Monthly Archives: November 2011

Transparency Equals Credibility: Communicating What You Know When You Know It

Posted on by

Communicating is tough when the news is difficult for your audience. It’s even harder when details aren’t fully baked.

I’ve fallen victim to holding back – for example, waiting till all of the content was developed before launching an intranet site with only a few months left to go on a large-scale change project.

I look back on that experience and cringe. Sure, intranets were brand new then, and most of us were trying to make them look and function like external websites, but the main reason I delayed was fear that stakeholders needed more content. So, they waited while we created.

Doing Better than “I Don’t Know”

Recently, I wrote a post about communicating a new Pay & Rewards system for warehouse employees (“They All Laughed: Can Humor Be a Communications Asset?”). That post was about getting my foot in the door and learning an entirely new functional area – heck, understanding a whole different culture – at the company. I promised to tell you the rest of the story as a kind of case study for communicating difficult information, even when all the facts aren’t available.

For many years, change communicators were advised to get comfortable (and get leadership comfortable) with saying, “I don’t know.”

The fact is, “I don’t know” doesn’t work for most audiences. They suspect you do know something; you’re just not telling them.

Let’s face it, they’re usually right.

Instead of trying to make “I don’t know” work, it’s a lot better and creates far more credibility for everyone involved (leaders, the change team, Corp Comm, and your communications vehicles) to establish regular milestones for communication.

That’s the mandate our warehouse Pay & Rewards team started with. But, instead of providing regular updates, they sequestered themselves while rumors filled the information vacuum.

Rebuilding Credibility

Before I was ushered in to meet the Pay & Rewards team, the facility leader advised me he’d appointed warehouse employees to this team for a reason. He was adamant that, unless there was absolutely no other way, they needed to deliver the communications. This wasn’t going to be some slick communication from HQ. The credibility of the team and the pay system depended on it.

Sitting in on my first session with the team, it was easy to recognize their expertise. They’d been through weeks of training to understand pay systems. They’d spent months formulating and reformulating a design they thought was appropriate when employees moved from the old warehouse to a new distribution center where they’d be expected to work with a massive robotics system and computers.

The team was determined to do right by their colleagues. And that’s where they foundered. Concerned about creating a fair system, they were afraid to communicate a half-developed design – and air their debates as the design took shape. The risk of misunderstanding seemed too great.

Early in their deliberations, they began taping paper over the little window in the conference room door to keep people from peeking at anything that might be on the white board. That didn’t sit well with the warehouse.

Good News or Bad, Be Honest, Clear and Consistent

As we worked together, I realized the new design was good news for the majority of employees: most would see a pay increase when they moved to the new distribution center, and the process for earning bonus pay would be standardized, making it clear and fair for everyone.

(Now, I can hear you thinking, “But, you had good news to communicate. Just go out and tell employees, and the team’ll be fine. It’s not like employees were losing money. That’d be a lot harder to explain.” True, we were lucky there, but six months of silence is a hard act to follow. More to the point: I would have taken exactly the same steps if the new pay system had meant smaller paychecks and fewer bonuses.)

The first thing I did was have the team explain the new pay and rewards design to me, the timetable for its approval, and how it would work as employees transitioned to the new facility. This took a while, but in the confines of a private conference room, they presented the information like the experts they were.

Facing their co-workers was quite a different story. Up until their appointment, the Pay & Rewards team members worked in the warehouse; they’d never had to speak in public, and they were nervous and wary. We spent hours on presentation training, while I worked with a graphic designer back at HQ to bring their design to life.

The team had three critical goals for the presentation:

  • re-establishing the Pay & Rewards team’s credibility
  • explaining the new pay and bonus system clearly, so that everyone walked away with a solid understanding of where they fit in the new pay scale
  • establishing the equity of the new system

When It’s Okay to Bury the Lede

Together, we created a presentation that addressed each of the critical needs and used models (i.e., without actual hourly pay) to explain the pay scales conceptually before sharing the actual new pay and bonus rates.

