Winston Churchill took up painting at the age of forty, and eventually became very passionate and quite good at it, despite one or two other distractions on his mind. He once said, “When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject.”
As Churchill reminds us, any worthwhile and challenging human activity takes a lot of work to do well, much less master. If anything, persuasive communication is even more nuanced and challenging than painting, because it requires you to adjust real time and to tailor your approach to the particular audience. So, whether it’s personal conversations, presentations, lean communication, writing emails and reports, or any other form of communication, the good and bad news is that you’re not as good as you could be.
It’s important to realize that improvement does not come automatically with time. Like driving a car, the average person reaches an acceptable skill level and then stays there for the rest of their life, unless they have a good reason to change.
As Anders Ericsson, perhaps the world’s reigning expert on expertise, says:
“Some professionals continue to improve steadily during many years and even decades, and are eventually recognized by their peers as having attained the highest levels as experts or masters. In contrast, most professionals in a domain reach a stable, average, undistinguished level of achievement within a relatively short time frame and maintain this mediocre level for the rest of their careers.”[1]
Unless you’re happy to count yourself among the average and undistinguished, you’ve got to want to change, and you’ve got be intentional in how you go about it. That spirit is captured in the concept of kaizen. The word kaizen comes from the Japanese characters “kai”, meaning change, and “zen”, meaning good. So, it means change for the better. It also includes the concept of continuous improvement, which means that you don’t make a one-time change and then live with the new status quo. Rather, you constantly look for ways to improve even on your improvements. As we’ve seen, it’s so easy for waste to creep into our regular communication, that it should not be difficult to constantly refresh your sources of possible improvements.
Take stock and prioritize
Start by thinking carefully about what you want to improve. If you decide you need to improve your communication skills, you probably already have a sense of what you want to work on. Whenever I start a coaching relationship with a new client, I ask them what their priorities, and most people can quickly identify two or three with no problem. If you’re not sure, start by self-monitoring: consciously pay attention to yourself as you engage in regular communication. You could even take it a step further by either asking others for feedback, or even videotape yourself.
We don’t have a million years to work on our skills, but we should also be patient and realistic. It’s hard to change too many things at once, so if your list is longer than about three items, I suggest picking one or two areas at a time. You don’t have to get it perfect, but improve it a little and then move to the next.
Be clear about your intentions
Implementation intentions have been found to be highly effective in reminding and motivating desired behaviors. Rather than vaguely saying you’re going to try to get better, think about specifically what you will do differently and when. So, you might say, “When I go to the meeting on Tuesday, I will consciously try to start with the bottom line up front every time I’m asked a question.” Implementation intentions work well if you only go through them in your mind, but they work even better if you write them down. You’ll be amazed of how your mental reminder will kick in when you’re in the actual situation you envisioned.
Review
How many times have you left a meeting and said to yourself: “I wish I had said this, or asked that”? The first few minutes after an encounter are the best time to conduct an after-action review, even if only informally. Go over what went right, what you could have done differently, and then turn that into implementation intentions for your next meeting or conversation.
By the way, if Churchill has been true to his word, by my calculations he’s spent 54 years so far working on his craft. I wonder how it’s going?
[1] K. Anders Ericsson, Enhancing the Development of Professional Performance: Implications from the Study of Deliberate Practice, in Development of Professional Expertise, p. 405.
Call me weird, but I LOVE Mondays. Monday is my favorite day of the week. I am more focused on Mondays than any other day of the week, and I get more done on average.
Why do I love Mondays?
Because very Monday is so full of promise and possibility for the week ahead. To me, Monday morning is a chance to start fresh. Every new week offers a fresh chance to improve on the previous one. No matter what happened last week, you can always make this week better.
It’s a chance to start off the week at full speed. A good productive Monday sets the tone for the rest of the week.
Maybe it’s because I work for myself, which makes me solely responsible for choosing how to spend my time and energy, but I view every Monday morning as an empty sheet of paper, and I get to write the story.
It can be intimidating, if you let it be. Or it can be a beautiful challenge to make the best of the unlimited possibilities to fully engage your talent for a worthwhile purpose.
