The view from here

I’ve been running some time management workshops recently and one of the things that we’ve been looking at is the direction in which people are heading, their longer-term goals. Having a direction is an excellent way (and possibly the only real way) of establishing your priorities, without which it’s impossible to organise yourself in any meaningful way. The thinking behind this is that it’s important to know where you want to get to otherwise, as Lewis Carroll pointed out, it doesn’t really matter which way you go.

I left school with weak A-levels and didn’t go to university. A few years ago, I decided that I was going to return to studying and get the degree I didn’t get a quarter of a century ago. As I was thinking about this, it struck me that it would take about six years to do this and that I would be 45 years old by the time I got my degree. That length of time felt daunting until I realised that, unless something dreadful happened, in six years I was going to be 45 anyway – I might as well be 45 with a degree.

My destination was the degree and I had a vague idea of what I was going to do with it when I began studying. An analogy that I often use is that of a pilot filing a flight plan: when the plane takes off, the pilot knows where he’s going to land – unless, of course, something unexpected happens. It’s a helpful analogy but, like any analogy, if you push it too hard it will break down. Since I made my choice, my outlook has changed and evolved. In the words of every contestant on the X-Factor, I’ve been on a journey and the view from where I am now is different to the view I had when I started studying.

Someone once told me that “to decide is to divide” – a yes to one option is automatically a no to another option. But that yes also opens up the possibility of a whole lot of other options. Because of the choice I made five years ago, I was alert to several opportunities that have come my way in the last few weeks, opportunities that have helped to clarify that vision I mentioned above. For us, the destination doesn’t have to be fixed in stone – we’re not locked into a flight plan and it’s possible for us to change our destination at any point. It’s what makes the journey exciting.

The Outlook is rosy

Say what you like about Microsoft but when it came to Outlook, they really came up with a great productivity tool. I recently purchased a MacBook, to use as my main home computer, and I’ve been disappointed to discover that I can’t find an Apple equivalent that’s as good as Outlook – to the extent that I’m seriously considering forking out a couple of hundred quid on Outlook for Mac.

Outlook does so many things and is used by so many people that I’m baffled by how little people know about what it can do. Few people ever seem to have had any training on how to use Outlook, beyond sending an email. As email, it seems, is the thing that most people struggle with, here are some techniques to help you get on top of your in-box.

The first tip to get on top of your in-box is to stay out of it – or, at least, not dive straight into it every day. When you open Outlook for the first time in the morning, it probably takes you to your in-box and the temptation is then to start dealing with those emails. Instead, set your opening folder to your Calendar (Tools>Options>Other>Advanced Options>Browse and choose the Calendar folder).

Next, stop Outlook telling you when it receives an email (Tools>Options>Preferences>E-Mail Options>Advanced E-Mail Options and uncheck the boxes under the heading “When new items arrive”). The key thing here is that you check your email when it’s convenient for you, not every time someone sends you a mail. If you’re doing the latter, you’re effectively treating email like another telephone – and you probably already have a couple of those.

Once you’ve freed yourself from the constant interruption of arriving email, you can concentrate on other things. A really good habit to get into is only checking your in-box every couple of hours or so – if you like, you can book out half an hour in the calendar to do this, so that you get into a routine.

Why do this? Well, if you were trying to lose weight, imagine how you’d feel if someone regularly waved a cream cake under your nose, telling you how delicious it was. You wouldn’t be very happy, would you? It would make losing weight that much harder. If you’re struggling with email, that’s the equivalent of what Outlook is doing to you. Take some control and give yourself the space to concentrate on your job - which is not, believe it or not, to handle/produce emails.

You have mail...

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by “abroad” – by which I mean, from my Anglo-centric viewpoint, any country that wasn’t the UK. I’m of a certain age, which means I predate email, when the only way of contacting people abroad was to send them airmail letter. I vividly remember the excitement of seeing one of those lovely blue envelopes hit the mat, the glamour and mystique of the strange address and the poetry of the phrase “par avion”. Weeks would pass between posting a letter and getting a reply, the excitement would build and the eventual letter would be read and re-read, digested, considered and then finally responded to.

All that’s changed now, of course. Nowadays, I can text friends on the other side of the world and get a reply almost instantly – assuming they’re awake, of course. I can share pictures of events with friends in at least six other countries (and comment on pictures of their events) through Facebook and Twitter. The waiting for the postman has gone, replaced by the much shorter wait for the ping of the email inbox. Lest this sound like an old man’s paean to a bygone age, let me be clear: what we’ve lost in romance we’ve more than gained in sheer convenience. I’m in touch with friends now in a way that simply wouldn’t be possible twenty – or even ten – years ago.

