Art’s Weekly Leadership Message: Step Up to Cure Effective Dialogue Deficit Disorder
The medical community and drug companies have their ED malady and cure, but too many management and project teams suffer from their own form of ED…with two more D’s…EDDD… Effective Dialogue Deficit Disorder.
It’s not that people aren’t talking. There’s no deficit of hot air swirling around most meeting rooms. The issue is all about the quality of the dialogue.
Consider:
- All the firms who use last year’s operating plan and budgets as the basis for next year’s plan, without vetting and refreshing on what’s really happening in their markets and with their customers and within their own businesses. The future is difficult enough to predict in the best of circumstances. It’s laughably impossible to do it by focusing on the images in the rear-view mirror.
- Strategy meetings where the swirling discussions include opinions, facts, emotions, ideas and yes some political posturing, all without order, direction or purpose. Kudos for getting people together for the right reasons. Now, focus on managing the discussion flow to ensure purpose and progress.
- Performance evaluation processes that don’t connect to professional development steps. Your job is to connect evaluation to forward progress and development. You’re not a movie critic…you’re responsible for helping someone create the next scene in their own professional movie.
- Project Teams that develop detailed risk assessments at the onset of their initiatives, and fail to constantly refresh and update on the risk plan. The pesky thing about dealing with risk is that it is annoyingly unpredictable in many circumstances. Vigilance and review beats static advance planning here everyday.
- Ideation or brainstorming sessions that develop long lists of ideas that are forgotten as soon as the flipcharts come down. Ideas are truly horrible things to waste.
5 Ideas to Help Cure Effective Dialogue Deficit Disorder:
1. Don’t preoccupy on the past. Use past results to assess where YOU failed to anticipate and execute, and then focus on asking the hard questions about what’s changing with markets, customers and competitors. Build your plan around what you should be doing to succeed in the emerging world, not on what you did last year.
2. Change your discussion approach. Learn and apply the process of parallel thinking and discussion to eliminate the swirl and sort facts from emotions, opinions and ideas. De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats is a great place to start.
3. Learn to feedforward. Every opportunity to offer “feedback” on prior performance should be better viewed as an opportunity for what Marshall Goldsmith describes as “feedforward.” Again, cut out the rear-view mirror stuff and help people design their way forward.
4. If is was important enough to “assess” and develop a document, it’s very likely important enough to revisit and rethink. Don’t ask people and teams to just comply with a step or process (i.e. create a risk assessment). Instead, encourage frequent return trips to check assumptions and incorporate new learnings.
5. Never waste ideas! Don’t ask people to exercise their creative capabilities and then lose the precious output. Build an idea inventory and reference it frequently.
The Key Point:
Teach your teams to engage with purpose. Plan and manage your discussions to include reflection, assessment, direction and action. Every discussion is an opportunity to design something going forward. Throw in a consistent serving of accountability and you are on your way to building high performance into your working environment.
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JUST RELEASED! Check Out Art’s New Book: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development
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About Art Petty:
Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach and Strategy Consultant, helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Art’s second book (an edited, annotated collection of the most popular leadership essays), Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, was released at the end of September in 2011.
Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement.
The Career Enhancing Benefits of Message Mapping
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Management Education, Marketing, Marketing Yourself, Product Management, Professional Growth, Strategy, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Critical 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.
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.
October 29th Carnival of HR (and much more)
Readers interested in some divergent thinking and great ideas should take a look at the menu of authors and content at the latest Carnival of HR. And don't let the HR headline trick you. This Halloween collection of articles covers diverse topics in leadership, communication, execution, talent development and priceless career advice. Oh, and of course, Dan McCarthy, the host, was nice enough to include my recent attempt to place a quantifiable value on leadership development activities. Check it out, it's definitely a treat.
Three Simple, Low Cost Ideas to Help Jump-Start Leadership Development
One of the most frequent questions that I get at seminars or workshops goes something like this:
"Art, I’ve read your leadership book, I’ve listened to you in the workshop and I understand how important it is for me to put time into the development of leaders on my team. Where should I start?"
It’s actually a great question, and one which some creative and conscientious leaders have offered me some great, low-cost, easy to implement ideas that I am happy to share with you.
Teammate Yesterday, Manager Today
Undoubtedly, one of the most difficult and awkward professional transitions is the jump from team member to team manager. The people that you’ve worked with side by side, joked with and shared lunch with are no longer your peers, they are your employees, and for good or bad, your relationship with them will never be the same. If you are truly interested in developing as a leader, this awkward situation is an outstanding rite of passage, complete with some hardcore lessons on what it takes for you to build credibility, motivate, direct, support and lead others.
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e-book-Leadership and the Project Manager - Developing the Skills that Fuel High Performance
