Tag Archives: Alexis Lindsay

Trusty tools of the trade #6: the number three

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The number three is the professional communicator’s friend. It just is.

  1. There’s nothing niftier than saying “there are three things that need to be done as a result of this decision…” or “in summary, there are three points I need you to remember …”
  2. Three is tight. Snappy. Enough detail without losing your audience’s attention span.
  3. Three points are just enough to remember and pass on. The length of an anecdote.

Three people might be a crowd. But three points are just right.

Perhaps the 10-Point Plan or the First 100 Days in Office may beg to differ?

Vocabulary vigilance

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Note to self: maintain vigilance on one’s vocabulary.

Words and phrases can slip in like a well-dressed gatecrasher and next thing you know you’re ‘socialising’ documents and ‘reaching out’ to people. Totes.

I readily admit it. I’ve dropped my guard many times. My husband took issue with me ‘populating’ a spreadsheet (how about ‘filling it in’. Fair point). As far as he’s concerned, the only ‘dashboard’ you need to know about is the one in your car.

There are standard terms or phrases that are particular to your professional tribe and there’s a time and a place to use them. For me, ‘stakeholder’, ‘key message’, ‘corporate responsibility’ and ‘materiality’ are classic cases.  It’s kind of hard to get what I need to get done without them. I’d like to think I used them in the right places and with the right audience.

But it can be hard to resist adopting a new and exotic sounding word here or there, especially when you work with new people all the time, in different organisations, sectors, countries and organisational cultures.

Sometimes your old words can just sound so damn tired and old-hat that you need a bit of new blood.

Social media has brought with it a whole new vocabulary that very quickly sorts the users from the non-users. Try trotting out hashtag to someone who hasn’t a clue about Twitter and you’ll get some WTF? looks.

I suppose good practice would be to listen to what you’re hearing in the course of doing business and be aware of what you spit back out in your speech (or write in your documents).

If it doesn’t sound quite right to you, it probably doesn’t sound quite right to the people you’re communicating with. Awks.

 

 

Trusty tools of the trade: #5 stakeholder analysis

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Allow me to be straight up on this one: listing your organisation’s key stakeholders is not stakeholder analysis. And it is not stakeholder engagement.

It is stakeholder identification.

And it’s a good start.

Stakeholder analysis is the process of identifying, categorising and then prioritising stakeholders in order to determine the impact and influence that individuals or groups will have on your ability to achieve your objectives. In the process, you will also identify and determine material issues.

After this is done, you can work out the most effective engagement approach for identified priority stakeholders, including tactics and tools, taking into consideration timing and the resources you have available. That’s stakeholder analysis in a nutshell.

And then you do what you said you’d do in those plans. And listen to feedback. And refine. And so on. That’s the engagement part.

Many practitioners and organisations skip stakeholder analysis – the thinking part – and jump straight into stakeholder engagement – the doing part.

The problem is, all the doing part without the thinking part can be a waste of time, money and resources because you are likely to a) stray from the business strategy and overall objectives b) go it alone and not engage your influential peers and colleagues who will be a determinant of success and c) miss the mark on measuring impact and success.

So, my advice is to think about your stakeholders before you engage with them.

It will make all the difference.

 

 

Trusty tools of the trade #4: newsworthiness

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Knowing what news is and where information sits in a hierarchy is a valuable concept in business. After all, time is money.

Think of what you want to communicate and its various messages as an inverse pyramid. The most critical information is positioned and weighted at the top and delivered immediately. The least critical information – such as context or background information – is given less weighting and is positioned further down the pyramid and delivered later.

I’m boots n’ all in agreeance with Mark Treddinick and Geoff Whyte in The Little Black Book of Business Writing (2010) on this one:

There isn’t a person alive who wants to take a second longer than they must to read your email or your letter, your brochure of your report, your tender, your paper or your thesis.

There’s not a person alive who want to take a second longer than they must to write a work document.