The presentation went something like this, with each team member taking a turn:

  • the team’s training in pay design
  • the core value of developing a pay system in-house, rather than having one imposed from the outside
  • an objective overview of pay scales in the regional economy
  • benefits of the new pay and bonus system
  • models of the new pay and bonus system
  • expectations of employees: how they could be successful within the new structure
  • the new pay and rewards system
  • questions and answers

This wasn’t a crisis – and we were delivering complicated information that every single employee cares deeply about (“How much am I going to get paid?”) – so, we had good reasons to delay sharing the actual pay rates. If the team had shared the new pay rates at the beginning of the presentation, no one would have heard a word they said after that.

Despite jitters, the team delivered heroically, communicating to every employee in the facility within a 24-hour period and staying late into the night to present to third shift to ensure the information was delivered in a timely and consistent manner.

There were lots of questions, but very little confusion – the audience heard and understood the messages – and the team answered every single query, further re-establishing their credibility.

By the next morning, we’d placed thick notebooks with the full presentation, a long list of Q&As, and a schedule of regular Pay & Rewards team communication updates in the cafeteria and common areas. The team made themselves available for questions and we updated the Q&As whenever there was new information.

There were certainly concerns and questions for a couple of days following the presentation, but before the week was out, everything was back to normal and the old rumors had been put to rest.

Ultimately, the new design gave employees a positive incentive to move to the new facility, so they could work within the new pay system. And our change team moved on to other pressing issues of the transition, such as employee technophobia and business-stakeholder management.

Is there anything we would have done differently if the news had been bad and pay went down? The key indicator for that message was the pay scales in the regional economy and how our facility ranked in relation to other companies. Given bad news, you’d still follow the same order above, ending with a series of small group or brown bag lunch sessions to continue the discussion, reinforcing key messages and answering questions. Then, make all of the information available, as we did, in an open and transparent way. Ongoing communications from the team and their willingness to answer questions frankly and on the fly would help maintain their credibility over the long run.

Giving Thanks

Posted on by

Tomorrow is a day for sharing dinner with extended family and giving thanks for the abundance in our lives.

The U.S. celebration of Thanksgiving is also famous for a big parade of balloons in New York City, an endless exhibition of college football bowl games, overindulging, long naps, and sneaking a second (or third or fourth) slice of pumpkin pie, among many other traditions.

Before joining the festivities, I’d like to offer a heartfelt thank you to everyone who’s helped me this year as I began learning about social media, especially you, the readers of this blog, which launched almost nine months ago.

I’m profoundly grateful for your willingness to come along for the ride with a blog that veers from discussions about corporate communications and PR to reading and the value of public libraries to Twitter, blogging and Facebook. I recognize that it’s hard to leave comments or join a discussion on this blogging platform (and I’m working over the holiday season to make that a lot better for you), but I appreciate those of you who’ve reached out to me via email to share your thoughts, which have guided many of my choices.

One solution has been to create additional spaces where No Bad Language lives; you’ll now find pages for the blog on Facebook and Google+, which should give those of you who are members of these networks more options for discussion and comments minus the onerous log-in process.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t say thank you to the following pros who have been generous and gracious in sharing their expertise and insight about social media. I’ve included links, so you can meet these amazing folks, too:

Rita Wechter, author of the beautiful One Day in America travel and photography blog, and Tracy Fox, writer and creator of the Good Green Words blog for those interested in eco-solutions to everyday life – you were there at the start of this journey; thank you for your encouragement and continued cheerleading!

@rockieshapiro, editor and communications pro par excellence and good friend, who, as all good friends should do, pushed me to dig deeper and learn more – thank you!

Erik Deutsch, media and marketing strategist and principal, ExcelPR Group, who packed more social media insight into six weeks than anyone could possibly imagine. In addition to supporting PRSA in Los Angeles, Erik teaches the essential “Best Practices in Social Media for the Communications Professional” course at UCLA Extension. I’m grateful for everything Erik has to teach.

Chris Lam, social media marketer, PR pro, and animated blogger – thank you for your inspiration!

