Strategy. Innovation. Brand.

Interpersonal Communication

Social Media, Bosom Buddies, and Christmas Card Friends

Bosom Buddies

Bosom Buddies

I try to keep up with the latest trends in social media. I’m especially interested in how my clients might use it to improve communications internally with employees or externally with customers and partners.

Over the years, I’ve seen the persistent criticism that the “social” in social media is Orwellian – it does the opposite of what it claims to do. Just as Big Brother promised freedom but offered enslavement, social media promise to create closely knit communities but actually insert an intermediate layer where none is needed. Rather than making us more social, it separates us further.

That’s the complaint… but is it true? As I use social media, I find that I need to segment the market to get real benefits. For some segments, social media doesn’t help me much at all. For other segments, it keeps me in better contact with people than ever before.

The two big segments for me are: 1) Bosom Buddies, and; 2) Christmas Card Friends. Bosom Buddies have two defining characteristics: 1) they’re close friends or colleagues that I want to keep up with, and; 2) I see them or talk to them or e-mail them often. I know what’s going on in their lives.

With Bosom Buddies, social media add no value whatsoever. I’ve never, ever learned a juicy new tidbit about a Bosom Buddy from a social media source. I’ve always heard it first from a more traditional source – a dinner party, a phone call, or just plain old-fashioned gossip. Social media add an unnecessary layer of communication that doesn’t get me any closer to my Bosom Buddies.

With Bosom Buddies, the grapevine is a powerful and prolific source of information. In fact, I sometimes hear that active participation in social media is an effective substitute for going to the office. With Bosom Buddies, the reverse is true: going to the office is an effective substitute for social media.

With Christmas Card Friends, things are different. I like my Christmas Card Friends just as much as my Bosom Buddies but I don’t see them nearly as often. They may live in another town. Or maybe they travel in slightly different social circles. Or maybe they have young children and don’t get around much any more.

Whatever the case, I don’t get to see them as often as I’d like. Nor do I hear from them (or they from me) frequently, even though I would like to. In some cases, I only hear from them though the traditional social medium called Christmas Cards.

With Christmas Card Friends, social media can add significant value. I can fairly easily keep up with people I enjoy but don’t interact with regularly. Social media are a source of new news. I regularly learn new things about Christmas Card Friends through social media. I enjoy that and I think it enriches our relationship.

As you think about social media – whether personal or professional – think about your market segments. You may find that targeting Christmas Card Friends rather than Bosom Buddies will lead you to richer, more enjoyable interactions.

More Time

Budget this!

Budget this!

Last week, in Time – The Infinite Resource, I wrote about the “time culture” in your organization. If your organization is like most, you keep close track of how employees spend money and no track of how they spend their time. Yet, management gurus like Peter Drucker, say that time is our most precious resource. If you can’t manage your time, you can’t manage anything.

In my post, I outlined three (of five) time management techniques that McKinsey recommends to make organizations more productive and less stressful. The basic trick is to treat time as a corporate resource rather than an individual resource. In other words, we should treat time essentially the same way as we treat money.

Here are the other two time techniques from the McKinsey article.

Refine the master calendar — to identify things that you can stop doing, you first need to identify (to yourself and others) that you are doing them. This often means a master calendar for key individuals and meetings. In fact, meetings are some of the biggest time wasters. (See the Travis Rule). Make them do double duty. If executives travel to a meeting, ask them to schedule other activities at the same time. Perhaps they can visit customers or schedule personnel evaluations on the same trip. McKinsey also suggests categorizing your meetings. Are they for: 1) reporting; 2) collaboration and coordination; 3) managing performance through course corrections; 4) making decisions? (Not approving decisions, but actually making them). McKinsey reports that, in top performing organizations, executive spend some 50% of their meeting time in decision-making meetings and only 10% in reporting meetings. Less efficient organizations often over-schedule reporting meetings and under-schedule decision-making meetings. By wasting time that also increases stress.

