This blog is about the relationship between organizations and the people who work for them. And, it’s dedicated to the millions of people around the world who go to work every day wanting to do a great job.
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The truth about the number 1 fear
Can it really be true that public speaking is the number 1 fear of ordinary people like you and me? Presentation coaches often say so. I should know because among other things I’m a presentation coach. But the evidence for the claim is underwhelming. Years ago Jerry Seinfeld used to open his comedy act with this story. “According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does this seem right? That means to the average person, if you have to go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”
Of course Jerry’s right this doesn’t seem right. The facts are “most studies” haven’t found this. One study did. The much quoted or referenced 1971 Bruskin Report, conducted by the U.S. marketing research firm R. H. Bruskin Associates for the [American] Travel Research Association. The good folks at Travel Research wanted help dealing with what they thought was a big marketing problem for the travel industry: Americans fear of flying. Bruskin was delighted to be able to help them out with their survey which, remarkably, showed ordinary Americans were much more afraid of public speaking, heights, insects, financial problems, deep water, sickness, and even death than they were of flying. [Which proves, to carry on with Jerry's logic that if your swimming in deep water and get a cramp you'd much rather drown than ask the crowd on the beach for help.] Since then surveys have been conducted from time to time that report what everyone already knows that large numbers of otherwise ordinary people are to some extent apprehensive, hesitant, shy or nervous about, fearful or afraid, call it what you will, of public speaking. If this research proves anything it is that nervousness about public speaking - to use one simple label for a complex collection of feelings and energies – is a normal part of what it means to be human. It is not our number 1 fear; and fear is the wrong word for most people; it is our most common shared experience. And I have come to believe it is an extremely useful thing. I don’t think any great presentation happens unless the presenter feels some nervousness before they go on. Too much can hurt a presenter but so can too little. The key is to master your nervousness not eliminate it.
Here, for your consideration, are the musings of an expert on the subject of fear:
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Do you know the 3 best headline writing tricks ever … anyone can do, guaranteed!
Today, I was reading an article in IABCs Communication World – “What can we learn from the ‘real world’” – by Steve Crencenzo. Steve advises companies on how to write headlines so employees, customers and other people they want to influence will read what they have to say. He suggests that you write your headlines the way newsstand magazines like Cosmopolitan do. Cosmo, he explains uses three basic tricks to hook your interest: use lists, directly address your audience and use dot, dot, dots.
For example:
- 10 sure-fire ways to have the best sex ever!
- You can be a sex goddess now!
- Admit it … you definitely need more great sex!
Wow, I thought that sure beats the typical headlines you see in corporate writing, such as:
- Speed and disintermediation
- Reputation management is strategic management
- Local values, global view
Granted, as Steve points out, Cosmo has got a big advantage. It’s selling sex. Most companies have a less appealing product. But as Steve also points out Cosmo doesn’t rely just on sex to sell their magazine. Afterall a lot of magazines are selling sex. Cosmo uses a far more powerful weapon: the headline hooks.
The big question is: should you try to use these hooks in your business writing? My take is if you do be careful. If you have something important to tell people great. If not the hooks are not a substitute. And you may turn people off using them even if you have something to say because, let’s face it – they’re manipulative. And that’s not sexy.
What’s your take?
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Scale & proportion in communications
"The Fisherman," Saul Steinberg, from The Labyrinth
I think internal communications design at its best is compositional. So, that takes me to the arts to see if there are things I can learn there.
Scale and proportion are two important considerations for the artist or architect. Should they be considerations for those of us who design communications plans? Scale refers to the size of the work. Proportion refers to how we see elements within the work in relationship to each other.
It’s easy in the heat of the moment or the “big” announcement to lose sight of what really matters to our colleagues in different functions and at different levels across our organizations. Not all decisions and announcements are created equal from the point of view of those we’re trying to reach and engage. Not everything is as big to “them” as it is to us.
Designing a communication approach that is the right proportion and scale for the news we’re sharing is as important as any other aspect of communication plan we’re building. Overdoing something that isn’t all that relevant to employees or failing to communicate something that is will lead to equally bad outcomes: Confusion and erosion of trust.
Thinking about the scale and proportion of the communication from the receiver’s point of view helps.
