The Career Enhancing Benefits of Message Mapping

August 4, 2010 By 4 Comments

empty voicesCritical communication situations demand crystal clarity.

With apologies for my abusive but personally amusing alliteration above, I’m banging the drum again on the need for all of us to carefully form and frame our messages before we open our mouths and trip on our tongues.

There are many critical communication situations that we face in our organizations and in public, and the moment that you open your mouth is not the time to begin thinking about how to best get your points across. And it’s certainly no time to start rambling like so many politicians or hapless business executives caught on the wrong end of a microphone without a plan.  We all know the outcomes, ranging from empty blah blah blabbing to disturbing utterances that demand later apologies.

I use a simple but powerful tool called Message Mapping that is ideal for all of those critical communication situations, including:

  • Developing and delivering a speech
  • Presenting to executives
  • Preparing and participating in a job interview
  • Launching a new product
  • Communicating a new strategy
  • Announcing organizational changes
  • Helping to get a group on the same page
  • Preparing for an interview
  • Delivering difficult news
  • Anything else that you can think of…

A group of us learned this approach from a public relations professional years ago and went on to adapt it to serve our own needs in creating corporate and product messaging and helping to ensure that trade show and briefing teams were on the same page about new product launches.  Ultimately, we’ve all used it to great effect in our personal professional lives for interview and other presentations.

Creating the Map-Simplicity and Complexity at the Same Time:

The approach is simple to explain, easy to visualize and darned challenging to master all at the same time.

Let’s start with the visual in my poorly constructed, but hopefully, illustrative picture here.  In its’ simplest incarnation, the map is constructed on a single sheet of paper (landscape), with the core message placed at the center, no more than 4 key supporting points external to the core message and then supporting data or evidence adjacent to each supporting point.  That’s the easy part.

Message Map

The challenging issue is to distill your core message down to its bare-naked essence and get it right. If you are preparing for a job interview, the core message is your personal-professional value proposition, which for most of us, is something that takes a lot of teeth gnashing and revision work to capture and describe properly.  If you are launching a new product, this is the core value proposition of your offering…the essence of why this is important and for whom and how it is uniquely different.  And yes, this is captured in one or two sentences.

Once your core message or in this case your core value proposition is defined, you need to back that with points (examples, facts, experiences) that support this message.  Once again, you face the task of distilling a lot of examples and supporting points down to the very few that most effectively support your case.   And yes, I’m serious about limiting yourself to three or at most four supporting points that make the case for your core message.  Any more than that, and you’ve not worked hard enough to sharpen your messaging.

The outer ring as I describe it is used for the facts and supporting points that back your logic.  The constraint of a single page or flip-chart challenges you to summarize the critical points and to jettison extraneous anecdotal information.

Using the Map:

Once the map is in place and appropriately tested, it becomes an invaluable personal or group tool.  You’ve now got a tool to help you practice and deliver in the most difficult of situations.  If constructed properly, your map drives your script and serves as an aid in answering questions.  Proper use of the map involves making your case according to the flow and answering questions by referencing back to the supporting evidence…key supporting points and core message every time.

One point of caution: politicians are often observed abusing this tool by answering questions using their maps, with complete disregard for the question being asked.  Don’t disrespect your audience this way.

The Bottom-Line for Now

I’ve worked for weeks with teams using this tool to form corporate and product messaging and days and weeks with individuals to help frame their own professional value propositions.  I’ve also used this in minutes to prepare for interviews or executive updates. We frequently provided these maps to our trade show teams to ensure that everyone could answer the questions, “What do you guys do?” or “What’s new this year?” with something that actually meant something to someone, other than the inconsistent corporate gobbedly-gook that is often spewed in these settings.

Keep in mind that just because you own the finest woodworking tools doesn’t mean that you are capable of creating beautiful furniture.  The message map is a tool that demands care and handling and then and only then, rewards you with rich and productive communication experiences.

