Friday, June 19, 2009

Wrtng n th age of txtg ("Writing in the Age of Texting")

I’ll admit it right up front. I am a luddite when it comes to the world of text messaging. Given enough time, I can clumsily grope my way through the arduous process of replying to one of my teenager daughters’ cell phone text messages (usually after three or four failed attempts where I accidentally press CLEAR and wipe out the entire message). So I sheepishly admit that I am not up to speed on all the text messaging TLA’s (three-letter acronyms) like POS (“parent over shoulder”) or LOL (“laughing out loud”) or SIS (“snickering in silence”) or even ?4U (“I have a question for you”). And don’t even get me started on all the emoticons. : ~  o )

For you txtg neophytes like me, there is a comprehensive listing of these text messaging abbreviations at Wikipedia.

In talking about the merits of using a cell phone to call someone vs. texting them, I simply had no retort  when my 13 year-old said “Why would you call someone when you could text them.  “Um, er, perhaps to have an actual conversation?” I thought to myself, but decided to say nothing realizing that my logic would fall on deaf ears.

What I have noticed is that increasingly I see younger workers send emails at work as if they were texting a buddy. In text messaging, everything is abbv, er, abbreviated. Capitalization and punctuation are side-stepped as a waste of time. Well, that’s fine when you’re texting your buddy about what time you’ll meet them at Starbucks. But when it comes to the work world, remember, not everyone is your buddy, and not everyone knows what you mean when you email back AISB (“as I said before”) – oh yeah, right. How obvious!.

I actually received an email from someone recently who was applying for a position with our company. Clearly this person was a member of the TMG (“text messaging generation”) – okay, so I made that one up. Sorry.) His email cover letter had no less than 15 punctuation errors. Most of the sentences began without a capital letter. He would write “U” for “you” and “B4” for “before” and COS for “because.”

What this young job candidate failed to appreciate is how this shorthand communication style – while totally accepted in the world of text messaging – is completely alien, and thus ineffective in the business world. I read his email, and I immediately concluded that he was someone who:

 a) had no attention to detail (as evidenced by all the typos) or

b) was lazy (feeling the need to take short cuts with his sentences) or

c) was stupid (did he really not know how to spell “because”??) or

d) all of the above.

I went with “d” – Final Answer! I half-expected him to misspell his own name. In addition to leaving a horrible impression on the reader, someone using text messaging abbreviations and (lack of) punctuation in a business environment runs the risk of failed communication. I recently received an email from a co-worker and all it said was “TMI.” I had no idea what that meant. Turns out it means “”too much information.” Ironically, their email did not provide me with enough information by which to understand my email provided TOO MUCH information. 

So if U luv to txt mssge, Gd blss U. Text to your heart’s content. But if you’re sending me an email about work or about employment and you want me to understand and have a favorable impression of you, take the time to insert a couple extra vowels, and throw in a comma or a period just to impress me. I would really appreciate it. TAFN THX  SYL  (That’s all for now.  Thanks.  See you Later)

Posted by Tim Jones at 1:12 pm

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Monday, June 8, 2009

Sustainable Competitive Advantage -- Learning

Arie de Gues, a former Royal Dutch Shell executive, once said, “The ability to learn faster than your competition may be your only sustainable competitive advantage.” You may have read his words or said them yourself; they’ve been widely quoted over the years. Those of us in the learning field know how critical learning is, slow or fast, if an organization and the individuals within are to grow and thrive.

So the questions of the week are:

• What are you doing now, as an individual or as a key player in your organization, to become more competitive?
• What are you doing now to grab the attention of those organizations ready to move once this economic chaos settles down? Or to put yourself now in front of those who are movin’ and shakin’ right now?
• What are you doing now to build a learning model that will sustain you regardless of the times or the conditions?