Provide high-quality administrative support – how often have I seen companies lay off relatively inexpensive clerical workers and then ask expensive executives to pick up the task? Far too often. That reduces the time efficiency of your most costly employees and adds to their stress. In McKinsey’s study, 85% of executives who manage their time effectively also report that they have excellent administrative support. Only 7% of the poor time manager report that they have excellent support.

It’s also interesting to note how effective time managers spend their time. According to McKinsey, the best managers are alone 24% of the time. That doesn’t mean they’re not communicating — they could be on the phone or e-mail — but it does mean that they’re not in meetings. They also spend 17% of their time in meetings with customers or prospects and another 10% in meetings with external stakeholders. Taking the three activities together, they spend 51% of their time not in internal management meetings. If you’re trying to organize your time more effectively, that seems like a good number to shoot for.

When effective time managers communicate with others, their preferred method is face-to-face meetings. Indeed, such meetings account for 38% of their communication time. This was a revelation to me. I’ve always believed that meeting face-to-face is the most effective way to communicate. But I never thought of them as time savers. Perhaps because face-to-face meetings do provide richer, more nuanced communications, they also save time in the long run. With richer communications, you make fewer errors — and correcting errors is a huge time sink.

 

Bad News Sandwiches

Ibad news once had an employee who was not doing well. She just didn’t seem to understand the nature and objectives of her role. Her work was sloppy and often had to be re-done by others. She often missed deadlines. Other employees resented her because they felt she wasn’t pulling her weight.

We needed to motivate her and get her on a new path. Or, failing that, we needed to cut our losses and terminate her. I consulted with HR about the best ways to have a “difficult conversation” with her.

HR advised me to use a “bad news sandwich”. Delivering bad news can deflate a person and de-motivate them. So you create a “sandwich” of good news/bad news/good news. In theory, that delivers the bad news without discouraging the person.

The conversation went reasonably well. I thought I delivered both the good news and the bad news effectively. I spent roughly 60% of the time on the bad news. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. She had been called in by the “big boss” and two of the three messages she heard were positive. She concluded that she was doing better than she had previously thought. Her work did not improve.

I realized that I should have paid more attention to Greek rhetoric. The Greeks taught a system of message prioritization. If you have three messages to deliver in a speech, put the strongest message first. Put the second strongest message last. Put the weakest message in the middle. Why? Because the middle message is the one your audience is most likely to forget. This is sometimes called the “primacy and latency effect” – the first and last ideas are remembered.

I was reminded of this incident when I spotted an article, “You’ve Been Doing a Fantastic Job, Just One Thing …” in a recent edition of the New York Times. The article also notes that the bad news sandwich doesn’t work (though they call it a “praise sandwich” which is analogous to calling a chicken sandwich a “bread sandwich”).

The article notes that feedback serves different purposes for people at different points in a learning cycle. Novices often lack confidence and need encouragement. Negative feedback can discourage them. On the other hand, more experienced people see feedback as a way to improve their performance. As always, it’s important to know who your audience is.

The article also questions whether it’s useful to label feedback positive or negative. Let’s say I see you riding a bicycle and say, “You’d be more efficient if you raised your saddle by two inches or so.” Is that positive feedback or negative? Sometimes feedback is just feedback.

What have I learned in all this? I’m now more likely to give “negative” feedback without the positive wrapper. I try not to be harsh but I do try to be specific. I also learned that defining a decision as “either/or” can be self-defeating. It turns out that the woman in my little story wasn’t a particularly good marketer. But she was very good at inter-personal communication and very intuitive about other people’s needs. We found her a role in the HR department and she blossomed. I thought that the decision was binary: either she improved or she would be fired. It turns out that there was another option, as there often is. The good news? No more bad news sandwiches for her.

Multitasking is a Myth

I can’t really do this.

