Tag: Career

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

failure to communicate
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Like it or not we live in a 140 character society. I know a few pastors who REALLY don’t like it. I, on the other hand, LOVE it. I’m all about the KISS theory of communication (Keep It Simple Sister!). If you have to explain your idea too much, you haven’t communicated it very well. Your message does not need more words. It needs better words. Author Verlyn Klinkenborg says, “You can say smart, interesting, complicated things using short sentences. How long is a good idea?” Here are five tips for clear communication:

Use Action Words – Use the simple tense instead of the continuous tense of verbs when possible. Instead of, “I have been working at Acme Motors for 10 years.” Say, “I have worked at Acme Motors for 10 years.” Take time to choose your words. You may feel awkward with the staccato nature of simple tense verbs at first, but they set a nice pace and make your message clearer. Put yourself in your listener’s shoes: “If this was the first time I heard this message, would it engage me?”

Shut Up – When in conversation, listen more than talk. Figure out what really matters and filter your communication through that lens. Repeat in your head what you heard the speaker say and reword it back to her. My go to intro for this is: “Just to clarify what I heard you say…” Be aware of your listener’s non-verbals and make good use of your own like eye contact, nodding, smiling, and my favorite, the puppy head tilt. When you are on the phone, smile. Even though the caller can’t see you smile, they can hear it.

Broaden Your Vocabulary – Read, read, read. I read books suggested by Reese Witherspoon, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Susan Barber (http://susangbarber.wordpress.com) among others. A mix of fiction and non-fiction is vital. Don’t be afraid to read over your head. I keep a dictionary on my phone to quickly and surreptitiously look up words for which I can’t glean the meaning from the sentence (like the word surreptitiously).

You Got Some ‘Splaining to Do – You know what you’re talking about, but no one else does. Put your message in terms a 5th grader would understand. This is not belittling 5th graders. They are pretty smart, but they are not known for their patience. Give illustrations in a simple and concise context. Edit ruthlessly. Write a rough draft. Leave it alone for a while. Overnight even. When you go back to it, cut repetitive phrases. Things that sounded brilliant in your head at the time often look over explained in the harsh light of day.

Don’t Give Up – Does all this sound like work? It is. Rarely is communication complete. Keep refining your message. It’s like talking about the Birds and the Bees with your kids. You really don’t just sit them down one day and tell them about sex. It’s a years long conversation. One day your two-year-old daughter asks you where babies come from and you tell her, “Tennessee,” because that’s what her little brain can handle. When she is older, she asks again and you tell her, “When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much…” because she can handle more. As the years go by, the questions get more uncomfortable, but you keep communicating because the message is important. When your second child asks similar questions, you’re ready because you’ve communicated this message before and had a chance to edit and refine it. The same theory holds true for much of your communication. Your message is important. Work on it.

Have any tips for clearer communication? Share them here:

Don’t Dread It. Go and Get It!

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Photo by energepic.com from Pexels

Shhhhhh. Do you hear that? It’s the collective groan of employees working on self assessments for annual performance reviews. If wracking your brain for strengths, weaknesses, and accomplishments has you searching for the migraine tablets, consider this: You can turn your annual performance review into an opportunity to showcase your mad skills. Last year, I decided to do just that and received a promotion for my trouble 🙂 Here is a formula that worked for me:

Accentuate the Positive
As Stuart Smalley (Saturday Night Live) says, “You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and doggone it, people like you.” A performance review is the time to remind your manager why he/she likes you. Take this opportunity to blow your own horn particularly if you don’t like to. What were your biggest accomplishments during the past year? Make a list. When you see your contributions in writing, your confidence grows. After listing all you can think of, set the task aside for an hour or so. When you come back to it add any others that came to mind while you were working on something else. (Funny how that happens. You take your mind off a task and when you return to it fresh, you have another idea. It usually comes to me during a time I can’t go write it down, like in the shower.) Pare the list down to your top three for your final draft. BTW, if you don’t have a running list of accomplishments since your last performance review, start one for next year. Right. Now. If you don’t remember the major thing you accomplished six months ago, your manager won’t either.

Eliminate the Negative
A performance review allows you a peek inside your supervisor’s head. Most bosses won’t come right out and tell you what they think of your work – especially if your work doesn’t please them – but an annual review forces communication. This usually involves identifying your weaknesses. Do NOT say you don’t have any. We all do and you’ll be better off identifying them yourself instead of forcing your manager to batter your ego by listing perceived defects. It’s also very tempting to cheat on this one. IE: “My biggest weakness is that I work too hard.” (Can you hear my eyes rolling?) Instead, how about presenting your weakness followed by how you are addressing it? IE: “I’m having trouble formatting the charts in the Activity Reports so I’ve signed up for an online Excel course.” This acknowledges you see an area in which you need to improve and you already have a plan to do so. Stick to just one or two things you’re going to improve by next year’s performance review. No need to expose ALL your flaws.

Latch on to the Affirmative
You’ll probably also be asked to comment on your strengths. Remember the accomplishment list you made? Revisit the things you did not include in your top three. Can you use some of those for your strengths? For example, if “I caught a typo on an invoice saving the department $1000 four months ago,” did not make your top three accomplishments, you could repurpose that accomplishment into a strength: I have excellent proofreading skills (IE: In April I saved my department $1000 when I found a typo while proofreading an invoice). Try to come up with examples of when you saved the company money, made the operation more efficient, and/or made your team stronger.

Don’t Mess with Mr. In-Between
Even if your company says your performance review is not tied to a raise, act like it is. It’s motivation. Establish a baseline against which you want your manager to judge your work over the next year. Use this meeting to pick your manager’s brain. Bob King, a former Senior Vice President of CLEAResult Consulting suggests, “Embrace this process as an opportunity to make sure that your perspective is aligned with your supervisor, and should it turn out not to be, engage your supervisor in a positive fashion to explore where perspectives diverged.” If you don’t have a habit of checking in with your boss every couple of months to ask him/her how you’re doing, put it on your calendar. A performance review should not be the first conversation the two of you have regarding the quality of your work and it’s up to you to initiate that feedback. In your review, set goals that receive your manager’s blessing. Over the next year, keep notes on what you’re doing to reach those goals (online courses, certifications, earned CEU’s) and check in periodically before your next performance review to inform your boss of the progress you’re making. Now is a good time to suggest ways you want to grow. Ways for which perhaps your company will reimburse you (associations you want to join, classes you want to take, conferences/seminars you want to go to). If you approach this review as a “get to” instead of a “got to,” you could come out of it in a much better position than you entered it.

Shout out to Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer for their song “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.” Now I’m stuck with an earworm.