Even though the world is a messy and noisy place these days, if you sit very still and listen, you’ll hear a quiet voice from deep within that will tell you it’s time to grab hold of your life and crack a textbook, register for a class, or attend a webinar. We began our life as eager learners. It’s time to reboot and re-engage.

Posted by Bernice Johnston at 12:26 pm

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Monday, June 1, 2009

A Mandated Business Directive!

I found myself reading an article in Talent Management Magazine about outsourcing learning, assuming incorrectly it was going to be the same dribble about the cost effectiveness and ability to use the best talent without having to hire them full time.  Although this was some of the benefits later detailed, it was the introduction about the importance of the function of learning that had me high-fiving the air.  Here is the part that got me:

“When profits are squeezed, attracting and retaining customers and increasing their spending become paramount to an organization’s survival.  Factor in the employees’ role, and their professional development ought not to be regarded as a perk, but as a mandated business directive.”

Imagine for a second this reality.  A company in America that is struggling in a bad economy, where sales are down and profits are being squeezed.  They must not only retain their existing customers, but attract new customers, all of which need to spend more money.  Have you ever heard of such a company near you?  Of course you have, they are everywhere!

But where I find this amazing, is how many companies in this particular fix, realize that it is their employee workforce that will need to make this happen?  And for those few that do, what are they doing to their professional development right now?  Yes, you got it right again; they are cutting the training function down to the bare bones!

So what happens when you find a company that views professional development as more than a perk, but a mandated business directive?  What is happening now at that company that is not happening where you work?  I can testify that there are some amazing things going on with companies that view the learning function as a mandated business directive, and are using both internal and external (me) resources to move the company in a different direction.

Maybe if you and your company started referring to the training department and their function in this new way, your future and the company’s future would glow a lot brighter!

Jim Hopkins – JK Hopkins Consulting

 

Posted by Jim Hopkins at 12:43 pm

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Friday, May 15, 2009

Ask them “What do you do best?”

Granted, every job has aspects to it that nobody really likes doing that much. Every job has some mundane or tedious components that “just have to get done” and we can’t always delegate them away. But I believe that we as managers often fail our employees by simply slotting them into roles without ever asking whether the job, as it is currently configured, really gives them the opportunity to excel and grow – and ENJOY their job.

Here is a radical concept: Ask your employee “What is it that you do best?” And find out if there are aspects of their job that can be adjusted to capitalize on some of these strengths. So often we try to fit the person to the job but never consider what the upside might be of trying to fit the job to the person.

One of the best managers I ever worked for brought his newly formed department together for a sit down right after the company had announced a major re-org. The company had a history of moving employees around into different work groups and job functions without ever consulting them. The theory was that management could not let the prisoners run the prison so they just made these unilateral decisions with no regard to whether these moves would actually be received positively by the affected employees. In most cases, employees were far from excited about the changes and usually were apprehensive about the new role, their new boss, and were more than a bit anxious about whether they would be able to make the adjustment.

This manager pulled together his entire new team – many of whom did not know him at all – most of whom had no idea what their new role would be. Then he asked them, one by one, in front of everybody else, to tell him “What is it that you do best?” He asked them to describe the sorts of things they excel at, what aspects of their job they particularly enjoy, and even what aspects they struggled with and why. While it is true no company is a democracy, he did the unthinkable: He actually began to tailor people’s jobs so that some components aligned with what they felt they did best. In a matter of days, his department had the highest morale in the entire 800-person company. Fear and apprehension were quickly replaced by enthusiasm and motivation – not to mention productivity.

Sometimes you have to get a little creative. In our company, I needed to train someone on how to handle the web hosting and administrative responsibilities of our webinar events. The problem was that this was a massive job with a wide variety of unrelated tasks. Half of the job involved hosting a live webinar event while the other half involved managing a daunting list of behind-the-scenes administrative tasks to set up and track these events. The responsibilities of hosting the webinar and scheduling/administering these events required two very different skill sets. When I consulted employees about this role, I found that nobody had the skill set or temperament to do all aspects of this job. One employee loved the idea of hosting the live events but admitted to not being good at the detail stuff, while another employee loved the idea of setting up these events but confessed that they weren’t comfortable with the people side of the job in hosting these live events. So I broke up this job into two parts, matching each part to the person who excelled in that aspect of the job. A win-win for everybody.