Measure twice, cut once.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Marketing, Marketing Yourself, Product Management, Professional Growth, Strategy Tagged With: , , , ,

Leadership Caffeine: Learning to Adjust Your Altitude

April 12, 2010 By 14 Comments

A Cup of Leadership CaffeineWhile the phrase is most commonly referenced as attitude adjustment, I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that one of the abilities that leaders must develop to be effective is the ability to adjust their altitudes.

Good leaders learn to scale institutional and intellectual heights with ease and comfort, quickly adapting to the audience and situation.

Examples of Frequent and Successful Altitude Adjusters:

  • There’s the CEO that’s built a career around being a brilliant strategist and an even better operator.  Watch him work a factory floor and you’ll see him descend from the lofty level of the boardroom to the critical issues of people and process.  He’s equally comfortable in the rarefied air of strategy and vision and market forces or as an observer and student on the shop floor where true value is being created.
  • The small business owner that serves customers all day long and drives home with an emerging vision for how her business must change in order to grow.
  • The college professor that translates the philosophical foundations and theories of her specialty into practical, relevant concepts and tools that clarify, stimulate interest and offer some form of sustaining value.  This professor offers knowledge and insight designed for use.
  • The Product Manager that is able to move seamlessly from detailed requirements discussions with engineers in the morning to a concise strategy discussion and competitive analysis with executives in the afternoon.
  • The Project Manager that pivots on one foot to resolve a team dispute and then pivots back to the work of helping his team learn to make better decisions.

Regardless of the specifics, these effective formal and informal leaders move seamlessly from the detailed to the general, from the tactical to strategic and from the confusing and complex to the simple and straightforward as easily as you are reading this post. Whether this is an innate ability for some or a learned skill for others, those that practice adjusting their altitudes are significantly more effective than others stuck at one level.

Of course, those that are effectively stuck at one level are requiring everyone else to adapt, and that takes energy and breeds stress and strife.  These less than effective leaders require both the proverbial attitude adjustment as well as some solid lessons in learning to adjust their altitude.

5 Suggestions for Learning to More Effectively Adjust Your Altitude:

1.  Seek first to understand and then be understood.  I love that saying for its wisdom.  I observe many leaders that engage with their team members on issues for just a few moments and then cut them off mid-stream, with an opinion, a decision or an order.  Teach yourself to clamp your jaw shut and listen and process on all of the verbal and non-verbal cues that are so generously placed in front of you.  The time you invest in focusing and listening and then thinking about the issue being presented will give you time to adjust your altitude to the right level.

2.  Plan your message. Knowledge workers and individual contributors should redouble their efforts to plan the messages for exchanges with executives.  While you may be personally fascinated by the details of your project or product, it is critical to recognize that those in executive roles want you to give them the time…not to tell them how to build the watch.  For unscheduled, hallway or elevator exchanges, condition yourself to move into time-teller mode, again resisting the urge to showcase your in-depth command of every detail.  Your overall work and results will showcase whether you have command of the details.

3.  Recognize that context is key to motivating action.  Assume that no one else has thought through the issue in as much depth as you have.  Management teams that vigorously debate strategy for weeks and then become satisfied on a direction and choices must recognize that no one else in the organization has any context for either the direction or the choices.  This common communication gap is actually more like a grand canyon of misunderstanding, both in expanse and in height and depth.

4. Learn to see patterns in problems. In your daily work life, develop the habit of identifying recurring problems and patterns and then suggesting and implementing ideas that eliminate these problems and improve organizational practices.

5. View your role and tasks in the context of a long value chain.  Instead of thinking about what you do as discrete and separate from people in other groups, recognize that your work impacts the performance of others along the chain.  Seek to understand how and why others depend upon you and better yet, develop an approach that emphasizes constantly measuring your own performance against how well you are meeting the needs of others that come after you in the organizational value chain.

