Not Now. Or Ever. July 31, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.Tags: Communication, Customer Service, Sales
7 comments
I have been known to rant a bit on what I perceive to be annoying sales practices. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, someone comes up with yet another way to completely irritate a potential customer. The latest trick is the “presumptive appointment.”
With the universal adoption of calendaring systems, most everyone has grown accustomed to receiving appointment invitations via email. While such appointments are very common within an organization, they’ve generally not expanded beyond organizations. Recently, however, people have been sending more invitations to people outside of their email domain, which is generally useful and makes scheduling a meeting a little easier.
That’s where the annoying salespeople come in. Lately I’ve gotten meeting requests from salespeople for meetings I did not agree to attend. In the body of the message, they do not ask for my time; rather, they ask me to supply a different time if their proposed time is not convenient. The real question, whether I want to meet with them, is ignored.
This is like someone showing up at your house, unannounced, looking for dinner. When you awkwardly try to refuse their request, they innocently ask, “Oh, is this not a good time to have dinner? When would be better for you?” Well, how about “never?”
A responsible salesperson goes about this in a different way. After a productive introductory conversation, he or she might ask if a follow-up meeting is in order. If I agree, we then compare calendars and find a mutually convenient time. To close out that negotiation, I’ll ask them to send a meeting request to confirm the appointment. The calendar entry represents the result of our negotiation, not the starting point.
I am constantly amazed at how rude a small subset of salespeople can be. All the hardworking, polite salespeople that go about things in the right way should beat these ignorant few with a stick. Are there large groups of people that accept these invitations without prior discussion? If so, stop! Like the insane people that respond to spam email, you are only encouraging more bad behavior. We’re all suffering as a result.
Broadway Leadership July 24, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Communication, Public Speaking
3 comments
I recently spent a long weekend in New York City. Among other things, I was able to attend three Broadway shows in three nights. This is a rare treat; my love of Broadway theater goes back to my childhood. I was part of many productions in high school, even if my professional career (ahem!) never really took off the way I might have hoped.
Although I have come to accept that I will never win a Tony, I carry with me the lessons learned from my days on the stage of West Windsor-Plainsboro High School. Many of the core skills of the theater can help all of us be better leaders.
Leadership is about communication, and communication is about getting up in front of people. More people fear public speaking than dying, and the only way to overcome that fear is to get up and do it, over and over. If nothing else, being in a show will teach you how to get up in front of a group of strangers and do all sorts of foolish things. With that experience, making a simple business presentation is child’s play.
But effective communication is more than just getting up and speaking. Theater teaches you to face the audience, to keep your face in the lights, to project, to speak clearly, to wait for laughs and applause. You learn how to read an audience, and how to develop pacing and timing. These kind of communication skills will benefit anyone, but are a core component of every effective leader.
Theater experience goes beyond performing. As part of a troupe, actors rely on each other to deliver a unified performance. The analogies to business teams are obvious, but the subtleties of the stage bear repeating. Respect the other actors and give them their time in the spotlight. Don’t step on someone else’s lines (or applause!). When you sing and dance, since and dance together. And when you take a curtain call, make sure everyone gets to take a bow.
For many of us, gaining theater experience now is not an option, although community theater always beckons. As an alternative, organizations like Toastmasters can provide excellent training in public speaking. For our children, however, it is not too late to encourage them to try out for a play at school, or to get involved in some aspect of performing. The lifetime benefits of that experience will be invaluable.
Even if you will never walk the boards and feel the lights, you can always attend a performance, either on Broadway or when a touring company comes to your town. In this day of digital everything presented on screens we hold in our hands, it is entrancing to sit and watch live people sing, dance, and act along with live musicians playing live music. It is magical and inspiring, and it is something everyone needs to experience.
Never forget: every leader is a performer, whether you like it or not. Break a leg!
Swing, Batter-Batter-Batter! June 29, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Best Of 2009, Communication, Leadership, Teams
9 comments
It’s easy to tell when a youth baseball team is struggling: they fall silent. If the silence persists for any length of time, the coach (or a parent in the stands) will yell out, “Let’s hear a little chatter out there!” This request hopefully refocuses the team as they start talking again.
Baseball chatter falls into two broad categories: inane repetitive noise and helpful advice between the players. The inane noise is designed to annoy and distract the opposing team, especially the pitcher and batter as they duel at the plate. The helpful advice is more important: players call out potential defensive plays, adjust coverage, warn about possible bunts or steals, and so forth.
