge of new medical treatments—was their interpersonal skills: treating patients with respect, listening  carefully, being easy to talk to, taking patients’ concerns seriously, spending enough time with them, and really caring. (1) And a Harvard study of 44,821 patients found that only 1 of every 5 malpractice suits arise from medical negligence. What drives the majority of law suits, is the way patients are treated. (2)

Yet as important as customer service is in healthcare, medical schools still don’t train staff in service skills. Health systems spend millions on measuring patient satisfaction and then struggle, by and large, with what to do with low scores. Here’s Mary Malone, Executive Director of Consulting Services for Press Ganey, one of the two largest patient satisfaction measurement firms in the industry. “There is a big difference between paying “lip service” to service in a meeting and doing the hard work that’s needed to implement organizational and behavioral change. And I’m still astonished by how many health care professionals fail to make this connection.”(3)

The  healthcare industry will keep building animosity until senior management realizes they are in the business of serving patients and they happen to do it by fixing bodies, and not the other way around.

The second thing to notice, that’s important for those of us who are in relationships with others is the remarkable destructiveness of mutually perceived threat. I conducted a needs analysis years ago for an oncology department in a large hospital that was prestigious for good reason. The core of the analysis was this: your staff feels threatened by your patients and your patients feel threatened by your staff. Not everyone, not all the time, but often enough that you need to take active steps to turn the situation around. Unbeknownst to me, the analysis flew around the hospital. What started as one training turned into 16 throughout the organization. Even though staff in other departments knew the analysis wasn’t written for them, they could feel a tension that they recognized in the document.

There’s a dynamic of domination that comes up seemingly whenever people approach each other across an examination table, or a cash register, or whatever it is in your industry that separates you from those you serve. Your customers have to come to you to get service and they fear you’ll take advantage of them. You have to serve your customers, and you fear that they’ll stomp and shout and demand an unsustainably high level of service. And if you leave those mutual fears unspoken and unexamined, they fester and escalate. Joe Peschi’s famous line, “They @$%> you in the drive through!” morphs into a lawsuit over coffee served too hot.

Tim’s Takeaway:

What’s the tension in your industry with your customers? Are you courageous enough to say it outloud? Or do you assume the conversation would just be too sensitive. If you’re not addressing it openly. It’s not going away.

References:

 1. Humphrey Taylor, Chairman of The Harris Poll, in The Wall Street Journal Online, Health Care Poll, Vol. 3, Iss. 19, October 1, 2004

2. Medical malpractice as an epidemiological problem, Social Science & Medicine, Volume 59, Issue 1, July 2004, Pages 39-46, Michelle M. Mello and David Hemenway

3. Press Ganey, The Satisfaction Monitor, Sept/Oct 2000, Service InSight: Connecting the Dots, Another in the Latest & Greatest Series, Mary P. Malone, MS, JD, Executive Director, Consulting Services

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