Professional Skills

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Here’s a little test: It’s Friday afternoon on a beautiful spring day, and everyone is ready to depart for a great weekend. You get some information and suddenly realize you need people reporting to you or working with you to work all weekend on a project you need to get out by Monday morning, 8:00. You are about to walk into a meeting to ask them to do this.

Quick: How are you feeling?

If you’re like many leaders, you might be experiencing dread, aversion or fear. Who wouldn’t? Well, some.

So let me tell a story.

Years ago, I had a boss who asked me to handle a project that took ALL my weekends in February – a mercifully short month (and at least it is in the winter).

But I wasn’t upset, didn’t push back, and actually got some pleasure out of knowing my work would help him.

Even more surprisingly, I last worked for this boss a decade ago. If he called me up today and asked if I would give up my weekend, stopping only for pepperoni pizza and Pepsi breaks, I would not even hesitate. In fact, I’d say “I’m on the way now, and why don’t I pick up the food on the way?” I would be there with a smile on my face.

I don’t even work for this guy anymore, and I would welcome the opportunity to help him.

What’s the secret?

The phrase “discretionary effort” is sometimes used, and I think many people are probably confused by it. Here’s what it means. It means that you will go above and beyond the requirements of your job – for whatever reason. It means the extra effort you willingly provide – not as a result of coercion.

It’s not about pay, it’s not about having a nice office, it’s not about getting a certain title, and it’s not about anything except . . . relationship.

Yes, relationship. That vague, hard-to-define, off-the-balance-sheet intangible. Relationship gets you commitment, effort, alignment, collaboration, communication and all the other things we know are crucial in performance in knowledge organizations.

You see, because my boss treated me the way he did, I would go the extra 50 miles for him.

So how did he treat me? With respect, openness, truth-telling, deep listening, a sense of humor and compassion.

This may shock you, but when I first moved to the city where I worked for him, we were talking on the phone one weekend, when I happened to be assembling my new barbeque grill. I knew him to be pretty handy with fixing things, and I asked him if he knew what a certain part name meant. He figured out what I was doing, and a few minutes later knocked on my door with his tool box. We had a beer and built the grill.

Twenty years after that, I would be happy to show up with the pepperoni and Pepsis.

In years of teaching presentation skills – and observing many presentations in and out of
classes – I have concluded there is one method that is virtually guaranteed to gain or
regain audience attention.

But before explaining that technique, let me tell you a story.

I once was working with a group of people on presentation skills at a remote military
base in west Texas. The class had gone fine so far, but on the third day I walked in and
immediately sensed something was very wrong. In fact, I had never seen anything like
what I was about to experience . . .
End of story

You see, the fact is, I don’t actually have a story. I just started one, and really just have
one question:

Did it get your interest?

Try it yourself. In your next presentation, at an appropriate point (usually after a lot of
facts or data have been shared is a good time), say the following words: “Let me tell you
a story to illustrate what I’m talking about.” Or, you can just launch in with no warning:
“Last week, I was sitting at my desk when Rachael walked in . . .”

Next, I want you to really pay attention to people’s eyes. There is something like a 100%
chance they will look at you, waiting to hear what you have to say. This is not a bad
dynamic in a presentation.

Of course, your story has to be on-topic, ideally contain a little bit of a build up, have
some specifics and a resolution. But this is actually easy to do. The harder part is to
convince presenters they should tell stories. Once you decide to do so, you will increase
the attention to what you are saying.

There are interesting reasons for this, including the fact that human beings are story-
telling and meaning-making machines. The narrative is a timeless, genetically encoded
form we use to communicate. Listen to the after-work conversation in a bar, gym or
coffee shop. I’ll bet you’re going to hear  stories.

So why not use them in your next presentation?

Many writers I have worked with are confused over the central message in whatever they
are writing. When I ask them: In a sentence, what are you trying to say? They often
respond with several things, qualifications, explanations and other moving parts.

One of the most valuable practices we teach in writing is the concept of the coat hook.

You can think of the coat hook as the one, specific point that everything hangs off of.
Everything connects to the coat hook.

In the same way, the coat hook in a document is the one, single point that the document is
all about. If you can’t say clearly what that is, there is potential confusion in your mind,
and then guess what happens in print, and in the reader’s mind?

One way to understand the coat hook is to ask yourself which sentence – if everything
else were stripped away – would the last man standing.

It’s easier to start out with a clear coat hook, though. State out loud what you would say if
your boss said, “In a sentence, what are you trying to say?”

Writers find that once they get clear on the coat hook, everything else can then fall into
place.

When you say the term “customer service” people in organizations usually think of a
department, or work group.

In fact, you are also in customer service, no matter what your job. Here’s how:

Think of an organization as a group of people who interact to take some kind of input and
create some kind of output. No one can do it alone, so hand-offs are necessary. Maybe
you collect data, analyze it, prepare a presentation based on it, or deliver the presentation
that will result in someone saying “yes.”

Each of the players in this process is handing off a work product to someone else, and
that other person is called a customer (the first is the supplier).

When you get the concept that the organization is full of internal supplier-to-customer
relationships, you realize there is such a thing as internal customer service, as well as
external. How well you collect, analyze, prepare or present the information are all
examples of customer service. If you collect the data poorly, it doesn’t help whoever is
supposed to analyze it (or anyone else down the line). This is bad customer service.

There are lots of ways you can find out how good your customer service is. A 360-
assessment is one; asking for feedback is another.

One final point: An organization cannot support a level of external customer service that
exceeds the level of internal customer service. The value chain breaks in the above
example. Whenever you’ve heard the phrase from someone in the organization in the role
usually thought of as customer service, “They shouldn’t have told you that,” you’re
hearing about an internal breakdown in customer service.

If you didn’t identify two grammatical errors in the above sentence, we need to talk.

Or perhaps just blog.

The public school system in the United States dropped the ball on grammar sometime
several decades ago. It went from being a rigorous requirement to optional – even in
English classes. The onslaught of video and oral culture, the rise of email (where
capitalization and punctuation seem optional), instant messaging and now Tweeting have
all eroded the standard to which people write.

Does it matter?

Yes, in the following scenarios: You’re writing a letter of application for a job you really
want, are putting in for a promotion, or trying to get an assignment that is just right for
you.

In these cases, you have to accept the fact that whether you express yourself correctly or
not will be noticed by those who know the difference, and they often see it as a proxy for
intelligence and capability.

We can agree or disagree with that, or think it’s right or wrong, but it is. If you care about
your prospects, it matters that you get it right when you write.

If you are not sure about your use of the language, it usually means you are making
mistakes. Don’t make them when something important is on the line for you.