But there is, of course, a price to be paid. Email has revolutionised communication but it’s brought a whole slew of problems along with its tremendous advantages. And while email itself is steadily becoming less popular amongst what I suppose I must now call the “younger generation” it’s still the dominant form used in business. So if you feel overwhelmed by email, over the next couple of weeks I’ll be taking a look at some email best-practise to help alleviate the information overload you might be feeling.

We’ll start next week by looking at a few of the basic skills but if you have any hints and tips on how to make email – and, in particular, the main tool for using email, Microsoft’s Outlook – work better for you, do please drop me a line.

The normalisation of deviance

Every now and then, in my travels across the internet, I come across a quotation so perfect that I’ll start using it on every workshop I run. I found one of those quotes the other day and I’ve been using it everywhere I can ever since:

Each uneventful day that passes reinforces a steadily growing false sense of confidence that everything is all right – that I, we, my group must be OK because the way we did things today resulted in no adverse consequences.

It’s a quote from Scott Snook, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, and is used in the context of the “normalisation of deviance” which is not as much fun as it sounds.

It describes a situation whereby a group or an organisation, usually under duress, takes a risk or a short-cut that it wouldn’t normally take. Perhaps it eases its safety procedures or lowers its quality control standards. Whatever it is, the decision is made in good faith that the measure is only temporary and that normal service or standards will be resumed when the crisis or unusual circumstances have passed.

However the group realises, consciously or unconsciously, that having taken a risk they have, effectively, gotten away with it – nothing bad has happened. And so, instead of returning to the stricter procedures, the laxer regime is allowed to continue. The longer this goes on without any adverse consequences, the more used to it the group or organisation becomes – essentially forgetting that there is any risk involved in what they’re doing as the deviant procedure or process becomes part of the normal, everyday run of things.

This applies to serious and tragic events such as the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and to trivial events, like me being pulled over by the police because one of my headlights wasn’t working. It hadn’t been working for a while; I knew I had to fix it but the longer I left it the more normal it became until I had forgotten that I was taking a risk

And this is the key thing, I think. At the start, we know we’re running a risk but when disaster doesn’t strike we forget that risk doesn’t mean that an event will happen – merely that it is possible. The longer we continue without the risked event occurring, the more we forget that the risk is still there – it just hasn’t happened yet. As the deviance is normalised we forget the risk that’s being taken and then suddenly disaster arrives out of, apparently, nowhere.

Are you successful? Are you, your team, your organisation doing well? Are you doing well because of the actions you’re taking or despite them? What risks have you normalised? What disaster, even now, as you read this, could be building because of a deviant procedure that you might even have forgotten about? Sleep well – and don’t have nightmares.

Unaccustomed as I am...

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been flying to and from Scotland, increasing the size of my carbon footprint so I could talk to people about communicating the importance of sustainable lifestyles. It’s been an interesting project and they’ve all been really great groups to work with. Plus, there’s been the added bonus of hanging around university campuses, where the energy and enthusiasm of the students has just been infectious.

A couple of key bits of feedback kept coming up as I was watching the presentations delegates were making and so I thought I’d share them with you. Bear these points in mind, next time you have to talk to a group of people:

Know what you’re trying to achieve

Surprising, but often the speakers didn’t really know why they were talking to the group – they hadn’t worked out, in their minds, what the purpose of their presentation was. Getting this clear in your mind guides everything else in the presentation. Think carefully about what you want your audience to do, know and feel at the end of your talk and then gear your talk to these objectives.

Use signposting and headings

Talking to a group is like giving someone a huge block of text to read, with no paragraphs, no spacing and no headings. Pretty soon, readers get bored and switch off – the same is true of your audience if you don’t structure your talk. The old cliché with speakers is to use the three Ts – first, tell your audience what you’re going to tell them; secondly, tell them what you want to tell them; thirdly, tell them what you just told them. Audiences drift in and out and if you say something only once, there’s no guarantee that people will hear it. If it’s a particularly important point and you want the group to remember it, don’t be afraid to signpost it for your listeners and tell them that it’s an important point.

Know your “in” and your “out”

To be fair to them, most of the speakers I saw knew their “in” – that is, they knew how they were going to start their presentation. If you can find a way of doing this that’s funny, attention grabbing and memorable, so much the better. However, very few speakers knew their “out” – that is, what to do at the other end of the talk. So instead of ending, the talk/presentation just “fizzled out” and left the audience with a negative impression. As part of your planning, know what your concluding point is and end your talk with something other than “and, er, that’s it...”