The Bottom Line for Now:

For your own professional development, challenge yourself to understand issues from all levels.  The best leaders and the best employees connect their work to creating value for customers or solving vexing internal issues. These effective professionals learn to scale heights from idea to implementation, from problem to improvement and from understanding to new direction.  They strive to become effective communicators at all levels and they constantly focus on understanding what is reality to individuals at all layers of the organization.

While the vertical metaphor of altitude may grossly simplify what is really going on here, it’s simple and comprehensible enough to grasp and apply.  For today and everyday, make certain that you are challenging yourself to adjust your altitude.  You might just find a lot more enjoyment and success in your work, in the process of scaling the issues.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Leadership Caffeine-Teach Your Team to Make Better Decisions

March 14, 2010 By 1 Comment

A Cup of Leadership CaffeineNote from Art: What started out as a cup of Leadership Espresso ended up as a Double-Tall! Enjoy the extra sips and let’s hear your thoughts on this important topic.

If you were to embark upon a rugged and lonely journey to the top of the mountain to ask for enlightenment from the Oracle of Management, I suspect that you would be left with the words “decision-making” to ponder on your long walk back to civilization.

And while that might not sound much like enlightenment, remember that oracles by their nature offer only vague but profound observations to stimulate learning.

In spite of the lack of a concrete answer from this journey, I’ll throw in my two-cents worth that decision-making is in fact the essence of management. It’s also darned hard to do, difficult to teach and challenging to get right more often than not.

As humans, we make tens of thousands of decisions ranging from the mundane to the profound.  Decisions open up new paths, close off old ones and usher in an entirely new series of issues and decisions that ultimately affect us in so many ways that it is hard to fathom.

History of course can be explained in hindsight as a series of critical decisions that ultimately determined the fate of civilizations, empires, nations and tribes.

Think about your own professional experience.  If you’ve spent any significant amount of time in the workplace, you can certainly look in the rear-view mirror and see decision-points that impacted the fate of teams, companies, or tasks. Projects hinge on decision-making effectiveness, as do new product launches and business strategies.

I recall distinctly watching and listening as a newly hired and early career professional as a firm’s market leading position was sacrificed on the alter of ego and ignorance with a single utterance from an executive. Most of us in the room suspected that the decision was bad at the time, but the true impact wasn’t clearly understood for several years.

Alternatively, I’ve participated in long and tough discussions and decision-making processes with teams that ultimately translated into good and great outcomes on both small and large scales.  From projects that succeeded to produce great results to products and strategies that captured market segments and grew revenues and profits.  In hindsight, the decisions seem so clear and obvious, but in real-time, they were tense, ambiguous and even frightening.

Talent related decisions are some of the most common and painful. Anyone that has hired a significant number of people has made one or more mistakes.  What was it about your own decision-making process that failed you or that obfuscated your ability to assess the individual properly?  It’s hard to say, but chances are you’ve learned from that mistake and refined your process.

While machines can be taught to make decisions based on rules and data, humans have the advantage and disadvantage of….well…of being human. There are many complex factors at play in our decision-making processes, ranging from our own personalities (think right or left brain), our personal experience sets and biases, to the many complicated environmental factors and human and group dynamics and risk and reward issues that make effective decision-making a truly complex task.

On the other-hand, we’re paid to make decisions and we’re responsible for helping our groups and teams do this effectively more often than not. What’s a leader to do?

The Bad News-There Are No Decision-Making Silver Bullets

A review of much of the management literature on decision-making showcases a great deal of fascinating discussion without a lot of substantive guidance. There is apparently no silver-bullet for us as managers and leaders on ensuring that we make good decisions or on ensuring that we build teams and cultures that make more good decisions than they do bad calls.

