The KUPMC Blog

The new session of the Emerging Leaders Academy got off to a great start this week–well, at least from my perspective! I hope that the participants felt the same.

While much of the first day consisted of getting-to-know-one-another activities and discussions of what we all expect of the program, we also did our first skills session. The topic on the agenda? Communication skills. Specifically, listening.

Many people have a great deal of awareness about the importance of communication skills to workplace success. But if asked about what these skills include, most would note speaking and writing, the abilities that allow us to clearly and effectively communicate our messages, goals, and priorities.

What is often neglected in our thinking about communication skills is the piece that’s necessary in order for us to create a message others want to or need to hear in the first place.

Are our ears and our intentions open to hear what people are saying around us so that we can truly discern how we can contribute best to the projects in our organizations? Are we attuned to what our customers and clients want from us to make sure the products we offer truly serve the needs they have? This is especially important for those of us in government where we don’t have competitors offering our products and where citizens can feel frustrated when they don’t feel we’re doing our best to understand and meet their needs.

Among the many habits that get in the way of our listening is the practice of interrupting. In a recent post on her I’m Listening New website, Jill Chivers reflects on two well-intentioned types of interrupting, correcting and cheer leading, that I think nearly all of us do. She asks us to consider the effects of both of these and invites us to tune in to track our own habits of interruption to see how it affects conversations. Click here to read the full post.

What if you decided to listen more deliberately today? What would you learn? Try it and find out, and share your story in the comments below.

In our super-connected world, there are a million and one ways to keep in touch with old and new friends and acquaintances.

But sometimes this doesn’t make it any easier when there’s a new layer of awkwardness inserted into a relationship due to a friend’s job loss. It’s not uncommon for the still-working person to find themselves not sure about what to say. How do you express support appropriately, in a way that’s supportive?

The always-astute Lynn Gaertner-Johnston offers some terrific guidance on this in a recent post on her Business Writing Blog, including both “Do’s” and “Don’ts.” For example:

*Don’t talk about how bad things are where you work, especially if they lost their job there. Working in hell may be preferable to not working at all. Don’t complain; and

*Do invite the individual to low-cost and no-cost events. Warmly receive both acceptance and rejection of your invitations.\

Click here to see the rest of her helpful suggestions.

Last year as I was planning a networking activity for participants in our Emerging Leaders Academy, I bounced some ideas off Terri Callahan, CPM director and instructor extraordinaire. I mentioned the need to help people learn to ask questions, both informational and meaningful ones, of others as a way to connect with others.

Terri offered up a phrase that precisely described what I was wanting to encourage them to do: cultivate a curious spirit.

The phrase captures the idea that it’s an ability that can connect us not just to other people, but also to our own deeper selves–bringing a curious spirit to an exchange with another puts us in the mindset to assume they have something to offer and we have something to learn. In spite of the deepness of this intention, there’s also a wonderfully fun association with the idea of curiosity. It implies bringing some lively energy to the act of investigation, something we can all use bit more of these days.

Even as asking questions can energize us and establish a connection with others, when done with a genuine, curious spirit, it also helps create trust by showing regard. This is all the more important when the person asking the questions is in a leadership role and taking the time to really find out about a staff member.

In this Harvard Business Review blog post, “Learn to Ask Better Questions,” John Boldoni offers some guidance for how to ask the sorts of questions that can both cultivate and reflect your own curious spirit.

When has asking questions helped strengthen your working relationships?

Many experienced public sector managers recognize that there’s something important in all the hype about Facebook and Twitter and the need for agencies and governments to embrace their use. But, for those who are not users of social media themselves, it can be a struggle to understand exactly why it matters as much as it seems to.

Fortunately, The Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania recently published a fabulously thoughtful and interesting report on social media and local government that offers as good an explanation as I’ve ever seen about what social media do that’s different that might help you or others in your agency truly get your brain around the value of Facebook and Twitter.

A very useful suggestion is that we should stop worrying about making sense of terms like “web 2.0″ and instead think of social media as communications channels that have “a different set of rules and habits than traditional types of news and broadcast media.” From here the report outlines three points that are at the heart of these different rules and habits.

1) Social media are typically interactive rather than authoritative. Social media like Facebook and Twitter facilitate conversations rather than one-way announcements. Much of the value is provided by users who respond and recommend them, often in near real-time. A city’s Facebook post about bad potholes after a winter storm, for example, might be enhanced by user comments that detail where, exactly, the worst ones are so that other drivers can watch out and so that the city knows to fix them.