The parallels for any support team, and especially IT organizations, is obvious. A happy team is constantly communicating with themselves, in matters both large and small. As changes occur and problems arise, they go out of their way to make sure people know what is going on. The communication is fluid and consistent. Ideally, most of the chatter should fall into the “helpful advice” category, although it could be fun to taunt your DBA during a big upgrade. (“Drop, table-table-table!”)
As a leader, are you listening for chatter in your team? Are you even in a position to hear it? Chatter is in the break room, the hallways, and the parking lot. It’s both verbal and electronic, via Twitter, SMS, and instant messaging. Chatter isn’t in the formal memos, project charters, and design documents. It may not even be in the general email flow. In fact, formal communication is the enemy of chatter.
When teams get bogged down in Memos and Documents, they stop chattering. They begin to formalize their communication, creating paper trails and looking to cover their read ends. They think before sharing and selectively reveal information to suit their own agendas. This kind of thinking, putting self before team, is disastrous for any group. If it persists, the whole group will fail.
Leaders must create a culture that promotes chatter. This includes both physical and cultural components:
- Does the work environment provide places for people to gather and chatter? Are teams co-located so they naturally interact? Are there places for groups to meet informally? Is it easy to see when people have gathered, so that others can join the conversation?
- Are people inclined to chatter? It’s easy for people to send email back and forth all day. Do you encourage them to get up and actually engage in conversations? Do you walk around and engage in conversations? Do you provide positive feedback to groups when you see them gathering and chattering? Do you use chatter to communicate to your direct reports?
Stuffy, staid environments inhibit chatter. Do you work in such an environment? Have you inadvertently created one? Here’s an easy test: from your office, can you occasionally hear laughter? If your people are not enjoying themselves to the point where they laugh every now and then, how can you expect them to chatter? How often do you laugh with your team?
Our work teams are more complicated than a baseball team, but the core value of chatter is just as important. We can’t simply call out and make them start chattering. We have to build environments and foster cultures that make people chatter on their own. Are your people chattering?
Whose Fault? Yours. June 19, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Communication, Customer Service, Users
10 comments
As CIOs, we lead a service organization. Although there is much talk of late about turning IT into a profit center, the reality is that most companies rely on IT to get something else done. Just as finance, legal, and HR provide crucial support to help a company succeed, IT provides important services that allow the other employees to accomplish their jobs and serve the external customers.
By definition, service organizations exist to serve their customers. This may seem a bit obvious, but there are many IT shops that have lost sight of this core principle. Our job is not to find cool new tools, or nifty phones, or the sleekest laptops. Our job is to help people get their jobs done as quickly and efficiently as possible, using technology where appropriate.
When people fail to get their jobs done as quickly and efficiently as possible, it’s our fault. Period. It doesn’t matter why they failed; we still own the problem. That’s a hard concept for some people in IT to grasp and accept.
Anyone who has worked in IT for any length of time has seen this happen. We listen to our users and determine there is a need we can fulfill. We diligently collect requirements and build a potential solution. With the users’ approval and assistance, we develop some new tool. We provide training and support. After scrupulous testing, we release the tool to its intended audience.
A smashing success? Not always. Users get confused. They make mistakes. They didn’t attend all the training, or misunderstood the documentation. They forgot to tell us everything during the requirements meetings, or didn’t provide a complete testing regimen.
Whose fault? Ours. We should have asked more questions. We should have asked for more testing. We should have rethought usage scenarios. We should have anticipated certain mistakes and found alternatives. No matter what goes wrong, we are at fault. Figure out why, fix it, and file away the lessons learned for next time.
IT folks at every level fall into an easy trap when they start complaining and fussing about the end users. It’s easy to push blame onto the unsuspecting customers when a system is used incorrectly or mistakes are made. After all our hard work, how could they still get it wrong?
Easy: because we obviously did not work hard enough. We build this stuff; we must ensure people can use it effectively. If they can’t, we dropped the ball somewhere. Railing about the users does not fix the problem. It only annoys the users, makes us look petty, and reduces our ability to serve them.
This concept, that we are always at fault, is at the core of our ability to serve and satisfy customers. The burden sits with us to make it right, do it better, and meet our customer’s needs. If you are in IT, and you cannot accept this or live up to it, you have chosen the wrong career. Get out now, before you make the rest of us look bad.
The Effective CIO 