Serena Erhlich, executive director at Attention, and Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, president of the Social Media Club Los Angeles chapter and author of Like My Stuff – thank you for encouragement and continuing education.

Eric Snoek, new blogger, old and wise friend. We started this journey (oh, so many years ago) as fellow journalism students and professional radio broadcasters and have both grown into blogging. Eric shares his expertise in institutional advancement and so much more at Advancement Synergy. Bang a gong, my friend!

Social media is evolving so fast, I find it’s important to keep an open mind about it all and find good sources of knowledge to help gain perspective and ensure standards in the practice. I’d be at the start of the journey without a compass if it weren’t for all of these wonderful people and you, and that is something truly to give thanks for.

Building a Blogging Community

Posted on by

“The more passion in the blog writer, the more passion in the readers,” explained Rowse at his BlogWorld talk.

I had the pleasure of hearing “Blogging from the Heart (But Smart),” a talk by Darren Rowse, author, blogger extraordinaire and digital photography guru, at the Los Angeles BlogWorld conference a few weeks ago.

Slated for the early morning session of Day 2, after many attendees enjoyed a tequila-maker-sponsored party the night before, it was clear from the packed auditorium that Rowse’s talk was going to be inspiring.

“Where the heart and the smart come together,” Rowse told the crowd, “ that’s where the magic has happened for me.” While he advocates passion around your subject matter and your blog community, he also recommends treating blogging like a business (if you want it, ultimately, to be a business) and defining what success means for you.

If your blog is all heart, you risk burning out on passion, he said. Think strategically about your audience, content, brand, and blog promotion.

More than a Job: A Passion for Blogging

Rowse has launched a number of blogs, Problogger and Digital Photography School perhaps the best known outside of his native Australia. He has an especially beneficent and welcoming approach to creating blogging communities and sharing his knowledge.

According to his book, Problogger, written with co-author Chris Garrett, Rowse and his wife got married and started a family as his blogging career got under way. He talks about his kids on Twitter and shares proud-dad snapshots and, he said, as kids do, his children occasionally run through a shot of a video blog or play in the background of photos he’s trying to take. The line between personal and professional blurs; candor and openness appeal to readers, engendering a sense of trust.

Through all this, as the subtitle of Problogger suggests, Rowse and Garrett have blogged themselves a comfortable income. Making money from blogging isn’t the only purpose of Problogger or for many people who start blogs, myself included.

The message that resonated most strongly for me (in addition to my love of strategic thinking!) was Rowse’s encouragement to “do good in the world.”

“Be useful,” he urged in his BlogWorld session, “do something heartfelt.”

In the introduction to Problogger, Rowse acknowledges that building a successful blog “takes hard work and discipline…I never want to be accused of giving an unbalanced view of blogging or hyping it up as a get-rich-quick thing.”

What makes the book so practical for those about to blog and writers who’ve already taken the leap is its step-by-step approach to everything from content creation to finding and engaging an audience, search engine optimization, advertising, and selling and buying established blogs. Rowse and Garrett offer examples from their own experiences in blogging’s early days and provide helpful case studies, including a year-by-year analysis of how Rowse grew the Digital Photography School blog.

Am I Blue?

One of the chapters offers a simple-to-follow technical walk-through of setting up a WordPress blog on your own domain. For those who find WordPress needlessly complicated (you may have noticed I use Blogger), this was illuminating. As was the section on choosing your blog’s color.

“As everyone knows, color affects mood,” the section starts. “What do you want the mood of your blog to be?”

Good question, I thought. When I created No Bad Language, I’d spent 10 years at companies saturated in blue. One company even had the word “blue” embedded in its primary product name – you can’t escape “blue” when you work for a jeans giant – the other company used blue (and white), as many health-care entities do, to denote “clinical,” “sterile,” “medical” – all those words we associate with safe products. From corporate websites to intranets to PowerPoint templates: blue.

I found I could hardly look at blue anymore, despite it being my very favorite color my entire life, no contest. And, what’s furthest from blue? Why, red, of course.