As I look back on my own career (yep, there’s that experience bias) as well as my observations of many, many teams and leaders, I’ve formed an informal and I’m sure imperfect, but hopefully, helpful list of tools to guide managers on strengthening their decision-making effectiveness and that of their teams.  These include:

11 Suggestions for Strengthening Your Own and Your Team’s Decision Making Effectiveness:

1. People need context to make decisions. The best context in a firm starts with a galvanizing vision and is strengthened with a clear strategy and highly interconnected goals. If you’ve worked in firms with and without this clarity, you’ve lived and know the difference.  The absence of vision, strategy and clear, meaningful goals equates to complete lack of context for any decisions.  They are all good and bad and there is no way to discriminate. Fix this!

2. If your organization fails on point number one, you need to fix this at the team or group level. Quit complaining about the lack of guidance and define the playing field and goals for your team.  Yes, this puts accountability on you and requires you to turn ambiguity into something concrete.  Get over it and get on with it.

3. Your own decision-making style infects-positively or negatively, everyone around you.  Ponder too long and you paralyze.  React too quickly and you increase risk and the likelihood of team whiplash by finding that you have to quickly reverse decisions.  You must deliberately develop a style that balances the need for clarity with the reality that much of business is steeped in ambiguity.

4. Beware of the evil paternal twins of groupthink and group polarization. Know your enemies and keep them visible and teach your team how to keep them at bay.

5. Create diversity where there is none. Beware the damage from having hired and cultivated too many like-minded professionals on your team.  They may be great, but in group dynamics, the lack of diversity of thinking styles is your enemy.  Draw in external help to challenge thinking.

6. Keep the Devil’s Advocate in a cage and let him out for periods of time. Tom Kelley of IDEO fame showcases the potential destruction of the Devil’s Advocate run amuck.  No one said this creature needs to live amongst you every day, but opening the cage door from time to time is both terrifying and helpful.

7. Use approaches other than discussion or face-to-face to make decisions to reduce biases and change dynamics.  The Nominal Group technique or the Delphi Method both offer opportunities to reduce the presence and impact of group biases.

8. Constantly teach your group to both assess their decisions and improve their decision-making processes.  This is a never-ending task of the effective leader.

9. Resist your own natural tendency to opine. John Chambers at Cisco (Harvard Video) described as one of the most critical issues in transforming from a command and control culture to one of collaboration, his need to not tell the answer to everyone after ten minutes of discussion.

10. Reward, don’t shoot messengers and failed experimenters. Remember Deming’s point number 8: “Eliminate fear in the workplace.”  Live it.

11. Create and teach a risk framework.  What’s the worst that will happen?  Can we bear the worst? If we cannot bear the worst, what can we change to reduce the worst?  While many will argue appropriately that a good risk framework is much more involved, you can do worse than start with these three questions.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Ultimately, your career and your company hinges on the decisions that you and others around you make.  Given the broader forces affecting us all…speed, globalization, the march of technology and an exciting spread of diversity in our workplaces, this process of making decisions won’t get any easier.  I don’t have the silver bullet for you either, other than to offer that you need to wake up every morning and walk in the door prepared to find a way to improve as decision-maker while teaching others to do the same.

Now, what are you going to do about it?

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Decision-Making, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management, Strategy Tagged With: , , , ,

Leading the Driven Individual

January 15, 2010 By 10 Comments

The Driven Individual's DestinationNote from Art: My use of the “Driven Individual” term here encompasses the big-thinkers and game changers that I’ve had the privilege of supporting over my career.  I get that there are other types of Driven Individuals…those that will seize a task and not let go until it has been wrestled to the ground.  The latter group represents a subject for another day.

A great deal of popular leadership writing (mine included) focuses on the common issues and challenges with “typical employees.” Now before you grab a pitchfork and light the torches and start marching on this blog for my use of the term “typical,” don’t misconstrue my meaning.

Yes, I know that no one is “typical” and that we all have strengths and weaknesses and that it is grossly unfair to provide such a crass label to the masses of good quality employees laboring away and earning “strongly exceeds” on our grade-inflated performance evaluations.  (I can hear the pitchforks clanking again on that last shot!)

