Archive for Communication
How Well Do You Communicate With Yourself?
Posted by: | CommentsThere is much talk and more written about effective business communication with your customers and prospects. But what about how you communicate with yourself?
I began to ponder this question as I sat waiting to be called for a panel on my first day of jury duty. The laptops thoughtfully provided for the jurors were hopelessly slow and outdated. So I had the choice of reading the newspaper, or a paperback or pondering the meaning of life. Finally, time to THINK!
After some thought, I began a conversation with myself about how to move forward with my redesigned blog, the steps I should be taking in new business development and how I should be balancing my personal and work lives, etc. etc. Wow. That’s a lot of conversation.
As I pondered how I should be communicating my ideas to myself, I realized I had several options:
- Free Association. Just let the ideas rip. I guess nowadays that would be known as mind mapping, should I choose to write down the ideas. But doesn’t this slow down the flow of ideas to myself?
- Make a list. If all else fails, make yet another list to myself. Hey, Jeannette, what are your top three priorities for the next week, month, year? Go ahead, write them down. Wait a minute. Didn’t I just write a list, ummm, last month? Wonder where it is.
- Communicate through a friend. Yes! I’ll call Janet or Andrea and discuss possible courses of action and then ask them to feed back to me, through their lenses, what my priorities should be. This is a roundabout way to communicate with myself, but it takes a lot of responsibility off my shoulders. It’s also called avoidance.
- Say and do nothing. Now we’re getting to the heart of the dilemma that I think afflicts a lot of people. It’s easier to ignore this essential inner conversation and just keep trying stuff to see what sticks. No thinking needed for that.
What I’ve noticed in the complex world of the blogosphere is that my conversations with myself are shorter and less reflective. Got to keep checking email every two minutes. Need to get another blog written. And don’t forget a quick look at Twitter and Facebook.
No time to communicate with myself. Too busy for meaningful conversation that would replace a lot of wasted time on the web.
Where Did the Employees Go?
Posted by: | CommentsThe 2008 corporate annual reports have rolled off the presses and are on view on company websites. I flipped through some of them online and, as usual, they are the same old dullards. A letter from the president, a few words about the past year and what the future holds, followed by the financial results.
But you know what? Several of the very largest Fortune 500 companies had not a single photo or story about an employee. None. Aren’t employees the ones who make the company successful? Where did they go? It is a little shocking to think that they merit so little recognition. Granted many companies have had layoffs. Maybe they think that if they don’t highlight the employees who are left people will forget about the ones who are gone. Or maybe it’s something else.
In a recent column, David Brooks, an op-ed writer for The New York Times cited a study “Which C.E.O. Characteristics and Abilities Matter,” by Steven Kaplan, Mark Klebanov and Morten Sorensen. What they learned, says Brooks, is that “strong people skills…and being a great communicator…correlate loosely or not at all with being a good C.E.O….what mattered were execution and organizational skills.” Their findings apparently were consistent with other research on the subject of successful C.E.O.’s.
Maybe that’s why employees are so little recognized in the most successful companies. The C.E.O.’s need to be a good communicator isn’t as important as sweating the small stuff, like being attentive to detail. OK, not all C.E.O.s think team building and communications with employees are unimportant.
But it does make one pause and wonder if companies just don’t value their employees as much as in the old cradle-to-grave days when an employee lived out his entire work life with one company. Maybe employees are fungible. That’s it. Employees come. Employees go. Welcome to the new world.