Of course, it does not always work out so neatly. Sometimes you have a job that must be done and the person simply is not a good fit. But sometimes you may have a very capable employee who is simply in the wrong role. Before deciding whether the person is the right fit for the job, stop for a moment and ask whether the job is the right fit for the person. You may discover that you have a star employee who just needs the opportunity to demonstrate their gifts, if given the right role in which to succeed.

Posted by Tim Jones at 1:04 pm

Labels: job satisfaction  

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Saturday, May 9, 2009

Communication Then and Now

   On a Friday morning some ten years ago my friend Ben scooted into the red leather booth at the coffee shop and waved a book at the other four of us.

   “On page 10 the author describes the 10 rules of good communication,” he said, proceeding to read them to us. The rules included such items as listening, acknowledging, clarifying, etc.

   “This book was written in 1897,” he said. “Bernice, you consultants are still saying the same thing today the author wrote about 100 years ago and are still getting paid the big bucks. Can’t you come up with anything new?”

   The others, businessmen with tangible products such as fishing tackle, portable heaters, and plumbing supplies, delighted in challenging the “soft feel-good” practice of consulting and eagerly awaited their turn to put me on the spot.

    I looked around the group. “It’s all your fault, you know. Remember the magazine survey article we discussed last week that showed the woeful state of communication between management and employees and with customers?”

   They nodded.

   I continued. “Even after 100 years of consultants getting paid to tell you again and again the same thing he says in the book, communication isn’t any better than it ever was. We’d love to talk about something new. But as I said, it’s all your fault. When you start practicing what we preach, we can go on to something new. Until then . . .” I shrugged my shoulders.

   Ben dropped the book on the table and a smile crinkled his face. “Touché! You got me there.”

   The others applauded and we reminded ourselves of a George Bernard Shaw quotation: “The biggest single problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

         Is it any better in 2009 than it was in 1897? What do you think?

Posted by Bernice Johnston at 7:21 pm

Labels: communicating to influence  communicating with style  real world customer service (book)  

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Monday, May 4, 2009

Building High-Impact Leaders

I am teaching a workshop this week to a group of HR and Training Leaders on what it takes to build managers and leaders within their organizations.  It has been a topic of discussion across America in nearly every industry for years, and yet what may be more important than talking about it is the actual building of High-Impact Leaders.

Many companies have realized way too late that management and leaderships skills are not naturally part of our DNA.  Somewhere down the career path we all need to be trained how to perform these skills from basic management to strategic leadership.  Some of us were lucky and learned from a combination of training programs, mentors and coaching opportunities.

The result of not training or creating mentoring and coaching environments is a group of highly skilled subject matter experts that now struggle to lead organizations in these changing times.  These poor souls are unable to fix issues to take their company in a better direction so they are competitive or even keep the doors open.  The companies that have trained manager and leadership skills have redesigned their environments and are sailing into better seas.

In my opinion (after some 19 years in learning development) you need to get started on something and make a plan and commitment to add to your momentum each and every month or quarter.  Constantly taking the pulse of your organization and adjusting your course is important, but getting beyond talking about what should be done and doing something would go a very long way in most companies today.

I love to fix problems, but what I really like to do is prevent them by leveraging the learning function in a more proactive approach.  If you need help getting started, just let me know!

Jim Hopkins – JK Hopkins Consulting

 

Posted by Jim Hopkins at 11:25 am

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Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Don't judge a book by its cover

We all know this expression, and yet for most of us, it’s just a collection of words. The reality is every day we do just that – we judge people based on artificial information and cursory impressions that don’t begin to tell us the full story about someone. We look at how they are dressed, their hair style, their weight, perhaps we notice a slight speech impediment, or we notice they are wearing a cheap watch – and we make all sorts of conclusions about their worth, their intelligence, their honesty, their work ethic, and  value as a person – sometimes before they utter a single word.