Nonetheless, it was the best label I could come up with on short notice and only a few sips into my first cup of coffee, to differentiate from the subject of today’s post: The Driven Individual (DI). This is the “atypical, super-motivated, cannot do enough, has limitless energy and enthusiasm and offers capabilities that have no visible boundaries,” type of employee.

While one might consider the DI to be a leader’s dream, the reality is that these wonderful individuals offer a unique set of challenges that require special care and feeding. My perspectives are based on personal experience working with some brilliant but challenging DI’s and reflect both the good outcomes and some spectacular misfires on my part.

Understanding and Leading the Driven Individual:

Recognize that these individuals don’t think about problems like the rest of us.  What we view as a set of tasks or a discrete goal, the DI views as an opportunity to change the world.  DI’s in my experience are often “systems” thinkers, looking at the big picture and offering ideas that may be transformational.

A simple example might be an engineer or product manager that sees an opening for a new product.  The product idea might be innovative, but the DI is constitutionally and genetically wired to attempt to rethink how the offering can redistribute the wealth of an entire industry. The iPod was a cool innovation beyond the Walkman.  The iPod plus iTunes reset the profit pattern of an entire market and changed the world.  You bet that there were a bunch of DI’s and one obvious one (Steve Jobs) behind that.

Another example is the individual that looks at the way certain tasks are executed in an organization and sees an opportunity to streamline, eliminate waste and improve coordination.  This Deming-like thinker gets the fact that “the system” is the tool for success of failure and is always looking at problems and processes from that perspective.

And one other core observation of my own in working around DI’s is their reaction to failure. I’ve yet to meet one of these characters that didn’t respond by licking wounds for a day or so and then coming back stronger…either for the project that failed or on a new idea.  They don’t need false motivation from you, they need recovery time and space.

Leadership Guidance

-Let DI’s run, but make certain that you stay engaged enough to keep them from pursuing too many revolutionary activities at one time. Some of these characters love to catalyze revolutions but lose interest for the long fight.  Left unchecked, their passion and exuberance and brilliance can lead to too many great projects chasing too few resources.

-Don’t ask the types of DIs that I’m describing in this post serve as project managers. I’ve made this mistake and I’ve yet to succeed with this configuration. The minutiae of execution detail acts like a leash on creativity and energy.  On the other hand, this same DI that might not be a great project leader is most definitely the heart and soul of the project, so they must remain involved as architect, champion and visionary.

-Don’t ever micromanage a DI.  Frankly, don’t ever micromanage anyone, especially a DI.

-Watch out! DIs I’ve known have tended to have little regard for social niceties and are prone to stepping on toes or entire bodies. The goal is the thing for these DIs and if they have to throw a few body blocks along the way, that is fine.  If you have this form of DI on your team, you’ve got a non-trivial leadership challenge in front of you.

The cultural pressure from the rest of the team may ultimately demand that you act to remove this “social misfit,” while your tendency will be to rationalize the behavior as the price to pay for their brilliance.  Coaching, constant feedback and more coaching can help minimize the body count, but won’t completely eliminate the issue.  Get this right and your DI will do great things for you and others will recognize how they benefit as well.  Manage this wrong by either allowing reckless, free reign or worse yet, attempt to neutralize the DI and you will fail.

-Don’t let DIs sit idle or you will bore them into looking elsewhere, including your competitors, for their next challenge. Remember, these individuals are thinking three chess moves ahead of the rest of us, and as they mentally wind down on one issue, there needs to be a new one ready to take its place.

-Be careful: some DIs enjoy visibility and others run from it. Don’t misfire by either ignoring this for those that like the accolades or over-using it for those that would rather have a root canal without drugs than have to stand up at a company meeting.