So how can you be more economic with your words? How do you structure your message to grab and keep the attention of your readers and convey meaning? Take a leaf out of the craft of journalism and news reporting (my first career love) and practice the process of determining the newsworthiness of an event or development.

Start with the following three questions when structuring the content and order of the information to include in your next communication effort:

  1. Who is the target audience - what are their needs and expectations?
  2. What is the most important fact or message they must know? Why am I telling them this, now? i.e, this bit comes first
  3. What is the supporting information or context that is nice to know? What information puts this news, announcement or event into perspective? i.e, this part comes later

Success isn’t that your communication piece was distributed (don’t laugh. Many people think this is mission accomplished, game over). Success is your target audience receiving and understanding the message and/or acting upon its content.

Why would they do this? In part, because you put the most important information first.

 

 

 

Trusty tools of the trade #3: inputs, outputs, outcomes

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Stay with me, I’m on a roll with my trusty tools of the trade series. Number one was the key message and number two was storytelling.

Onwards to number three - inputs, outputs and outcomes.

I know – measurement. Cue rolling eyes. I used to (still do sometimes). My career started out in journalism – a world away from any discussion about inputs, outcomes and outcomes. Yet as I progressed into consulting roles and then management, the realisation that what I was doing (inputs), created an immediate result (output) that would then result in some type of change over time (outcome) was a revelation to me.

Aha, it’s true. You can’t manage what you can’t measure.

Measurement is good management. It’s also self-preseveration; you’re a sitting duck if you can’t explain how you’re tracking against your KPIs and how your effort helps the organisation deliver on its overall business strategy and objectives.

The inputs, outputs and outcome model helps to:

  • Select the right measures: what does success look like? What are the quantitative or qualitative indicators that will be used over time to measure that success?
  • Allocate resources: who is going to undertake the activities in order to achieve that result and how much will it cost? If those resources are taken away or increased, what impact will it have on the outcome?
  • Influence peers: what are the key messages about strategy, resource allocation and performance that need to be communicated to decision-makers?
  • Monitor and evaluate: are you on the right track, if not, what can you change? Were you successful overall, if not, why not?

Speaking of evaluation, this is the third post in a series where I’m attempting to document the tools, approaches and methodologies that I’ve learnt and adopted into my professional practice over the years.

Let me know if they’ve been of any use to you.

 

 

 

Trusty tools of the trade #2: storytelling

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Here’s a really fun game to play with other film-loving and literary-minded souls (no Googling allowed!).

Name a dozen popular stories.

Okay, I’ll make a start for you.

Rags to riches. The prodigal son. David and Goliath. The hero’s journey. Man vs Nature. Man vs himself. Good vs Evil. Triumph over adversity. Teacher I’ll never forget/ the mentor. Loss of innocence/ coming of age. Love conquers all. Resurrection.

Stories with universal themes are mighty helpful to a professional communicator.

Fair enough, your annual or corporate responsibility report is not destined for a Pulitzer prize. Yet any communication should be planned with a story or narrative in mind. How else is your audience to make sense of it?

Stories help to make sense of a situation or event; to convey meaning to an audience. Stories help an audience remember a message or lesson and pass it onto someone else.

Narrative is what I come up with when I put my niece to bed and she says, “Tell me a story.” I tell her a story, I don’t tell her an article — Janet Rae Brooks, Salt Lake Tribune

I love that quote, sourced from a Poynter article titled by Chip Scanlan titled What is narrative, anyway?

So next time you’re asked to write something at work – a report, a briefing note, an article, a letter, whatever – think about the message you want to convey and the story or narrative that will help you deliver it.

Have you got any favourite stories I haven’t listed in this post?

 

 

 

 

Trusty tools of the trade #1: the key message

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We all have our trusty tools of the trade but there’s one that I picked up many moons ago that just keeps on keeping on. The key message.

Just last weekend I helped my nephew write a speech for his tilt at the school captaincy with a key message template.

Most weeks I use it as the starting point for a range of communication opportunities – presentations, speeches, blog posts, leadership messages, briefing notes and stakeholder engagement strategies.

