My son Jack, making those passes hard and exact.

My son Jack is 7 1/2 years old and playing his third season of soccer. He has a terrific coach this year, Coach Laurie. She’s led them through the season without a loss (though we’re not supposed to be counting points). Last week they won 4 to 1. That’s been their closest game.
 
How does she do it? Her mantra is “Hard and exact!”–with everything they do–”do it hard and exact”.
 
You don’t just move the ball downfield. You anticipate where your teammate will be and you kick it there hard and exact. You don’t just find an open space for the throw from the sideline, you move down the line. You don’t just do anything; you do something in particular, and you do it precisely .
 
That’s what we want from a coach of athletic sports, isn’t it?  That’s what makes legends of men like Vince Lombardi, the coach who led the Packers to the NFL’s first two Superbowl titles–demanding discipline. That’s what Coach Laurie provides, and it pays off for the team every week.
 
That’s what great communications takes? It may sound melodramatic, but it’s true. Here’s an example.
 
A couple of weeks ago, I was coaching executives from a small internet firm. They were practicing how to challenge and support an underperforming peer who was defensive. Just about any system of communications skills you learn will tell you to refect back what you see–call out the data, make observations, reflect what you see.
 
They were trying to do that:
“So, I see you’re feeling pretty defensive…”
“When I hear you complain like that, I think…”
“I can see you’re pretty sensitive about this, but…”
 
 and they were getting lots of pushback from the people they were trying to support:
“I’m not defensive, you just don’t know what it’s like.”
“I’m not complaining, I’m telling you how it is.”
“Now you’re trying to tell me how I should feel?”
 
Making observations, like many skills in communications is a precise practice. Knowing that you should do it isn’t enough as you can see above.
 
When making observations, you need to report what a video camera could pick up. As examples:
Rather than “I see you’re feeling defensive…”, it’s “I see you cross your arms and look down”.
Rather than “I hear you complain…”, it’s “When I hear you use words like petty and sneaky…”.
Rather than “I see you’re pretty sensitive…”, it’s “When I see you smile and your cheeks get red…”.
 
In my experience, language like that is surprisingly difficult for people to muster. Usually, there are two reasons. We think that stating what we’re seeing and hearing is too obvious, that the statements don’t add enough value or move the action along quickly enough. But often, especially when someone is upset, they’re not aware of what they’re doing. And even when they are, it’s nice for someone to acknowledge it. And if you report your interpretations (you’re defensive) rather than your observations (you’re crossing your arms), you’ll sound judgmental rather than supportive.
 
Second, we think our interpretations are right (well, he is defensive!). The problem is a fundamental bias in communications called the “observer’s bias” or the “attribution bias”. Essentially, it’s this: You do what you do because of the kind of person you are, but I do what I do because of the way you and the world treat me .

For example, you cross your arms because you’re defensive, while I cross my arms as a rational response to you waiting for me to make a mistake so you can pounce on me.

Whatever reason we have for reporting our interpretations instead of our observations, it reliably triggers defensiveness in the other person. And that sets communications back.

Tim’s Takeaway

Great communication is a skill, actually a set of skills. If you believe great communication is important to your success, you need to practice precision.

Sarah Palin

It’s no secret that gov. Sarah Palin is a controversial pick as a Vice Presidential running mate for Senator John McCain. A Google on her name will lead you to pages of conflicting analysis.

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

James Carville, CNN Commentator, Obama Supporter

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

Nancy Pfotenhauer, McCain Strategist

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

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.

Sleepy Audience from Kapterev

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.

Michael Phelps Interview

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.

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.

Beijing's Bird's Nest Stadium

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

2008 Chinese Drummers

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.

Chinese Print Block Artists

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. 

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

It’s a good example of how to apologize in business, a topic that’s seen increasing play in the healthcare industry press for the past 5 years or so.

The husband of the woman whose rib was partially shaved off by mistake (not the picture above, that’s an electrode left in Maria Del Rossario Valdez after a Ceasarian section) gave a pretty succinct recipe:”be completely candid, completely honest, and so frank…that the anger was gone.”

Here were the offending doctor’s actual words:

“After all these years, I cannot give you any excuse whatsoever. It is just one of those things that occurred. I have to some extent harmed you.”

 It happens in healthcare that more patients sue for poor communication than for actual medical mistakes. There’s probablly a lesson in there for you even if you aren’t in the healthcare industry.

References:

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

Free Agent Nation

You’ll notice from the reprint at the right important differences between Bunko and your standard career book. First, the text doesn’t respect margins. Second, the book doesn’t privilege text in the way most how-to’s do. Third, the book is fundamentally narrative, not didactic. In short, it’s a comic book. Or more correctly, it’s an Americanized version of Manga-a graphic format common in Japan and enjoying growing popularity in the US-which makes it sort of a literary california roll (to steal Dan’s metaphor).

But should you take Bunko’s format seriously, or is it just Pink’s attempt to attract attention for an otherwise deadly dry topic? The surprising answer is that there are a number of practically, and conceptually compelling reasons to believe this is more than fad or a promotional angle.

For example:

1. The internet has arguably obviated the need to put current information on many topics like careers into book form. A click of the mouse will take you to thousands of pages of career advice that’s both free and more current than any book could be. Hence, books are freed to focus on evergreen ideas like fundamental principals.

2. Some will say that the narrative format helps make these principals more memorable.

3. The manga format is popular and ubiquitous in Japan, capable of supporting content in a variety of genre. Dan passed around books formatted in manga with a variety of content including entertainment (comic books), social and political tracts (the dangers of nationalism), and how-to’s (time management tips). In fact, he says, walk into any bookstore in Japan and you’ll find an entire floor devoted to manga.

4. Some say manga is becoming more popular here in the US. That’s not entirely clear. According to ThePublishingTrendsBlog, a big dispute about the future of manga was sparked at last year’s Conference on Anime and Manga with pundits taking different sides depending on whether they put more stake in shelf space at bookstores, titles published, and on such things as paper vs. electronic format.

I can tell you this, there were three representatives there from a Snowhomish Washington workforce education group that were rabid about working Johnny Bunko into their material for high school and college kids. They cited high school drop out rates in the 50-60% range and saw Bunko as the right message in the right media. In fact, they’d already distributed 250 copies of the book to area job counselors.

Tim’s Takeaway:

We always want the media to represent the best way to get the message into the hands and minds or our audience. For some types of messages and audiences, the narrative-centric, visually-oriented manga style may be the best match of format and content. It’s worth looking into.

It turns out, according to a new study from the Ohio State University (happens to be my alma mater), IMing actually reduces workplace interruptions.

How’s that? By combining the best of phone calls and email, instead of the worst.

Workers get the immediacy of the telephone with the incentives for brevity that come from having to type out their comments. The result is that using instant messaging leads to more conversations that are briefer.

Tim’s Takeaway:

Go Buckeyes!