The Bottom Line for Now:

I’ve barely scratched the surface of this topic, but need to stop somewhere.  I love the challenge of working around and providing the environment for Driven Individuals to succeed.  Get this right and fortunes are made.  Get it wrong, and you’ll wreak havoc on the workplace.   The stakes are big, and the Driven Individual will challenge you to earn your keep.

Filed Under: Leadership, Performance, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Leading in the Trenches-Recovering from Trickle Down Project Management Chaos

November 3, 2009 By 3 Comments
Use these filters:
* Why are we doing this project? What are the assumptions that made it seem like a good idea before and are they still valid?
* Is it a must-do or compliance initiative?
* Is it strategic?  If yes, you should bounce it up against the current-state strategy and determine whether it is still relevant today.  If not, kill it.
* Is it an operational improvement?  If yes, can you connect the operational improvements to something that impacts strategy and customers…even through one or two degrees of separation?  If you cannot connect it to something that allows you to serve customers (internal or external) more effectively, consider killing it.
* Do we have the right balance of strategic and operational initiatives?
* Are we evaluating projects based on a combination of objectively developed financial and non-financial criteria?  Does our evaluation approach allow for reasonable comparison of alternatives?

chaosQuite a while ago, I wrote a piece entitled, “Too Many Projects Chasing Too Few Resources,” where I exhorted executives and organizations to adopt a rigorous project filtering process and to discover the power of the word, “No,” when it comes to project selection.

Project inflation…the spread of too many projects and the heaping of them upon the tormented and torn few is a formula for disaster. Unfortunately, work force reductions and pressures to reduce costs, improve processes and to innovate all fuel project inflation.

A colleague described the scenario in her firm as follows: “It seems like we are reacting in knee-jerk fashion to what’s going on in the economy and our industry by saying “Yes” to anything and everything that looks like it might cut costs or improve operating efficiencies.  I get that, but we’re literally accepting and launching every project that comes along and we have even fewer resources to execute these projects than we did a year ago.”

Yep, the projects always trickle down from somewhere up there in the rarefied air where things look and sound good in theory. Conscientious project managers always raise the resource issue and according to my colleague, that discussion often ends up with a reprioritization of existing in-process projects (moving the deck chairs) or the OK to outsource to fill the gaps.

These short-sighted solutions of course are another step towards chaos:

  • Frequent reprioritization drives project team performance and morale into the porcelain bowl.
  • Adding contract workers (outsourcing) can be fine, but it increases communications and administrative complexity exponentially.
  • Project inflation overstresses the project management resources and often breeds a wickedly complex matrix of project responsibilities for the people doing the work.
  • Fueling recovery, renewing our firms and strengthening our ability as a firm to compete are critical goals right now, and developing project selection discipline is an absolutely critical ingredient in achieving those goals.

As a starting point for gaining control of the chaos, consider these Project Filtering suggestions from my earlier post:

Ask and Answer:

  • Why are we doing this project? What are the assumptions that made it seem like a good idea before and are they still valid?
  • Is it a must-do or compliance initiative?
  • Is it strategic? If yes, you should bounce it up against the current-state strategy and determine whether it is still relevant today. If not, kill it.
  • Is it an operational improvement? If yes, can you connect the operational improvements to something that impacts strategy and customers…even through one or two degrees of separation? If you cannot connect it to something that allows you to serve customers (internal or external) more effectively, consider killing it.
  • Do we have the right balance of strategic and operational initiatives?
  • Are we evaluating projects based on a combination of objectively developed financial and non-financial criteria? Does our evaluation approach allow for reasonable comparison AND selection of alternatives?

The Bottom-Line:

Stop the torrent of trickle-down projects that dilute the effectiveness of your resources to something approaching gridlock. Adopt a strategic project selection and portfolio management process or prepare to run in place while the world passes you by.

Filed Under: Decision-Making, Leadership, Performance, Product Management, Project Management Tagged With: , , , ,
« Previous Page
Next Page »