Motivation

By and large, people don't need to be told what to do and what not to do. As Peter Hunter loves to point out; the workforce is already motivated. They've turned up, on-time ready and willing to do the job they've agreed to do. That's the deal as they understand it, and that's pretty powerful motivation. If the reality is that they're not working to maximum efficiency and productivity, then it's probably because something that management is doing gets in the way.

This is pretty controversial stuff, but then Peter Hunter is not one to abide by conventions he doesn't believe in. The idea that people can be motivated should have died out around the millennium, with the end of the Piscean era. The Aquarian age is all about flat management, empowerment and the strength of the individual. For me, it was epitomised by a decision at BT some 15 or 20 years ago when they allowed the customer service staff (then known as "the operators") to give an instant cash refund to a customer who had a grievance. This was revolutionary at the time, but it transformed the relationship. Both parties benefited from a feel-good factor and contrary to what the old-guard had predicted, the system was rarely abused.

The only person you can motivate is yourself, and all that a "motivational speaker" can do is encourage you. Not in the Napoleonic style of shooting the stragglers "pour encourager les autres" (to encourage the others,) but by reinforcing self-belief and delivering respect.

Teenagers who carry knives and use them on their peers don't do so from confidence and security, they do so because they believe that society puts no value on them. It will take time to change the culture, and what will transform society is self-esteem. Which you don't get from shouting at people; you get it from listening - and that's why I try to persuade my clients to make their conferences interactive.

And that's another story: - a book, in fact. And I'm working on it.

The value of silence

Temples, mosques, churches, cathedrals: they all seem to cling to something of the purpose for which they were constructed, even if decades or centuries go by while the buildings stand deserted. Like this little chapel in the Chateau of Pirou in Normandy.
I spent some time just soaking up the peace and calm of these well-worn walls, remembering how rarely we make those breaks for moments of peace and solitude in our everyday routine.

It came back to me last Tuesday when I was running a workshop / seminar at a trade exhibition in London. The mood of the exhibition was bustling and frenetic and I was stressed at the prospect of delivering a presentation to a very mixed group drawn from a wide variety of professional backgrounds. I was reminded that every speaker, whether experienced or total novice, needs a "chapel" to escape to and get grounded before facing the audience. So I took myself off to the smallest room and locked myself away for 10 minutes to practice some deep breathing exercises. Then I walked across to the hand-basins and talked to myself in the cloakroom mirror, reassuring myself, encouraging myself and getting that balance between the man on the outside and the little boy panicking inside.

Everyone has nerves. You need stress and nerves if you are to be at peak performance; - do you really think that athletes aren't full of stress when they take to the starting blocks? Without nerves you would come across as arrogant, disconnected and uncaring. When I tell people this, they always laugh and tell me that I don't look nervous, but this is precisely because I've taken time to acknowledge my stress and ground myself so that I appear to be in control. Meanwhile, of course, my tummy's full of butterflies, but at least the butterflies are starting to fly in formation.

Some things threaten your confidence. Mine took a knock when 15 minutes into my hour two women collected their papers, made their way to the end of the row and walked out. I could feel the sweat prickling on my spine as I tried not to let my emotions show. At the end of my session, no amount of applause and encouraging remarks from various members of the audience who came to speak to me could compensate for the memory of two important-looking women leaving when I was in full flow, presumably because they did not think I was worth listening to.

Then on Thursday I had an email. "I attended your session on Tuesday afternoon, but unfortunately I had to run out before I could speak to you. I found your presentation very useful and was very impressed with all the various communications training that you do."

The email then went on to ask for details of the training and coaching that I deliver in various areas of inter-personal communications. You see, even if you do all you can to control your nerves, you can still completely misinterpret incidents, - especially if you think they are demonstrating your own weakness or incompetence. You must take encouragement from the people who take the trouble to talk to you afterwards.
And if your audience is hushed to the point of silence and nobody comes to talk to you, remember that this might just be because because you've given them so much to think about.

Features and Benefits

When you want to sell something it's no good just asking people; you have to give them a reason, a benefit, an advantage they'll get from buying what you're offering.

