Getting the word out: Rethinking communication
This lesson is simple but something that I cannot champion enough.
In the Age of Online, people have developed a weird habit of hiding behind screens all day and doing all their work and life things from right there in their study. You can actually go a whole day without speaking to anyone in person these days – it’s insane what digital communication has done to us.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to get out of your chair, abandon your screen for a minute and show yourself as the face of the change in as many ways as you can think of. Always remember that it’s genuinely difficult for people to form a significant relationship with an online announcement and come to believe in the profound magic of transformational change. It just doesn’t work like that.
Please take a minute and remember the good old days when you asked for help from an actual person rather than a search engine; when responses came in real time rather than with a ‘sorry my inbox is overflowing’ delay (or even worse, an automated ‘I’m busy, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can’ message); when you used to receive one specially selected postcard in the mail rather than thirty-seven photos on a messenger app; when you used situational gestures, signals and signs rather than the thumbs-up emoji; and when your life wasn’t governed by notifications and backlogs all the time.
One email after another pinging into your inbox from people you aren’t allowed to ignore can feel like a four-year old impatiently and repeatedly tapping you on the shoulder with their annoyingly pointy index finger. While I admit that irritation was also a part of good old-fashioned in-person communication, I have to confess that I miss that significantly less than I do receiving postcards in the mail. However, although I casually described these constant interruptions as ‘annoying’ just now, researchers have found that the scale of the email demands are often experienced as ‘overloading’; this can have a negative impact on the transformational leadership behaviour of managers.
Emails are the source of a good amount of workplace frustration, with a recent survey finding that 48% of those surveyed consider emailing to be ‘the most irritating task in their day-to-day duties.
The takeaway from this should be that emails can’t generate excitement, quite the opposite. They’ve become the biggest burden in the workplace over the last few years, so to cut through that and to get your change message out there, I’d like to challenge you to put your heart out there and, if it feels right, spice up the mundane communication and information culture at work with some of that spirit from the good old days. A place to start might be swapping the sterile term ‘communication’ with an action verb such as ‘engaging’, ‘involving’, ‘interacting’ or simply ‘speaking’. Make the whole thing less awkward and you’ll soon start to behave more like a normal person.
Your communication at the Excite stage should be considered as a combination of officially informing people of the business change on the one hand and engaging them with exciting buy-in messaging on the other. Understanding how best to convey the former is straightforward enough and will be guided by your earlier data on people’s preferred communication channels and ideal frequency; the latter requires you to tap into perception and emotion – like the marketing and salespeople – and for that, you need to understand why you are undertaking your project.