- Scale – the number and variety of communication channels, the frequency and duration of the communication, the effort level to engage people in a conversation
- Proportion – how evident we want to make the communication in context of everything else that is going on organizationally at any point in time and over time, and within the communication itself what is most relevant/important for different employees to ‘get’.
Next time you’re about to communicate a ‘big’ new corporate decision, business strategy, human resources policy, technology change, acquisition, or quarterly financial results, think about what this news really means for the people you’re communicating it to. What impact – direct or indirect – will it have on them? What do you want them to know, feel or do as a result of your communicating with them?
And once you have the answers to these questions, think a little bit more like an artist, design a communication that is right in terms of scale and proportion.
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Will 2011 be a reap year?
A friend of mine, Eunice Ajambo, is starting an NGO for educating young women entrepreneurs in Uganda [UgWO - sorry no website yet]. In a recent e-mail she said she felt next year was going to be a year of reaping. Of course we won’t know until this time next year. Today, what I know is that 2010 for me was a year of learning and consolidating. And it was fabulous in so many ways.
As a communications professional, I’ve been trying to find ways to explore social media in a more direct way. Move my understanding from theory to experience to practice.
This blog is part of that exploration. I was fortunate to have met Mitch Joel a few years ago and he got me seriously thinking about it. Interestingly that turned into my husband Michael diving in first with his ode to Marshall McLuhan. But, thanks to Mitch I started reading more blogs and commenting – building my nerve as it were. And thanks to that voyage I’ve met a whole raft of amazing professionals through CommScrum. These connections have felt a bit like coming home – but a lot less warm and fuzzy.
The turning point on blogging for me happened earlier this year with the encouragement of Michelle Sullivan, Leslie Quinton, and Lisa Chandler – who all in their own way said: “Come on, who are you kidding, you’ve got opinions on everything. Just do it.” Thanks ladies – I think. I’ve learned more about what I really think and value than I ever expected. Putting your ideas down and pressing post is a very humbling experience.
But for me not nearly as humbling as my experiments with Twitter. Here I’m still a bit lost. Tamsen McMahon @tamadear, my apologies for not responding to your response to my tweet. It’s not because I didn’t want to. It’s because I didn’t and still don’t know how. Sigh. Much more learning to do here.
There have been other experiments – FourSquare, Sharepoint, Goodreads, Skype, Facebook, LinkedIn. Some of them have been a success and are now fully integrated into my way of working and living. And others haven’t. And there’ve been some challenging and provocative conversations [Julien Smith – you know you are].
All of this is making me a better professional. And though I’m sure there will be a few more Mount Everests of social media for me to climb, the journey so far has been very enriching.
Next year may be a reap year as my friend suggested, I just hope the learning and the opportunity to meet new communities of like-minded [or not] people continues. I wish the same for you in 2011.
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Houston. We have a problem!
“E-mails and Intranet Are Top Communication Methods Used to Engage Employees”. So reads the headline on an IABC News article. What?
Recently, I spoke about Gary Hamel’s call to reinvent management. In the webcast I refer to there, Gary talks about a global study of 90,000 employees around the world that was conducted by Towers Perrin and that showed that less than 20% of employees are engaged. And, I think this IABC News headline may tell us why. Or at least part of the why.
It seems that even though we keep saying communications isn’t about pushing messages, we continue to rely heavily on push technology and message sending.
In the world Gary describes. A world where “obedience, diligence and intellect” aren’t enough to create a competitive advantage, organizations need employees to bring “initiative, creativity and compassion” to their work. And, that isn’t going to happen because of e-mails and intranet.
How are we creating inspiring places to work? Places where people want to bring more of themselves.
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Innovation culture & internal communications
There’s been a lot of talk about the need for organizations to innovate. But, since organizations don’t innovate, people do, there’s also been a lot of talk about building “innovation cultures”. My friends at CommScrum have taken the discussion further and begun a conversation about innovation and what the drive to an “innovation culture” means for Internal Communications. Here’s how I’m thinking about it. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
“Innovation culture” seems to me a lot like the next generation “leadership culture”. Then everyone had to be a leader. [how that was possible I have no idea.] Now everyone has to be an innovator? [makes about as much sense as everyone’s a leader.]
