All Posts in Organizational Effectiveness

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

As regular IS Survivalists may recall, in graduate school I researched communication between electric fish.

This involved me in many stimulating discussions of how to define communication … because after all, how can you research something when you don’t know what it is?

Back then, the standard sociobiological definition of communication was behavior on the part of one entity … the sender … that changes the behavior of another entity (the receiver).

It isn’t communication unless it changes the behavior of the recipient. Electric fish understand this. Do you?

Companies squander a lot of effort because somewhere between figuring things out and explaining the answer, many employees mistake their responsibilities. They think their job is done when they provide the information.

It isn’t, of course. There’s little more pathetic than a thick report in a three-ring binder, ignored and gathering dust on a shelf.

Your job isn’t done until your target has both understood your message and taken action on it. That action is the change in behavior on their part that proves communication has happened, validating your efforts.

What are the steps to effective communication?

1. Understand your audience. If it’s one executive, do everything you can to determine his or her “hot buttons”: Key motivators, personal and organizational goals, likes and dislikes. If it’s a small group, analyze each member this way. If it’s a large group, divide it into categories and profile each category.

2. Determine your key messages. You know way too much about this subject, and you’re going to be tempted to explain everything you know. Resist the temptation. What you have to say is the center of your cosmos, but it’s just one asteroid in your audience’s solar system. Choose no more than five key messages (three is better). If you can’t winnow your list down that far, you need to pull back to a higher-level perspective.

3. Choose your medium. Your key messages and knowledge about your audience’s preferred communication styles should determine the medium. “They should read their e-mail,” is about as useful as any other choice that substitutes how things should be for how they actually are. If your audience is an executive who wants to look you in the eye, make sure you meet face-to-face. And even though you “… like to scribble on the whiteboard while I’m talking,” … that’s your preference. If your audience will reject your message because whiteboard-scrawling connotes lack of preparation, stuff your preference in the closet and prepare a formal PowerPoint presentation. Or vice versa.

4. Use formatting to reinforce your message. When you communicate face-to-face, your vocal intonation and body language deliver as much information as your words. In memos and reports, intonation and body language aren’t available to you. That’s what formatting is for — to substitute for them. You know what your key messages are. How are you going to make sure the reader remembers them?

The act of formatting helps you think things through. Deciding what to bold or italicize, what to put in a bulleted or numbered list, what to separate into a sidebar, what to illustrate through a chart or graphic … or in PowerPoint, whether and how to animate a graphic or bulleted list, and what to put into a “kicker box” at the bottom … these decisions help you think through your message.

Carefully chosen formatting can have another benefit: It constitutes “meta-communication” — communication about the communication. It says you’ve thought through your communication instead of just blurting everything out. That’s a good message to send.

Ever receive an e-mail whose author couldn’t be bothered to capitalize the first letter of a sentence, or to break the message into multiple paragraphs?

Me too. This kind of if-you-can’t-say-it-in-pure-ASCII “anti-formatting” sends a message of its own: That the author’s attitude was, “Here’s everything I want to say,” and not, “Here’s what I think you’ll find interesting enough to remember.”

Complaining about feature-bloat is a popular pastime in some circles. Go ahead if you enjoy it. Me … I’ll use every technique I can to communicate. There’s too much information floating around as it is.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Who is your customer?

This is a popular question in consulting circles — the starting point for most exercises in process redesign.

But process redesigners don’t need to identify customers. They need to identify consumers. Consumers, not customers, understand what they need from a product or service. They’re the experts when it comes to defining specifications.

For process redesign, the distinction between customers and consumers — that customers make buying decisions, whereas consumers use products and services — doesn’t matter, because processes don’t have customers in any important sense. Unfortunately, the “internal customer” concept escaped the narrow confines of process redesign long ago and has been rampaging through many companies ever since, leaving hopeless confusion in its wake.

If you’ve been an IS manager for any length of time, chances are some consultant or other has asked you who your customer is. They should have asked you who your customers and consumers are, because they’re different, and when customers and consumers are different people, it greatly complicates everything. Why?

Customers, by definition, define value. Consumers, on the other hand, define good specifications. When the people who define value and the people who can help you with specifications don’t agree about priorities — and when they’re different people with different goals, how can they? — then how are you supposed to make good decisions about your product or service?

That’s why industries in which the two roles are split are weird. Take the airlines. I’m pretty sure their consumers would prefer inter-seat spacing that exceeds the length of the average human femur, just as they deplore the ever-shrinking in-flight meal. Business travelers though, aren’t the airlines’ customers, only their consumers, (purchasing managers are their customers) and the airlines know it.

In IS, your customers aren’t your consumers either, which is why I generally recommend jettisoning the whole “internal customer” metaphor at the first opportunity. It isn’t that you don’t have internal customers. You do. The CEO and executive committee — the people who approve your budget — are your internal customers. The internal version of a buying decision is budget approval, after all, so by all means keep your customers happy.

Now about those consumers. Do you need to keep them happy too?

Good question. As the airlines have shown, there’s no connection between happy consumers and “success,” let alone a connection between unhappy consumers and failure, so in many companies — certainly, any company in which the executives don’t give a rat’s nostril about the well-being of their employees — you can lead a thriving IS organization and enjoy a successful career by pleasing only your customers.

Well, kind of. Maybe. Except that …

There comes a time in most IS careers when you roll out a new system or a major upgrade. Employees have three choices at a time like this: Embrace the new system; use it as little as possible; or find manual workarounds that let them ignore it completely while still getting their jobs done.

Think your career will thrive when employees fail to use a system the company spent bazillions to implement?

So … what makes the difference between enthusiastic acceptance and rabid resistance to a new system?

It’s obvious, isn’t it? Employees embrace technology that helps them. If you want a system to succeed, design it so it gives something back to the people who will be using it every day. Every single consumer must perceive a net personal benefit from the system.

If you want it to fail, design it so one group experiences more work and inconvenience while “the company” or some other group of employees receives the benefit. What, do you seriously expect employees to sacrifice for the good of the company?

Everything you implement must give something back to the employees who operate it. This doesn’t mean you have to optimize it for them. Go ahead and optimize it for your customers, whatever that means.

In a healthy company, it may even mean the same thing.

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