Bring on the week!
When the group consensus says one thing and you think another, should you speak up? When do you have a duty to disagree?
Common sense tells us there are a lot of good reasons to keep quiet. We all know you “need to go along to get along”, and “the nail that sticks out gets pounded down”.
In his new book, Conformity: The Power of Social Influences, Cass Sunstein says there are two main reasons we don’t speak up even when we disagree with the group. One reason is that we may be wrong. If the question is complicated or we lack complete information, we may not be totally sure of our own position, so we look to what others are saying or doing for information. Second, we crave acceptance by our group, and disagreement threatens that acceptance.
These two reasons can exert enormous power even when the answer is fairly clear-cut. Solomon Asch conducted some famous experiments in which subjects were shown a line, and then asked to select which one of three lines matched the length. It was a simple task, and by themselves, they were right almost 100% of the time. But when others in the room (who were secretly planted by the researchers) chose a different—and wrong—line, they got it wrong 37% of the time. Even though it was obviously wrong, more than a third of the time, they let the group consensus win. And the majority were willing to keep their mouths shut: in twelve iterations, 70% of subjects got it wrong at least once.
That still leaves a third of people who were willing to speak up and disagree with the group, but remember that the question was pretty clear cut. I don’t have statistics, but it’s a safe bet that when the question is more nuanced, rugged individualists are few and far between.
Lack of disagreement makes a group run more smoothly, but there may be a price to pay. When getting along becomes more important than results, performance can suffer. Investment clubs that are formed on the basis of social connections perform worse than those formed by people who weren’t socially connected, for the simple reason that members were much more likely to openly disagree. Unanimous decisions were worse than split decisions.
It reminds me of the story of GM CEO Alfred Sloan who once ended a meeting by saying:
“If we are all in agreement on the decision – then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”
The “go along at any price” crowd think that those who disagree are selfish, because they put their own views ahead of the group’s. But the truth is, disagreement comes with a price, so if you’re willing to pay that price for the good of the group, disagreement is a totally unselfish act. In fact, you have a duty to speak up, regardless of what it may cost.
The good news is that your risk may pay off. Even when the group seems unanimously united in opposition, remember that up to two thirds of them may harbor doubts but are afraid to speak up. By saying out loud what they are privately thinking, you may encourage them to join you. (And if you are right, you also have two other powerful allies on your side: time and truth.)
But be smart about it: choose your battles. Your best guide to decide whether you have a duty to speak up is the first rule of lean communication: you must add value. When you are aware of an opportunity to improve the situation but don’t take advantage of it, not only are you not adding value, you may even be subtracting value.
Are we all in agreement?
You probably saw this video that went viral in 2017 when Professor Robert Kelly was conducting an interview with the BBC. It’s a great teaching moment for how to handle distractions that come up while you’re in the middle of a serious presentation.
On the whole, Kelly handled it with poise, although I wonder how it might have turned out if his wife had not scrambled in to corral the children and shepherd them out the door. He managed to keep his focus and get right back to what he was saying before he was interrupted.
So what could he have done better? If you’re in the middle of a serious presentation and something like that happens, it’s appropriate to apologize, but only once. More than one apology is superfluous and begins to call attention to itself. But the best thing to do when that happens is to recognize that you’ve just been handed a lucky opportunity to turn the situation to your advantage. If Kelly had made a joke about it, he would have shown himself the master of the situation. (Since he was talking about North Korea, maybe he could have joked about an invasion.)
When S**T happens—and it will—treat it as a gift. First, it humanizes you—in this case, who can’t relate to cute young kids? Even better, it elevates you. When you respond with grace and even flair to a distraction, your stock goes way up in the minds of your listeners. Everyone watching when you’re giving a presentation knows how difficult it can be, so they admire someone who smiles at adversity. Finally, it’s memorable. I can practically guarantee that Kelly’s viewership shot up by several orders of magnitude from his normal audience, and probably no one reading this would have even heard of him.
In an interview afterwards, Kelly said “I thought I’d blown it in front of the whole world.” No, Dr. Kelly, not only did you not blow it, but if you hadn’t done it, the whole world would not have seen it.