Be honest, when you see a job candidate come into your office, you quickly size them up and make all sorts of initial assessments before the interview has even commenced, don’t you? Of course you do. We all do. We are all very busy so we reach for any clues we can as quickly as possible to help us assess candidates because we just don’t have the time to dig deep. Research has shown that most people make up their minds about people they meet – about whether they are going to like someone or not – within roughly 30 – 45 seconds. How can we possibly know enough about someone in under a minute, and yet we do it all the time. Well, earlier this month, I – along with millions of other people around the world – got a big wake-up call about making snap assessments about people.

Enter Susan Boyle. If you have not heard this name by now, let me introduce you. Susan Boyle is a 48- year old Scottish woman who most of us would never take a second glance at if we passed her on the street. She is overweight, looks to have a perennial “bad hair day”, and appears to be a bit awkward in her mannerisms. Susan grew up with a learning disability, and, to make matters worse, when we are first introduced to her on Britain’s Got Talent (the UK’s version of American Idol – complete with judge Simon Cowell), we learn that she has never been married and never been kissed and lives alone in a very humble abode with her cat.

And on a Saturday evening in mid-April 2009 the world was introduced to Susan on the giant stage of that hit television show’s season premiere. Her clumsy responses as Simon Cowell asks her about why she has never been successful up till now are glimpses of the train wreck to come. She is nervous, struggles to find words to answer his simple questions and then she mugs very awkwardly resulting in eye rolls and “oh, this is going to be embarrassingly bad” glances between the judges as well as among audience members. This is not going to end well.

She has barely been on stage for 20 seconds but already the complete auditorium appears to have made up their minds about what they are going to see. They have by and large already turned against her – all because of her appearance, her age (there was a noticeable sound of snickering throughout the arena when she announced her age) and her nervously awkward responses to Simon Cowell, perhaps the most intimidating person on all of television. So at about the 30-second mark, before she has uttered one note, we have all made up our minds. We’re all ready to laugh at this woman who looks like she just emerged from a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon. And then she begins to sing….

 If you have not seen what happened next, you can listen to her performance. What happens next is right out of the movie Rocky – the classic case of someone with a huge heart and amazing talent overcoming all the odds. Susan Boyle stunned judges and audience members alike by displaying a vocal range and sound that was simply amazing to behold. As quickly as the audience had judged her to be a joke – that’s about how quickly she won them back with her powerful singing performance.  Within about six seconds, people were standing on their feet giving her an ovation (it took one of the judges about 10 seconds to do the same). Everyone was shocked. Their snap judgments about what they were going to witness could not have been more off the mark.

 I confess, I am a softie for these sorts of David vs. Goliath stories of the underdog overcoming tall odds to win. And maybe Susan Boyle will be a one hit wonder who, after enjoying her fifteen minutes of fame (or more accurately, 2 million YouTube video views) will quietly fade back into the Blackburn, Scotland sunset from whence she came (she still lives in the house that used to belong to her now-deceased mother).  But I seriously doubt it.

My point is simply this: Every day we make snap assessments about people – their ability, their likability, their honesty, their work ethic, based on some pretty cursory and superficial indicators. Watching Susan Boyle belt out her transformative rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream," from the musical Les Misérables reminded me of how often first impressions can be horribly unfair and terribly unreliable – both positive and negative first impressions. So watch the incredible video . And the next time you come across someone about whom you are inclined to not give a second consideration, slow down. Don’t judge this book by its cover. Dig deeper. Give this person a chance. They just might be a diamond in the rough. They might just be another Susan Boyle.

Posted by Tim Jones at 5:36 pm

Labels: susan boyle  

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