It’s Not Easy Being Green

Problogger indicates that red suggests “passion” (that’s fine, I’m very passionate about good writing and effective communications), but “anger,” as well (oh, dear, not really part of my blogging purview here or anywhere else). The book continues:

“Blue = conservative, business
Green = nature, go
Grey = formal, staid”

Given a bit of time and distance from blue branding – and a solid education in social media and blogging in the interim – I’m in the process of re-evaluating that choice plus a few others I made early in my blogging process.

All this to say, you may see some changes to the blog as we go through the holidays. I welcome your feedback and expertise, if you’d like to share in the Comments. Do you have favorite colors? Which backgrounds make it easiest to read blogs online? What works for you, and what doesn’t?

Writing that inspired me this week:

“Life’s like a movie. Write your own ending.”
~ Kermit the Frog, “The Muppet Movie”

The 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize Long List

Posted on by

If travel teaches us about different cultures, then surely literature from countries we’ve never visited can serve as a guide, even create a yearning to venture, discover and understand.

The long list for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize, announced in Singapore late in October, presents such an opportunity with 12 novels from countries like Iran and Pakistan that may be difficult to travel to and from Bangladesh, South Korea, China, Japan and India.

Thanks to the stunning descriptions of the novels and short bios of their authors on the Man Asian website, I’ve added The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya (India), The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi (Iran), 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (Japan), and Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin (South Korea) to my must-read list. I’m pretty sure these will be the first books I’ve ever read by an Iranian or South Korean author, and now that I’ve discovered the Man Asian prize, I look forward to many more.

Founded in 2007, the Man Asian prize is awarded to an Asian writer whose work is in English or has been translated into English. The short list will be announced in January, with the winner selected in March.

The Man Asian Literary Prize website also includes a video with one of the three judges, Vikas Swarup, author of Q&A, discussing the process of selecting the long list. (You may want to jump ahead to 3:17 on the video if you’ve already seen the list.)

Swarup called the judging – with author Chang-rae Lee and chair Razia Iqbal – “painless…collaborative…exciting,” which bodes well after some of the silliness surrounding this year’s Man Booker prize judging process.

Which books intrigue you on the Man Asian list?

You can follow the Man Asian Literary Prize selection process via Twitter @MALPrize.

They All Laughed: Can Humor Be a Communications Asset?

Posted on by

It might surprise you that one of the career moments I’m most proud of didn’t involve handling a crisis or securing a talk show for a client. It was a brief event, lasting all of five minutes, when a conference room full of clients couldn’t stop laughing at me.

I promise this isn’t a painful-to-read story about learning from failure or an embarrassing tale that ends with me being remembered as “that woman who mooned Atlanta.”

Back when I worked for a large apparel company, I was assigned Logistics & Transportation as a client group. All I knew, at the start, was that our warehouses held three brands’ worth of men’s, women’s and children’s fashion.

The Logistics & Transportation guys (and they were mostly guys, in those days) knew their stuff. They knew their people, too – the ones who picked, packed and shipped product for hourly wages – and they understood how to talk to them. They had to. For a long time, Logistics was in the shadow of larger functions, without their own communications person.

So, my assignment wasn’t exactly greeted with a round of hearty cheers. Like most folks who work in remote locations, they had a healthy skepticism of “experts” from HQ – those pampered few with carpeted offices, who’d never walked the cement floors of a warehouse or had to make things work no matter how limited the resources out in the field.

Understandably, they were a bit aloof when we met, but in the politest manner possible. The one thing those tough exteriors never hid were the true gentlemen beneath.

I knew their work and lives were different from mine, and that I had a lot to learn about this key part of our business. I freely admitted it, studied hard, asked questions at every turn.

I’d like to say that hard work won the day. It might have in the long run – certainly, a strong work ethic is something they respected. But, the day I truly got my foot in the door went like this…

There was a pressing communications issue over the pay and bonus system at one of the warehouses. The facility leader knew it was a heated topic and decided, what the heck, give this supposed HQ expert a shot.