Most mornings I listen to politicians on the radio and attempt to deconstruct their carefully constructed key messages.

But don’t be fooled. The key message belongs to all professionals who dare to give it a try, not just the corporate affairs/ communications types amongst us.

Here’s why:

The discipline of planning and preparing key messages makes you a far more effective communicator for three reasons:

  1. It organises your thoughts and ideas into a simple structure that the intended audience can understand;
  2. It helps you isolate the one thing you want your audience to remember; and
  3. It helps you find your way when you get a bit lost.

That’s why spending time planning and preparing key messages is an excellent use of your time and can be applied to an infinite number of communication scenarios.

How’d I go?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three cheers for teleworking (or whatever you like to call it)

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Today, apparently, is the last day of National Telework Week in Australia.

I thought this occasion deserved a lone post. Written from the kitchen table in my home. Where I am teleworking.

Semantics.

Teleworking.

It’s a slightly awkward definition. I feel like I should be wearing a headset. But whatever you call it is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether trust and flexibility sit behind what you call it. Trust between you and your employer that you’ll do a great job regardless of where the work is done, and the flexibility to choose where you think you’ll get the job done most effectively at a given point in time.

I quite like Telework Australia’s key points to remember about this subject:

  • Telework is ‘not technology-driven although it can be technology-enhanced’ (Gil Gordon);
  • It is not all about the home, there are many possible ‘non-traditional’ work places;
  • It is not always full-time. Most Australian teleworkers work away from the traditional office for only a day or so a week;
  • It is not always easy to implement and might require some hard decisions on all sides; and
  • Telework will not be right for some individuals due to the nature of their role or their personality. Neither will it be an appropriate tool for some organisations due to the nature of their business (e.g. hotels or retail businesses).

I’ve done a lot of ‘teleworking’ throughout my career and I’ve tried hard to balance the in and out of the office time. When you need to buckle down and think and write – out of the office without distractions is good. But sometimes that’s not home. Home at times can be the most distracting place. And cafes. Free wi-fi is great but there’s only so much coffee you can drink in a day. Sometimes a project requires regular discussion and bouncing-ideas-around interaction. Sometimes that’s better done through workshops or meetings in person at the office.

Perhaps over time we won’t need a National Telework Week and the term will become redundant as the workplace evolves.

But for now, I’ll raise my cup of tea from its saucer and say, Happy National Teleworking Week to you, wherever you happen to be working.

Back on that blogging horse

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I really dropped my blogging bundle of late.

I offer no excuses.

Just the observation that blogging regularly isn’t as easy as it looks.

Euan Semple (Wiley, 2012) has written a very handy book called Organizations Don’t Tweet, People Do. I share many of his sentiments on blogging and its personal and professional benefits:

There is something about the process of blogging that makes you more self-aware. You become more thoughtful about yourself and your place in the world. In the reactions of others to your writing you get a different perspective, possibly for the first time, on how others see you. While this can be scary at first it can also be liberating.

Back on that blogging horse.

Material that won’t lose the plot: part II

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I’ve been blogging for a couple of years and according to my analytics, the most popular post I’ve written so far is on the topic of materiality.

It’s still a hot topic in the sustainability reporting field. As it should be. Materiality is central to the strategy and story that a sustainability report seeks to communicate to an organisation’s stakeholders.

I came across this GRI blog post answering a question about how materiality will be examined as part of the GRI’s development of the next generation of its reporting guidelines, the ‘G4‘.

Two points stood out from the GRI’s answer:

1. The Materiality Principle is not under question in the G4.

2. One of the main focus areas of the G4 is to ‘improve considerably guidance around the definition of what is material (from different perspectives)’.

Point #2 is important. Reporters need as much help and guidance as they can get on establishing a robust materiality assessment process that is effective yet practical and logical. I’m looking forward to seeing how this materialises (excuse the pun) in the G4.

I’ve registered to take part in the G4 public comment period; what about you?