2) Social media are personal rather than institutional. Users exercise great discretion over their personal “channel”,
subscribing to only the information they want and ignoring the rest.

3) Social media tend to “narrowcast” through networks rather than broadcast. The Fel Report notes that even a large government social media audience is small by the standards of radio or television broadcasts (the City of Topeka, for example, has 120,000 residents and only 550 followers on Twitter). But, importantly, “social media facilitate a more voluntary, interactive, and symmetrical relationship between an agency and its audience, and the right message can travel extremely quickly through these networks to the general public.”

Far more quickly, it should be noted, than an announcement posted on a city’s website. A “tweet” or a Facebook update is pushed out to interested users who, if they find it relevant or worthwhile, will “share” it with their friends or followers on these sites, some of whom may then share it with theirs. This is in stark contrast with an announcement to an agency website that will only be found by those who happen to visit the website while the announcement is posted.

This also contrasts with “e-government” portal sites for the same reason: users are required to visit the portal in order for it to be useful. With social media sites, however, I get updates from my city as I catch up on new photos posted by my sister and what’s happening with my friends from college.

For professionals used to drawing a pretty thick line between their personal, professional, and public lives, this can be a new and peculiar concept. For many of the citizens you’re hoping to engage, however, nothing could be more natural. And it’s this fact that makes social media so important as a communication channel.

What benefits has your organization seen from using social media?

In an office where I used to work, there were several dozen staff. At least a couple of times each week we’d get emails sent to the whole department with the name of a staff member in the subject line, but nothing more: “Jane” or “Joe.” Each of us then had to open the email if we wanted to see the news about Jane or Joe–Jane was running late, Joe was still sick with the flu, etc.

Those extra seconds each of the staff spent opening these messages don’t seem like that big a deal–until you add it up. Together we spent many minutes of time each week, time that was in short supply, to find out something that could have been communicated in the subject line: “Jane is running late, will be in by 10am.”

This is one example of a less-than-optimal use of email to communicate; other common examples include blank subject lines and a disconnect between the email subject and the message content. This March 31 post from the Business Writing Blog offers good advice for why making sure the subject line is in tune with the message is important.

Since so many of us learn to use Outlook or other email programs on our own these days, I find that lots of people aren’t aware of many features built into it–like being able to change the subject of an email when you reply. What are your favorite time-saving or organizing tools in your email application?

As I recently told the participants in our Emerging Leaders Academy, grammar, punctuation, and word use issues may not be a big deal to you. But for many of the people who read what you write, they are. The people who pay attention to grammar, punctuation, and wording issues can’t not pay attention, and they cringe a little when they see writing errors.

The goal of this post is not to make you self-conscious about your writing. It’s to suggest that it’s worth brushing up on some of the basics to make sure that you’re creating a positive impression of your abilities with what you write.

With that in mind, I direct you to a practical and entertaining post on the Copyblogger site: The Inigo Montoya Guide to 27 Commonly Misused Words. Did you know you might be using “less” when you should be using “fewer”? Afterward or afterwards? Compliment or complement? (This one gets me every time.) The Inigo Montoya Guide offers direction on these and 24 other word use issues.

Are there words not on the list that you commonly see misused? What words have you had to correct your own use of?

I recently stumbled on a terrific resource for those interested in improving their abilities in public speaking and presentations–hopefully, that includes most everyone who ever speaks or presents! Nick Morgan has coached many public figures to improve their speaking skills and has published several books, including Give Your Speech, Change the World: How to Move Your Audience to Action.

He also has a terrific blog offering thoughtful tips, reviews of well-known speakers and general encouragement. As the intro to his blog indicates: “His passion is to connect the latest brain research with timeless insights into persuasive speaking and writing in order to further our understanding of how people connect with one another.” Review the list of his many posts here.

What are the characteristics of really great speakers you’ve heard?

Lynn Gaertner-Johnston’s Business Writing Blog is a great resource for workplace writing issues. This recent post caught our attention as one that sums up some rules for something that writers often run into trouble with: which words get capitalized in titles? Lynn sums it up in four easy rules. She even clarified one point that has often confused me–why do some prepositions get capitalized and some don’t? Answer: you decide based on the word’s length. Visit her post to learn more.