How we communicated the new pay and bonus design is a story for another post (which you can now find here). But, the employee team was gracious – and probably worried – enough to accept my help. Before the team could deliver communications to employees, though, the facility leadership team needed to review the design, approve it and give the go-ahead for an employee meeting.

You do the math, I’ll handle the words.

The Pay & Rewards team – all regular warehouse employees who’d received special training in pay design – brought deep knowledge of their subject matter; I provided messaging, organization and graphic design support. The one thing the team, with all their expertise, hadn’t been able to do by the time of the leadership meeting was explain one of the mathematical formulas so that I could convey it graphically in the presentation. It had been a bit like a game of telephone, with the team trying to help me understand, and me, via emails, conveying my impression to the graphic designer back at HQ.

Laughter the Best Medicine

The Pay & Rewards team, who’d never done public speaking before, overcame their nerves and gave an excellent presentation to leadership. When I advanced the PowerPoint to the slide with the math formula, though, it still wasn’t right. Before the leaders started asking, “What on Earth is this?,” I jumped in and said, “This one’s my fault. The team has worked valiantly to explain this to me, but I’m mathematically challenged.”

The tension in the room evaporated as everyone laughed.

They laughed a lot harder than that line deserved – laughter wiping away nerves over public speaking, concern about how the pay system would be received, doubts that an outsider would usurp the warehouse’s way of doing things.

Normally, when a room full of people laugh at you, it feels rotten, but I was over the moon and couldn’t help but join in. It was deliriously contagious.

This was the moment when it all changed, and it happened not because I played the fool – self-deprecation isn’t about being foolish – but because I didn’t insist on being the expert. And that can be a hard thing to let go of when our job is to provide communications counsel.

Once I’d demonstrated a willingness to learn from the people in Logistics & Transportation, no matter their position on the org chart or how much they were paid, my clients relaxed, welcomed me and gave me the chance to work with them and support their communications needs going forward.

When the conference room quieted, I quickly assured them I’d get it right so they could sign off on the communication. Then, I delivered on that promise and kept delivering. Because in the Logistics & Transportation world, delivering is what really matters.

Mission Drives Action in Any Crisis

Posted on by

Some Thursday morning thoughts on crisis and issues management.

It’s right there in the first line of Penn State University’s history: “From agricultural college to world-class learning community – the story of The Pennsylvania State University is one of an expanding mission of teaching, research, and public service.”

Nowhere in the description of its mission does Penn State mention football, though some reports have noted that the university’s athletics program’s motto is “Success with Honor.”

This week, even the student protesters on the Penn State campus would be hard pressed to suggest that the university had lived up to its mission of education and public service or that the leaders of its football program understood the role of honor.

Colleges and universities have a special place in society, different from those of most other institutions and organizations. They are communities held together by common purpose and values, and they are meant to be sanctuaries where ideas are tested, thought is emboldened, and moral courage is strengthened. While the demographics of higher education in the United States have changed significantly in the past 65 years or so – from upper class to all classes, from mainly white to a broad spectrum of both Americans and people new to this country, from young to older – there is still a sense of purpose around providing a safe and protected setting where youth can find their path in life.

I think this ultimately is what guided trustees in their decision-making when they fired PSU’s President Graham Spanier and football coach Joe Paterno after learning that a number of athletic program and university officials had, according to reports, failed to act decisively on information that an adjunct member of the football program had allegedly abused young boys.

Many news reports have noted that university officials observed “the letter of the law,” following guidelines for reporting such incidents. But, their failure to understand the higher purpose of their community – to uphold the mission of the school and its athletic program – triggered the crisis and the trustees’ actions.

Whether you work for an institution, a brand or a corporation, your greatest vulnerability in any crisis is what people perceive as your core strength. Failure at the core will always cause more outcry among your public than an issue generated by an outside agent.

The lessons of this week for communicators are to be prepared (the old Scouts’ motto) for crises of mission or core capability and support efforts (perhaps by Human Resources, training, or as a topic for all-employee meetings) to reinforce organizational values, so that everyone understands how to make mission the driver in their day-to-day work.

Is Your Call Center Prepared?

