This is my 500th blog post, and I could think of no more fitting topic for such a milestone than this: the first rule of effective communication.
The first rule of effective communication is this: you must add value. I’ll describe what that means and share a checklist for measuring the amount of value you have added in any communication, whether it be a sales conversation, a presentation, or simply answering a question from your boss.
What does it mean to add value in communication? Remember that in lean thinking value is defined as anything the customer is willing to pay for. By analogy, value in communication is anything the recipient is willing to listen to, and use as a basis for a decision or action. What would make them be willing to listen and act? Because the information received is useful: it will improve their situation in some way.
Value is then defined as useful communication that respects the relationship. You know you have added value when one or more of the following things happen:
- Either or both sides are better equipped to make a decision or take action that improves their personal situation.
- The organization is better off or a higher purpose than individual gain is served.
- The relationship is preserved or enhanced.
In an ideal world, you would be able to meet those three conditions in every communication, but of course that’s not always reality. Which of the three you emphasize when there’s a conflict depends on you: on your judgment, your values, and your appraisal of the situation. But having said that, you can usually find ways to accomplish at least two of the three, and you should probably not open your mouth unless you can do so.
Here’s a checklist to ensure that your communication adds value to the other person. At the end of the exchange, here are some questions that will tell you whether you added value:
Did you answer the question? When someone else asks you a question, it’s usually easy for all concerned to tell whether you provided an answer. But the same test applies when you are the one initiating the conversation. There is always the question that requires an answer, although it’s not so obvious. That question is: “What do you want me to do and why?” If someone takes your call or attends your presentation, this question is always on their mind, or should be. You can hear people talk for hours and not be sure whether the question was answered.
Did you improve their situation or outcome? The second part of the question is “why?” The bottom line of communication is that the information received is useful: it enables the recipient to solve a problem, take advantage of an opportunity, or deal with a risk. To pass this test, you must tell the other person what he needs to know, not what he wants to know. Focus on WIFM: “What’s in it for me?” Did you provide a personal benefit to the listener? While this is not always possible, ultimately all decisions are personal, so you should strive to frame communications in terms of the other person’s benefit. The only exception is when they need to do it to benefit a higher purpose, such as what’s good for the business. If your ask does not benefit the other person or a higher purpose, your only alternatives are begging or coercion, depending on who holds the power.
Did you maintain or improve the relationship? This is not always possible—sometimes what the other person needs to hear is not what they want to hear. But you should always be respectful and sensitive to the relationship if possible.
Who did the work? Remember that you’re a knowledge worker, not an information worker. Many communications are a “data dump” in which the speaker tells everything they know, and the listener has to draw conclusions from all the detail. If you present all the information in your head without analysis or recommendation, you are asking the other person to do your work for you. Give them your best finished thought.
Did you listen and adjust? One problem with giving them the best of your finished thought is that you may fall in love with your own idea, and you may miss opportunities to create even more value. During the conversation (and I use this term very broadly, to include any type of ongoing discussion or communication), you can jointly create even more value through dialogue. Dialogue enables correction, adjustment and improvement to the original idea, and can often spark new and better ideas—not to mention greater engagement and commitment. Of course, this will only work if you are willing to be influenced yourself, and if you actively listen and pay attention to how your ideas are being heard, understood, and processed by the other person.
These five questions may seem like a lot to remember, but they can become automatic through awareness and practice. The bottom line, and the first rule of effective communication is this: Before you open your mouth, stick in a slide, or hit send, ask yourself: “What value am I adding?”
My daughter Mackenzie and her fiancée Matthew got married last month, and the entire experience was magical and amazing, despite all my best efforts to the contrary.
Let me explain: from the moment we left the hotel where she got dressed, to the ceremony itself at the same church where my wife and I were married 33 years ago, and on to the reception, everything went perfectly and every single detail was just right.
During all the planning, my main contribution was a vain effort to rein in the costs. I would ask my wife, “Why are we spending money on two different-colored linens to cover the tables—aren’t the plain white ones good enough? Why do we need so many flowers? Do they really need menus, and does the printing have to match the color of the linens? Do we really need specially-ordered M&M’s!?”