I’ve never been able to pay attention to more than one thing at a time. I always assumed that this was a shortcoming on my part. I have friends who claim to be good multitaskers — attending to multiple projects and sources of information at the same time. I can focus on a task for hours on end but I’ve never been able to do two things at once. I always envied my multitasking friends.

Then last week, I attended a presentation by Bridget Arend, a professor of psychology at the University of Denver. Discussing how the brain works, she dropped an important tidbit: multitasking is a myth. People don’t really do two things at once. Instead, they are speedy serial task switchers. (Let’s call them SSTSers).

The best SSTSers can shift quickly from one target to another and focus intently on whatever target is in front of them at the moment. They focus intently and shift quickly. I think of expert trap shooters who can aim quickly at one clay pigeon, shoot it, and then — just as quickly — re-focus on another clay pigeon. They would never dream of aiming at two pigeons at once — it just doesn’t work. Perhaps we need to forget the old saying that we can kill two birds with one stone. It doesn’t happen. Believing it does only leads us astray.

This has important implications for communications. First, if you want to communicate to me, be sure you have my attention. If you walk into my office when I’m intently focused on my computer, you may not get my attention for a few minutes. It’s often a good idea to suggest that we go out for a cup of coffee — change the scenery, change the context, and allow me to re-focus. As Suellen can attest, I sometimes look straight at her and yet fail to hear anything she says.

Similarly, audiences don’t multitask well. You need a good introduction to grab their attention and get them to re-focus on you rather than whatever they were thinking about before. Some speakers love to show text-heavy slides while continuing to talk at normal presentation speed. They’re assuming that filling two channels — eyes and ears — will increase the impact. Actually, it’s just the opposite — the two channels cancel each other out. Sooner or later, each audience member attends to one channel or the other. Visual learners (a majority of us) tend to look at the slides while relegating you to oblivion.

This is also a good reason not to mention anything even remotely sexual in your speeches. Rest assured that sex is wildly more interesting than anything you’re talking about. If you mention sex, a good chunk of your audience will wander off on that track, never to return to your track. Sex is the ultimate serial task. Even the best SSTSers can’t switch quickly from that track to another. So, now that you’re thinking about sex, it’s time for me to sign off. I’m not going to get your attention back. See you tomorrow.

Moderating the Extremes

It’s complicated.

Your friend, Mary, avidly and vocally supports a national flat tax. Or maybe she’s convinced that free trade is the only sensible way to stimulate the world economy. Or maybe she actively supports more government programs to ensure equality of opportunity.

Let’s also assume that you disagree with Mary. You’d like her to see your side. But she’s so convinced that she’s right — and everybody else is wrong — that it’s difficult to have a conversation with her. Your attempts at dialogue just devolve into long-winded diatribes.

So how do you move Mary? Here are two different communication strategies:

  1. Ask Mary why she thinks her position is correct.
  2. Ask Mary how her ideas would work in the real world.

If you pursue Strategy 1, Mary will simply launch into her “pre-recorded” sound bites and positions. Strategy 1 does not require Mary to think. It merely requires her to repeat. She continues to convince herself. As a result, Mary’s position will likely become even more extreme.

Strategy 2, on the other hand, requires Mary to think through a variety of complicated, real-world issues. A common feature of extreme political positions is that they’re over-simplified. By requiring Mary to think through complicated issues, Strategy 2 often reveals weaknesses in the logic. It’s not so simple as it seemed. As a result, Mary’s position often becomes more moderate and more nuanced.

The effectiveness of Strategy 2 derives from the “illusion of explanatory depth”. In their article on the phenomenon (click here), Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil explain that, “People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do; they are subject to an illusion—an illusion of explanatory depth.” When you ask people how their ideas would actually work, they start to bump into the limits of their illusion. They don’t understand it nearly as well as they thought. As their explanation falters, so does the certitude of their position.

In this final week of the presidential campaign, many people are stating extreme positions. If you want to have a substantive discussion with another person — as opposed to a battle of sound bites — don’t ask why they believe something. Rather, ask them how it works.

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