Azzarello Group

Driving Action

In this month’s webinar we talked about how to optimize your communications to drive action in your organization.

HIGH VALUE COMMUNICATIONS

Listen or download the webinar to learn more.

Trust & Confidence

Useful assumptions: It’s useful to assume as a starting point, that people don’t listen to you, don’t believe you and don’t trust you. If you then proactively work on trust, your communications will stick.

Consistency: The repetition and consistency of your message is as important as the content. If people don’t hear it over an over again, they won’t believe you are serious. We talked about methods and technologies to show that you are serious this time.

Concrete language: The more concrete you make your language the better. We discussed the use of a timeline, and how to use it to create concrete examples of goals and progress.

Communicate on their terms: It’s important not to modify your communications into sanitized “business speak”. Address tough issues head on and answer questions in the same language as people ask them.

Decisions: Don’t undermine your communications with decisions that go against what you are telling people. We talked about the kind of mistakes organizations make that leave people suspicious and skeptical. (So action stalls.)

Getting Action

Keep it Simple: Greatness of Strategy = Strategy * Execution. You should be able to explain your strategy in straightforward terms that anyone can understand. Complexity undermines execution. If execution is zero, greatness is zero.

Spell out the next steps: High level strategies can be exciting and motivating, but don’t tell people what they need to do differently when they get to work in the morning. We talked about how to give people clear direction and measures that increase accountability across the organization.

Getting Communications to Spread

Get more people talking: You know you have communicated successfully when you are not the only one communicating. The goal is to get all the people talking amongst themselves about what you are communicating. We taked about a few ways to do this.

Create a new social norm: The pull for people to go back to working the old way is very strong. Unless you build communicating about the new way of working into the work day, people will think that you have given up on it and go back to what they were doing.

Get Personal: The more you personalize communications the more impact they will have. Get inputs, and ask questions and get more people communicating about what matters. Things like brown bags and breakfast meetings work well.

Use Social Media: We talked about how internal blogging and community sharing technologies can help groups of people share knowledge efficiently and reduce the email load.

Want more?

Listen or download the podcast – High Value Communications
Download the complete webinar – High Value Communications
(includes the presentation and the worksheets from the webinar)

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About Patty
Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)

You can find Patty at www.AzzarelloGroup.com, follow her on twitter or facebook, or read her book RISE…How to Be Really Successful at Work AND Like Your Life.

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