Consider my client meeting this week. There were lengthy discussions about the size and colour of the display panels for an exhibition; serious concerns about aligning with corporate brand policy and ensuring we had the Pantone colour references. Some talk of product specifications, but no mention of customer benefits. No discussion about words. No clarification of either the general message of the whole event or the specific messages that would be relevant to each of the displays.

The rules for an exhibition are not much different from the rules for a presentation. When the show's over, you want them to do things differently or do different things. In a nutshell: you aim to change their mindset. The alignment with corporate branding is a nice touch, and the technical specifications may well be impressive, but the bottom line is: "What does it do to make my life easier?" Not much else really matters. The punters have come to your show to find out how you can help them. That's what's in it for them. They want to get the message.

And my job was to create the message for the X4300c GTI with optical interface. But the message I scripted didn't emphasise the carbon-fibre locking pistons, nor the slide adjustment factor. My message told them it would do the job better and save them money: specifically HOW it would do the job better and HOW MUCH money it would save.

Don't let the specifications get in the way of the benefits when you're in front of your customers. What matters is whether you tell your story clearly enough for them to understand how you can help them. The rest is - realistically - almost irrelevant.

Quantum Physics and childhood gangs

Apart from open warfare, jargon is probably the biggest threat to communication. People use jargon to limit the number of people with whom they communicate, rather in the way we invented our own language and code-words in childhood games. Jargon is a way of communicating complex information through a mutual code; the trouble is that the code excludes outsiders. Now if you're six years old and you don't want the other gang to understand what's going on in your gang, that's fine! But if you're trying to communicate the benefits of a technical process to a potential customer, you need a jargon-buster.

Tork and Grunt were inventing language as they started to communicate, but today we've all got our own language and secret meanings. Every craft or profession has its jargon. Retailers have BOGOFs (buy-one-get-one-free,) telecommunication companies have WANs and LANs (wide / local area networks,) physicists have string theories. I can do retail, financial, telecoms and computing jargon, but Quantum Physics is not one of my hot topics.

Which is why I chose this topic after watching one of the TED presentations. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds and since then www.TED.com has been an inspirational source of ideas, creativity and whatever rocks your boat intellectually.

I was inspired this week by Brian Greene's presentation on string theory. OK, I'll have to watch it a couple more times before I totally understand it, but why can't all professors, experts, nerds and boffins speak with this degree of clarity and passionate excitement.

When I'm working with presenters they often dismiss my protestations at their jargon by telling me that the audience will understand. I will agree with them that will reach most of their audience, but my point is that what specialists need to do is learn to reach those who don't speak the same language, those who are thirsty for the new knowledge that the experts have uncovered in their research.

Enjoy TED... it's a wonderful exposure to cutting-edge thinking, and a sombre reminder of the legitimate leadership America has in communicating and exploiting knowledge.

A different perspective

Cretans are fiercely proud of their country and maintain a powerful regional identity. As in so many places, the tourists seem to huddle around the centre of the resort with its pseudo-sophisticated bars and clubs, while a few hundred metres up a side road will take you to a timeless village.

The simplicity of Crete - the gleaming white walls and the dominant sky-blue paint of the chairs, tables and woodwork in many of the little tavernas are in stark contrast to the neon and clutter of the tourist centres.

The waiter in the village taverna was almost at his wits' end. One evening he pleaded with us: "What has happened to my country? Where can I find the Crete of my childhood?"

And there's the rub! We can no longer expect things to stay the same, even for a few short years between youth and adulthood. Change happens regardless and change is accelerating.

My next book in the Tork & Grunt series, on the subject of Change Management, is proving to be a fascinating challenge and I needed the break and the perspective of my isolation in Crete to work out the detail of my approach to the subject.

What I'm finding difficult is not the theory, but the fact that the more I research the subject, the more I come face to face with the realisation that in essence - it's communication, and while some traditional management communication has been about maintaining status and authority, what I am talking about is genuine exploratory communication that gets to the core of the matter and establishes the reality of the situation, not the gloss behind which people - managers, operatives, directors or senior executives, can hide....

It's really so frighteningly simple....