So, the challenge for Internal Communicators is not to get caught up in the organizational hype and feel pressured into delivering on demand tools and tactics [sound familiar]. Instead, we need get the answers to these fundamental questions.
What needs to be innovated? Products? Services? Systems? Decision taking? Codes of Conduct? Accounting procedures? Pay policies? You get my point. Some things really benefit from continuous innovation. And some things just don’t. In fact getting too innovative would be detrimental and perhaps even illegal.
Why? To improve our employee experience? To improve our customer experience? To make it easier for the CEO to brag on the golf course? To get a headline? Understanding what’s motivating the drive for innovation will tell us how important it really is to the organization’s strategy.
Who will be most impacted? And what will the implications be for what they do and how they do it? No matter how wide or deep the drive for innovation goes, not all employees [I include execs in here too] will be affected equally [see What? above]. As communicators if we assume anything different we may find ourselves creators or amplifiers of mixed messages.
What? When? and How? It’s important to get an adequate take on what’s already being planned/done to create an “innovation culture”? And to understand how those changes will support employee innovation. New processes? New reward systems? Training? Supporting tools and tactics? For an interesting take on what needs to change, check out Jon Katzenbach and Zia Khan’s book, “Leading outside the lines”, p.177. This should give us a clear idea of how seriously the leadership is taking the change and where their priorities are. It should also help us discover where, when and how we can be most helpful.
What do you think? Will the drive for ‘innovative cultures’ change the role of Internal Communications? And, if so, how?
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Getting grassroots
This week I’ve spent a lot of time with people who are part of grassroots movements of one sort or another. And, I started to think about whether there was anything we can learn from grassroots movements like these that are making important and fundamental societal and environmental change?
It started last Friday with a fabulous evening – the Equitas host family dinner – spent with 3 of the 130 Human Rights educators who are here in Montreal for the International Human Rights Training Program. A Cambodian working on a peace and reconciliation program in a world where some citizens fear reprisals in the wake of Khmer Rouge convictions. A Brazilian Human Rights lawyer who devotes time to an NGO working on local Human Rights issues. And a children’s rights activist from The Gambia. Each of them committed to changing their society from the bottom-up. They come here to learn. They will go home to share and act. And they will change their world one action, one person at a time.
Then, because I have a crazy idea of building a rooftop garden – my field of dreams – on our Church hall, I’ve started meeting local people in the community who are working on related projects. They are working on food security, urban farming, creating a sustainable university campus and greening the downtown. They are students at Concordia who are piloting a sustainable business growing herbal tea to supply a student run and operated tea shop at the Loyola campus. They are professionals working with local action groups to green some of the most debilitated parts of the downtown. There’s one young man who went to jail for an action he took to change a regulation in The Plateau. And guess what they did. And, they are profs and grad students working on urban farming projects. It’s amazing. They are changing our urban landscape one planter at a time. It is amazing what’s going on just outside our door.
What do these movements have in common?
- They are “natural and spontaneous” movements
- They are driven by passion for the ‘cause’.
- They operate outside of “traditional power structures”
- They use “traditional power structures” to raise awareness and funds.
- They rely on informal networks to share information and resources.
- Their projects start small and local but with the clear intention of leading to big and sustainable change.
- They pilot and learn and share and pilot again.
- They build pride in the work and the community.
What do you think? Is there anything we can learn from grassroots movements that we can apply to institutional change initiatives?
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Recent Posts
- Grey zones are costing your organization big time
- Saying goodbye to jargon
- Don’t leave them laughing
- A master class with Ed Sullivan
- Innovation & collaboration: Strategic priorities or not?
- The truth about the number 1 fear
- Want to know the secret to writing a great speech?
- Connecting for big business benefits
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Recent posts
- Grey zones are costing your organization big time
- Saying goodbye to jargon
- Don’t leave them laughing
- A master class with Ed Sullivan
- Innovation & collaboration: Strategic priorities or not?
- The truth about the number 1 fear
- Want to know the secret to writing a great speech?
- Connecting for big business benefits
- Staying in touch with reality
- “Just hire a Dalek”
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