The KUPMC Blog

In a post today on the Harvard Business Review blog, Marshall Goldsmith makes this very important point:

“People have less time today, which means the value of that time has increased. Leaders who waste their workers’ time are not looked upon favorably.”

I’d simply add that this applies to co-workers as well. If you make an effort to be sure that you’re using your portion of the meeting time and presentation time well, your colleagues and staff will notice and appreciate it.

The challenge, of course, is asking ourselves which details are truly relevant to the situation at hand. We’d love it if others were interested in the full back story and all of the supporting reasons for our decisions.

But in practice, we get antsy and impatient when others share more information than we need. We need to get in the habit of remembering this when we’re doing the sharing.

What can you do to make sure you aren’t eating away at others’ time and patience when you have information to share?

The current fiscal crisis has created a lot of challenges in the workplace. But this brings with it a lot of opportunity for innovation.

Have an idea to streamline a process? You’ll likely find a pretty receptive audience.

So make the most of that by writing up your proposal with clarity. Save your readers the time of wading through the clutter of unnecessary words, and let your idea shine. Own it.

Addressing this issue in his always insightful blog, business writing guru Kenneth W. Davis suggested recently that we try “kicking the props away” in our writing and offers this gem from Patricia T. O’Connor and Stewart Kellerman and their book about online writing:

“Some puffed-up writers use long words, techie talk, trendy terms, and convoluted sentences to cover up or deceive or sound important or go along with the crowd. Most people who inflate their writing, though, are simply insecure, often for no good reason. They don’t feel their ideas are strong enough, and they prop them up with elaborate language.

If your ideas are any good, they can stand on their own. So kick away those unnecessary props. All they do is turn a strong writer into a wuss.”

Read more of Davis’s weekly nuggets of wisdom on his Manage Your Writing blog.

The popularity of Stephen M.R. Covey’s 2008 book, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything, suggests that there’s an inherent recognition of how central trust is to pretty much everything else in our personal and professional lives.

At the most recent session of the Emerging Leaders Academy, PMC director Charles Jones spent time with the participants talking about what he foresees for the future of the public sector. His presentation focused on three issues: efficiency, adaptation, and trust.

It all goes better, Charles noted, when there is trust.

Stephen M.R. Covey agrees, offering this communication example at the beginning of his book: “In a high trust relationship, you can say the wrong thing and people will still get your meaning. In a low-trust relationship, you can be very measured, even precise, and they’ll still misinterpret you.”

So how do we build trust? The circular answer is, of course, by being trustworthy. But what does this look like? Here’s the list that Charles shared:

• Tell the truth. If you can’t, explain why. Small lies kill trust.
• Keep promises. Promise less and deliver more.
• Admit mistakes; and say you’re sorry
• Trust others. To be trusted, you must first trust others.
• Don’t micromanage, use rules to empower vs. distrust.
• Hire and promote integrity.
• Walk the talk.
• Respect the ideas of others.
• Say “no” clearly when you have to, but explain.

So easy, and yet so challenging. What would you add to this list? What examples do you have of how trust really matters or how the things on this list really do build trust?

A strange disconnect seems to exist between how we see email when we’re the writer and how we see it when we’re the reader.

As readers, most of us are impatient. We’ve got a hundred other things to do with any moment of our time so we want things to be, as a professor friend likes to say, concise and precise. Opening an email, we are unconsciously thinking: Give me the relevant–and only the relevant–information, get to the point, tell me if something’s expected of me, and stop.

But most of us, and I certainly include myself in this, seem to forget our experiences as readers as soon as we step into the writing role. When it’s our information about our project, we want to make sure we include all the details to make as strong a case as possible for whatever we’re sharing and whatever we need.

The trouble is, our main point can get lost in all those details. Our readers find themselves needing to invest extra effort in finding the heart of the matter because we didn’t clearly highlight it for them with the written equivalent of a flashing neon sign. They may or may not make the investment.

And because it’s so clear to us what we’re asking for from people, we may not notice when we leave out a clear statement of expectations, request, or assignment complete with specific requirements and due date.

It’s a similar experience to what we may have experienced after asking our spouse to put dinner in the oven. It’s so obvious to us that this dish should be covered that we may not think to say so–only to arrive home to a dryer-than-intended meal and a spouse who assumed that if it needed to be covered we would have said so.

Before getting frustrated with others for not doing what we believe we asked them to, it’s probably worth taking a look at our written request to assess whether the information about the request and the deadline was clearly outlined. Sometimes it will have been. But other times not.

It might become easier to leave out some of the details we see as so important when we remember that leaving them out may mean that the recipient will actually read our message, while including the details may mean that the wordy email doesn’t get read at all.

What habits have you developed to make sure that the necessary information is included and the unnecessary details are not? Share your tricks in the comments below!

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.

Check out this CNN story about a study by Carnegie Melon University indicating that “sentiments expressed via the millions of daily tweets strongly correlate with well-established public opinion polls, such as the Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) and Gallup polls.”

The full report of the study hasn’t been released yet, but it’s interesting to think that the twitter comments about a city or other government agency might be a reasonable representation of the views on an issue.

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?

There are many issues that benefit from the collective discussion that takes place during meetings. But if you’ve ever walked out of a meeting unclear about what, exactly, was accomplished by the discussion, Lynn Gaertner-Johnston’s Business Writing Blog recently suggested that the problem may be in the agenda.

The solution? Add a second point under each discussion item that starts with “outcome:” or “results:”

She offers this example from a planning meeting. Rather than just “Discuss plans for trade show,” the agenda item becomes:

* Discuss plans for trade show.
* Outcomes: (1) Confirm list of activities. (2) Identify who will coordinate each activity. (3) Decide on essential action items for this month.

With this change to each meeting item, it is clear to all attendees not only what needs to happen at the meeting but also what will need to be done and by whom afterward. Now that’s a worthwhile meeting.