Naturally, I lost all those arguments, and I’m glad I did, because I was wrong. The whole experience made me re-learn a lesson that I should have learned many years ago: attention to detail pays off.
When I attended the Air Force Academy in the 1970s, the upperclassmen constantly repeated “attention to detail” as a mantra, but I saw myself as a big-picture guy, so I bought into it with my mind but not with my heart.
Yet over the years, I’ve come to appreciate how critically important it is to pay attention to even the smallest of details. Of course it’s a good idea if you’re going to fly fast, expensive jets for a living, but it equally applies to sales and persuasion.
In sales, attention to detail can keep you in the game or knock you out immediately. Small, seemingly unimportant details can have a huge effect on outcomes, either negative or positive. Just as one small fly in your soup can ruin a whole meal, and one tiny grain of sand in your shoe can cripple you, one typo can scuttle a million dollar proposal.
On the other hand, a small gesture thrown in at the last minute can put a negotiation over the top; one unusual or telling detail can make a sales presentation memorable (I still remember a presentation from five years ago that involved a Chihuahua named Pedro); and three Cuban cigars that I gave a client almost twenty years ago still pay off for me today.
Detail shows professionalism. Speaking of M&M’s, David Lee Roth of Van Halen used to insist that they be supplied with a large bowl of M&M’s at every venue where they played—with all the brown ones removed—upon pain of immediate cancellation with full compensation. That might seem like a case of massive egos gone wild, but the band in fact had it in there to ensure that the promoter had read their contract. They had enormously heavy and expensive sets, and failure to comply with their directions could actually hurt someone. If Roth ever saw a brown M&M, he would not only trash the dressing room, he would also meticulously check every other detail to make sure it was safe to go out and play.
Detail drives deeper thinking. In my opportunity planning workshops, I urge participants to be as detailed as possible in their analysis of the situation, especially the business and personal drivers of the customer’s need. The first broad pass through the analysis doesn’t do much for them, but when they challenge themselves to come up with more detail, it invariably uncovers one or two small bits of information that they can use to craft a unique understanding of the customer’s situation and a much stronger competitive value proposition.
Details convince. To see how details can make you more persuasive, consider the following scenario:
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.
Please check off the most likely alternative:
- Linda is a bank teller.
- Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement.
If you picked B, you are like 9 of 10 people who responded in this experiment by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.[1] Logically, it’s impossible that B is more likely than A, but somehow it’s more convincing. Kahneman calls this the representativeness heuristic, and concludes that as the level of detail in a scenario increases, the likelihood increases. That’s why detailed testimonials and recommendations work so well. Along the same lines, details also make things more real by making the abstract more vivid and concrete in the listener’s mind, and by making you much more human and approachable.
Would it have been a great wedding without all that attention to detail? Who knows, but I doubt I would have received this testimonial from a good friend of mine: “You made lifetime memories for a lot of people.”
Note: A version of this post ran in Kelly Riggs’ Business LockerRoom blog on April 15.
[1] Scott Plous, The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making, p. 111.
As I wrote last week, lean communication is an enormously useful tool for ensuring that your communication with others adds value, briefly and clearly. But human nature is too complex to be reduced to ironclad rules.
Think of this article as the disclaimer to that one. In persuasive communication, there are always exceptions. There are definitely times when you might want or need to violate some of the rules. Let’s go through each:
Added-value:
The rule here is to add value to the recipient, which means framing your message in a way that is good for the other person. There are times when this rule does not apply…
- If the situation demands instant compliance, brevity and clarity should trump added value.
- Some pies can’t be made bigger—you want a slice that will just make theirs smaller. When you want something from the other person and there is no clear benefit to them, trying too hard to make it seem like it’s in their best interests can expose your insincerity; it’s better to be up-front about the fact that’s it’s not win-win.