If you Google “top ten fears” you’ll find that public speaking features in most, if not all, of the lists. There’s no question that most people find speaking to groups to be a very painful experience; with a few simple techniques, it doesn’t have to be a painful experience for your group, too.

Confidence Tricks (Part Two)

The competency profile for trainers is an interesting one. I’ve always have joked that we have to be part Blue Peter presenter, part sadist and part furniture remover but there is another element to it, one that goes unspoken amongst trainers. Well, today I’m breaking the code because the one competency that all trainers have in common is that we’re psychic – we can read your mind. And because I can read your mind, I know what it is that you want. Deep down, you want to be confident.

You may laugh (I certainly hope you do) but I can be fairly – pardon the phrase – confident that you want to be confident because I’m playing the odds, rather than reading your mind. When I ask people what they want from this assertiveness workshop, or time management workshop or leadership workshop the answer the majority give is a variation on “I want to be more confident.”

Being part sadist, my immediate response to that request is “When you say ‘more confident,’ what does that mean to you?” The answer is enlightening because, very often, they don’t actually know. In fact, when I ask them what confidence actually is, they can’t define it for me. So I press on (told you I was a sadist) and ask them “What has to happen in order for you to feel confident?” Again, they usually don’t have an answer.

Rosabeth Moss Kantor defines confidence in this way: “Confidence is certainly mental, but it's... a situational expectation – an expectation of a positive outcome. And that expectation leads to all kinds of investments in making that outcome come true. Because of confidence people put in the effort. They invest financial and other resources. Instead of giving up, they stay in the game longer and, therefore, have more chances to succeed...” But now we know what it is, how do we know we have it and how do we get it?

Confidence is a belief and it’s slippery – sometimes our minds play tricks on us. If confidence is an expectation of a positive outcome, my advice is to look at the evidence in your life. Look for the situations that you have found yourself in and which you have handled; look for those situations that you influenced, turned around, resolved, dealt with. I’m willing to bet (because, after all, I’m psychic) that, more often than not, the outcome was positive – whatever it was, you dealt with it and it turned out okay in the end. The fact is, you’re already a confident person; you just have to start trusting the evidence in your own life and believing it.

Are you being served?

I'm fortunate in that, even in my mid forties, I still have hair. So periodically, I head off to a hairdresser in town to get it cut. I’m not a big fan of getting a haircut – it’s a strictly utilitarian thing for me – and I’ve been fairly free with my choice of hairdressers over the years, never really sticking to one in particular. However, I've been going to the same hairdresser on a roughly monthly basis for nearly three years now; he’s local, seems like a nice guy and he was having a few problems with his business in the early years, so I stuck with him out of a sense of solidarity – small businesses sticking together.

So, here’s the routine. Every month, the same guy cuts my hair. Every month, I get the same haircut. Every month, he asks me how I want it cut and every month I give the same reply. Every month, in response to my reply, he queries whether I really have my hair that short. Then he cuts it, I pay him and the whole thing starts up again in about four weeks’ time. During the haircut, he'll often ask me what I do for a living - I've lost count of the number of times he's asked me. I usually give a different reply every time, just to see whether he notices - he hasn't so far or, at least, if he has he hasn't mentioned the many discrepancies in my stories.

When I first noticed it, I found it amusing but recently it’s started to bug me; the last time I went, there were two of us waiting and he asked “which one of you is Steve?” Is it really too much to expect that, after let’s say at least thirty visits – he might remember who I am? Is it really so difficult to make a little note of who your customers are, what they do for a living, how they like to have their hair cut?

It’s not bad customer service – it’s not like he’s insulting me or being rude or overcharging me or anything like that. It’s just an example of poor customer service. He’s a good enough hairdresser; don’t get me wrong – the core service he provides is perfectly adequate. But I could easily be persuaded to go to another hairdresser, one who offered a similar core service but a better customer service. All for the want of a few, easily taken, steps.

It’s worth thinking about the service you offer – not just the core service but the customer service. Are you building loyal customers? A very good friend of mine runs a company called Spice Learning and they’re doing a series on the “A to Z of Customer Service” at the moment – if you suspect your customers might be feeling a little open to persuasion by other suppliers, I’d recommend you take a look.

On a personal note, the blog is taking a short break. The next “official” post will be on 15^th October, although there may be some shorter updates before then, depending on my access to the internet. Have a great couple of weeks.