Rants and Raves
To Tweet or Not to Tweet?
I finally joined the Twitter crowd. What I love – finding and reconnecting with long lost buddies and occasionally coming across relevant, useful, and interesting tweets. What I hate – when one person tweets every 15 minutes and fills up my inbox. Okay, I know I should figure out how to use TweetDeck or another tool to address that problem. Just haven’t figured it out yet! If you are toying with the idea of tweeting, check out this short, informative video clip. 
And if you decided to try it out, come visit me at http://twitter.com/Wendy_Mack.
Committee Leadership
I recently decided that, since our book is now done, it was time for me to come out of my cave and get involved in my community. So, over the past couple of months I’d joined several committees. I began to notice that after some committee meetings I was energized and excited. After others, I wanted to nap or pretend to be moving out of the country to avoid future meetings!
As I reflected on my experiences, I realized that committee leadership isn’t really that different from leading any team inside an organization. Here are a few observations:
Don’t Jump to Tactics Too Quickly
I was surprised by how often leaders jumped to assigning action items in the very first meeting of a new committee. Of course, there is always a lot of work to be done, but focusing on tasks too quickly can derail any team. Before assigning jobs or even asking for volunteers, leaders should:
Help Committee Members Build Relationships
Are Your People Brand Ambassadors?
One topic that has interested me for years is the concept of brand alignment. Think about the brand promise made by any particular company . . . United Airlines tell us to “Fly the friendly skies.” Home Depot says, “You can do it, we can help.” Now think about whether your experience with that company lives up to its brand promise. Has your flying experience been friendly? Have you gotten help the last time you went to this particular store?
Firms often spend a lot of time and money communicating their brand message to the public, but little effort making sure that their employees get it. This disconnect is a significant problem since it’s the employees who actually interface with the public, consumers, and clients. Author, speaker, and humorist Elizabeth Freedman provides some great suggestions for how to help employees internalize your company’s brand in her article Building the Brand from Within.
In future posts I’ll discuss many more of the factors that contribute to brand alignment (or misalignment).
Assessing Alignment
One of my favorite metaphors for an organization is that of a crowd of people in a large rowboat. When you are leading an organization, a unit, or a team – how can you be sure that everyone is aiming for the same destination and rowing together to get there? In other words, how can you tell if your organization is aligned?
There are many aspects of alignment. Today, I’d like to focus on alignment at the level of the senior leadership team.
Organization development expert, Tom Wilkes, has worked with many executive teams to improve team performance and organizational outcomes. As Tom describes it, success hinges on alignment. He recently shared this simple, but powerful exercise for assessing whether or not your team is on the same page when it comes to priorities:
- Give each member of the leadership team 3 index cards.
- Instruct the team to write down the 3 most pressing priorities for the organization (using a separate card for each).
How to Twitter in Two Minutes
In the past few weeks I’ve had lots of people ask me about twittering. Since a lot of people say “sounds dumb” when I try to describe it, I’ve been looking for a better alternative. Good news! I just discovered a fantastic video from Commoncraft.com on Twitter basics. Even if you never Twitter you’ll be glad you took two minutes to learn what the buzz is about.
Click here to see the video. The comments on the same page are also worth skimming.
Unexpressed Expectations
I’ve been noticing a pattern recently. As I’ve talked with my clients, friends, and family about some of the challenges they are facing at work and in their relationships, it seems that a lot of our troubles are due to “unexpressed expectations”. Bosses trying to change behavior with subtle hints instead of overt direction. Marriages failing because of a lack of communication about what matters most to each partner. Leaders frustrated when people aren’t onboard with a change – when in fact those same people haven’t been told what to change.
My rule of thumb in each of this situations is that we can’t expect people to read our minds. We have to explicitly express our expectations. If we want to see it, we need to say it.
Consultant Speak
Every profession has its own jargon, but we consultants are probably more guilty than most when it comes to making communication harder than it needs to be. I just saw a hilarious article on ragan.com about consultant speak. Here’s a sample:
Socialize. This is my personal favorite. I actually had a fellow consultant on a project look me in the eye with grave concern and pose this question:“Have you socialized that idea?”
I was dumbstruck and quickly tried to recover. “Uh, do you mean, did I take it out for drinks and show it a good time?” I asked.
Click here to read the whole article.
Parallel Play in the Boardroom
Last week I had the pleasure of working with the nine executive team members of a fast-growing marketing company. As the group grappled with the challenge of identifying and naming the principles that drive their business, I made two observations. First, every single person at the table was actively involved in attempting to solve the problem. Second, the nine executives were each using different and seperate methods to attempt to get to a solution. One person was drawing on a flipchart, one was working away in his notebook, a third was attempting to go around the room to ask others’ opinions, yet another was verbalizing a proposed solution. Each of these behaviors were positive, yet none were particularly helpful because all of these actions were occcuring simultaneously! These executives were engaged in Parallel Play.
According to the Child Development Reference (Volume 6), Parallel Play is a term that was introduced by Mildred Parten in 1932 to refer to a developmental stage of social activity in which children play beside rather than with one another. Children in this stage may comment on what they are doing or imitate what another child does, but they rarely cooperate in a task.
Permission Marketing
I just attended a teleseminar with marketing guru Seth Godin. Several of his points resonated with me – in particular his points about permission marketing. Godin said that too many companies assume that they have the right to bombard us with emails simply because we purchased something from them once in our lives. (How many email advertisements have you gotten today?) That’s not permission marketing. According to Godin, permission marketing is when people choose to come to your site/blog etc. because you are providing information that they need and want. If you are using a blog or E-zine as a marketing tool, ask yourself, “am I bombarding my customers or am I engaging a community of people with similar interests?” Which do you think is more effective?
The Wonders of WordPress
Two weeks ago I knew nothing about blogging. Today I am publishing my second post on the blog I created. (Okay. . . I didn’t create it – I customized it). All it took to get up and running was WordPress for Dummies, some time, and several naps interspersed with boughts of experimentation.
My positive experience with WordPress has been similar to my joy at discovering VistaPrint. For an embarrassing number of years I paid other people a lot of money to design my cards and stationary. Imagine my excitement when I finally learned that I can do it myself and have great materials produced for a fraction of a fraction of what I used to pay!
Power to the People!