Brevity:
The rule is to eliminate unnecessary verbiage that does not add value to the communication. But you still have to be smart about it…
- Anyone who has a teenager knows the frustrations of dealing with excessive brevity. Keep the relationship in mind when deciding how brief to be. When EQ is more important than IQ, sometimes you have to take more time to make the other person feel heard or valued. It’s easy to cross the line from brisk to brusque, especially because it’s the other person who decides where that line is. You have to use your common sense and judgment and most of all pay attention to the other person.
- Never forget that brevity which derives from deep thought is a totally different concept than sound-bite brevity, which is a product of shallow thinking, closed-mindedness, and snap judgments.
Clarity:
In general, you want to transfer what’s in your head with as little chance for misunderstanding as possible, except in these cases…
- There are benefits to ambiguity, imprecision and wiggle room in communication. When the idea you’re proposing is likely to be opposed by the other person, it’s not a good idea to begin with the bottom line up front, because of the risk that they might immediately stop listening or listen only to poke holes in your argument. In such cases, the shortest distance between two persuasive points may be a loop that starts from where they are and gradually circles back to your point of view.
- If your listeners are already on your side but your logic is less than airtight, being too clear may expose your weaknesses. Am I advocating fudging? What do you think? You may find this distasteful, but it’s the foundation of marketing and advertising; let your conscience be your guide.
- When clarity crosses the line to being “brutally honest”, it has definitely gone too far.
- When it’s not worth your time: My friend Gary told me a story about being at a conference with a colleague who had an inflated opinion of his own speaking ability. After he spoke, he asked Gary what he thought of his presentation. Gary replied, “Of all the presentations I’ve seen today, yours was definitely the most recent.” The fellow beamed and strutted away.
In another context, George Orwell wrote six rules for writers that align with brevity and clarity, but probably the most important is his last: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” In that spirit, strive to add value, briefly and clearly—except when it contradicts your more important goals, common sense, or good taste.
In order to get anything done in business, you have to persuade at all levels, but the highest stakes apply when we’re trying to convince the powerful—by definition, they’re the ones who control most of the resources you want. And if you want to convince the powerful, you have to realize that even though they put their pants on one leg at a time, they do think differently—and adjusting to those differences can make you more effective.
Quite simply, the more powerful think differently than the rest of us. According to Heidi Grant Halvorson’s book, No One Understands You and What to Do About It
According to the research cited by Halvorson, when people have power:
- They act more selfishly. In one clever study, researchers observed the correlation between the model of vehicle and the likelihood of cutting someone off at a 4-way stop. Drivers of cars such as Mercedes and BMWs cut off other drivers 30% of the time, compared to 7% for drivers of lower-status cars.
- They have less empathy for the person they’re talking to—except when empathy matters to their purposes. You may go into that big presentation hoping you’ll make a favorable impression on the big shot, but chances are they won’t pay much attention to you as a person at all. Halvorson says, “It’s not so much that they think they are better than you as it is that they simply do not think about you at all.”
The upshot of these two points is that the “A” of lean communication—Adding value—applies more than ever when persuading the powerful. Adding value, as I wrote last week, is “communicating useful information that produces improved outcomes for both parties while preferably preserving the relationship.”
As Halvorson puts it, “For the powerful, your instrumentality is key. Frankly, it is all that matters. What can you do to help powerful people reach their goals?”
She goes on to say: “Instrumentality isn’t about being nice—it’s about being useful.”
So according to Halvorson, the relationship is not only secondary, it’s irrelevant. I would not go that far, but I would agree that the best way to be seen as a person and to develop a relationship with someone of greater power is to first focus on adding value to them, and make that a prominent and early piece of your message. If you don’t show them briefly and clearly (the B and C of lean communication) that you can be useful to them, you won’t have much more opportunity to make that impression or develop that relationship. If you want to make a good impression, begin by talking about what’s important to them.
This takes us back to outside-in thinking and preparation: what do you know about what’s important to the other person? Do you know their goals, opportunities and challenges, and can you credibly connect your proposal to those?
Be useful, my friends.