Another issue that made the news this week was the seemingly minor matter of upgrading the Virgin America website, where many customers make, change and check on reservations. The resulting computer issues led to calls to Virgin’s 800-number to resolve reservation problems which resulted in some angry social media accounts of long hold times and hang-ups.

Since the topic for today is being prepared: If your call center was experiencing similar issues, do you know how to record updates on your phone system?

As communicators, we look for every avenue to message to our audiences during crises. We prepare talking points and FAQs and place them online and on Facebook and even YouTube. We update the message on our personal voicemails and the company’s news media line. We make sure every customer-facing employee has a copy and understands how to use them.

But, what if your audience is on hold?

Would your call center managers know how to access the system, remove Muzak or that awful recording of “Your call is important to us. Please hold for the next available operator”?

And what would they say if they could get into the system to record something for all those folks stranded on hold? A prepared statement may sound too canned to someone whose blood pressure is rising after 53 minutes on hold. A well-crafted, conversational message that acknowledges responsibility for the issue and what your company is doing to resolve it – and the long telephone wait times – may, in some cases, be all your audience needs. Even if it doesn’t completely resolve the customer’s issue, getting an update while on hold may put them in a better frame of mind when they do reach a live operator, so that the conversation isn’t full of invective.

Your call centers are important message points for your audience when issues arise. Messaging while on hold is another avenue for communicating issues and alleviating problems.

Do You Embrace Happy Accidents?

Posted on by

Maloof's “Happy Accident”: The hard edge.

I attended a lecture about fine furniture-maker Sam Maloof on Saturday, the Huntington Library and its botanical gardens a calm oasis after the ferment of BlogWorld.

Describing Maloof’s practice, Harold B. Nelson, curator of the elegant new exhibition “The House that Sam Built: Sam Maloof and Art in the Pomona Valley 1945 – 1985,” displayed a chair whose finish glowed like honey. Its lines seemed purposeful and true.

But, that purity was born from a mistake.

Maloof, who hand-carved many of his pieces, rather than use the lathe, was in his workshop one day, bringing life to a chairback. The Californians deviated from their east coast and European artistic colleagues by creating a rounded-over aesthetic. According to Nelson, as Maloof worked the wood, his hand slipped, carving a hard edge into the round-over.

Instead of chucking the chair, Maloof stood back to consider. Although it wasn’t what he’d meant to do, the hard edge added something to the soft line of the California round-over style. The hard edge, a “happy accident,” became part of the Maloof signature.

Now, you can bet that Maloof’s original accident didn’t look like the hard edge in that photo above. It could easily have been an ugly, squiggly gouge, a wound to the wood. It would’ve taken time to truly find the hard edge and perhaps even a few more accidents – happy or otherwise – before he perfected it.

The hallmark of an artist is the ability to see the potential and the willingness to let accidents happen.

We Need a Bigger Boat – and More Time

There are some classic stories of happy accidents in creative fields. One of the most famous is the failure of the mechanical shark during the filming of Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws.” Day after day on the watery sets around Martha’s Vineyard, “Bruce” the mechanical shark failed to slice through the waters on command – or he sank to the sandy bottom. Out of almost complete failure, Spielberg conjured cinematic magic: it was the unseen menace that created such breathtaking tension. Had Bruce swum back and forth across screen from scene to scene, the audience could have embraced his familiarity and relaxed. Not knowing – and letting the audience’s imagination take over – made “Jaws” far more powerful than seeing the shark.

Some happy accidents have become our apocryphal tales, like the one about Newton and the apple.

It takes patience to give space to possibilities like these. Patience and space require time, and that’s something many of us have precious little of these days whether we work in creative fields or corporate offices.

Still, happy accidents can be encountered as long as we’re in the frame of mind that embraces the idea that even mistakes teach us and sometimes turn out to be rather spectacular.

Have you discovered a happy accident in your writing or other creative work? How did it transform the final piece? What surprises did you encounter along the way? Do you think accidents are truly mistakes or just the creative mind searching for new possibilities? I’d love to hear what you think in the Comments section.