Tag Archives: communication

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How to Get The Pulse of Your Organization

In several past posts, Do You Suffer From Continuous Partial Attention Syndrome? and Focused and Clear Communications, I wrote about the speed of communications and how complicated everything can be in today’s “over-connected’ world. As a business leader, there are a number of techniques that can be used to cut through the noise and effectively communicate and lead your organization. I am only going to talk about two techniques here in this post but I will add others in the future.

The first tool that I have found to be very effective is something called “Did you know . . . “ emails.

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Are You a Beginner or an Expert?

Are you a beginner or an expert? Before you answer this, consider this statement from Shunryu Suzuki: “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities and in the expert’s mind there are few.” Why is this? Why are the experts so narrow minded and what opportunities might they be missing because of this?

Think back to when you were just a child and see if you can remember all the questions that you asked. Kids can drive adults crazy sometimes because of their continuous stream of questions! Kids do this to gain knowledge and to fully understand situations or concepts. They are beginners in everything.

As they grow older and gain knowledge, the number of questions they ask drop because they take their knowledge and apply it to identical and even to new situations. They find out that they can understand the new situations by extrapolating their existing knowledge into the new areas. They become self proclaimed experts and they slowly stop asking questions.

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Are Your Customer Loyalty Programs Driving Customers Away?

How are you treating your customers? Do you have open lines of communication with them so that you really know how they feel? Are your customer loyalty programs attracting and retaining customers or driving them away?

On a recent trip from Calgary to Houston I was bumped out of the Air Canada “Elite” line because my ticket didn’t show my Aeroplan flight rewards status. My wife and kids categorized this as a #firstworldproblem but for those people that travel a lot, not having the loyalty status you have earned is a big deal for quite a few reasons!

For example, I use my status to get into the airport lounges between flights. Besides food and beverages, there is usually a nice place to work complete with free, high speed internet. This means I can usually get a few hours of productive, uninterrupted work completed at each connection and this means less work when I get to my destination. This one feature is really important to me!

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What Kinds of Questions is Your Organization Asking?

“Organizations gravitate toward the questions they ask” (David Cooperrider)

Cooperrider is basically saying that your organization takes on the culture of the questions being asked by the leaders.

In his book “A More Beautiful Question“, Warren Berger explained it this way: if your leaders ask questions like; “why are we falling behind our competitors and who is to blame?”, then the business will end up with a culture of turf guarding and finger pointing. However, if the questions are more expansive and optimistic then this will be reflected in the company culture. Berger goes on to say that “we all live in the world our questions create.”

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Focused and Clear Communications

Thousands of years ago, a Hebrew story was recorded about an ancient building project called the Tower of Babel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel). As the story goes, people on earth at that time came together to build a tower that would “reach to the heavens”. These people all spoke the same language, communication with each other was easy and the project progressed quickly and successfully. However, as the story goes, God saw that the hearts of the people were filled with pride and he was not pleased so he confused their languages so that no one could communicate with another. The project quickly fell apart and the people scattered around the earth.

So, what does this have to do with business and projects in 2014?

Well, there are quite a few parallels and lessons that can be learned! However, the   lesson we will focus on here is the need for leaders to be excellent communicators. In today’s world of mega projects, global business and internet connectivity we have a world that offers unprecedented communication and connectivity opportunities. Yet, this also has resulted in unprecedented complexity as we are now dealing with an exponentially increasing speed and volume of communication through an overwhelming number of communication media.