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Change

Today marks the end of Angela Merkel’s period as Germany’s chancellor.

Three attitudes she brought to the office:

Keep calm.
Be respectful.
Listen.

Put together, these three lead to the confidence that there’s always a path. No matter who or what is challenging you. Keep calm, be respectful, listen … and you’ll figure it out.

It might not be the change you were hoping for. Maybe you could have done without change, entirely. But given that the world is changing regardless of whether you like it or not, being able to find a reasonable path forward, even when it’s a severe disruption, is a great virtue.

Thanks for your service, Mrs. Merkel.

Good resistance, bad resistance

Resistance is the universal force that keeps you from doing things.

However, there’s an important distinction about two very different types of resistance.

The first is knowing that you need to do this but you hide from actually doing it. For example, you just know that you have to publish this video, build that product, pitch that idea to your boss, but you hide from it because resistance has sent you fear.

This type of resistance is a great compass for the things we should do. When it kicks in, we know we’re onto something. The fear is there precisely because it matters so much to us.

The second type is knowing that you need to stay away from doing that thing but everyone keeps telling you that you should really do it. It sounds perfectly reasonable when they say it. It works for others, so why shouldn’t it work for you? And yet, your gut tells you that something is off. It just doesn’t feel right. Somehow, you know it’s not right although you can’t pinpoint why.

This type of resistance is a great compass for the things we shouldn’t do. When it kicks in, we know we should run. The doubt was there because it wasn’t true to who we are.

The art is in knowing which kind of resistance you’re in. A great first step is to start noticing it. When you do, then pay attention to how you feel, the patterns in your thinking, and, of course, the outcome.

About coaches

There are two kinds of coaches. Those who give you answers and those who give you questions.

There’s a place for both but it’s likely that only one is a good match for you.

The one who has the answers tells you what to do to achieve your goals, the other one helps you figure this out for yourself.

In the first case you trust the coach to have the experience to know what’s best for you, in the second case the coach trusts you to have the ability to know what’s best for you.

In the former case the job of finding the right question is yours, in the latter case it’s the coach’s job.

It pays to become conscious about which one you need before hiring your coach.

(And if you’re a coach, it’s just as valuable to understand your approach in this regard.)

The complete secret recipe

Here’s the complete guide to marketing success.

Ask yourself this question: “If they knew what you know, would they buy?”

Depending on the answer, do this:

If not, don’t even bother with your communication. Fix your product. Repeat.

If yes, all you need to do is tell a true story about your product.

Skip the bullshit. Speak with clarity. That’s all there is to it.

Order from above

“Don’t ask me why. It’s an order from above.”

Still a common scheme in corporations – both outward and inward facing. It frustrates customers and teams alike.

One solution – basically the default in many corporations – is to explain harder, i.e. longer, i.e. repeatedly.

Using. The. Exact. Same. Words.

As if not getting it was the team’s fault.

Clarity is the leader’s responsibility. The days of command & control have long passed by. Lighting the path so that people see where we’re going – and why – is a much stronger approach. It starts with seeing from the team’s perspective.

(Likewise for customers.)

A fun game with stories

A fun game from impro theater is to tell a story in turns: Everyone’s allowed a single sentence. Then the other person continues, again only one sentence.

You’ll be amazed at how quickly a story can break down. Let’s look at an example.

You and your partner play this game. You might think of a story about a man proposing marriage to his girlfriend. But before you even begin, your partner has said the first sentence: “Alex is seeking revenge.”

Ok. Let’s adapt. You figure out the reason and continue: “Last summer, Casey had stolen his girlfriend.”

Your partner is unimpressed. She continues: “But that’s not the reason why he’s seeking revenge.”

Boom. Your story’s just broken down. Because your partner wouldn’t go along with it. She was stuck with her story.

Which is quite a common behaviour. Look around and you’ll see instances of people being stuck in the stories they’ve built everywhere (it’s true for ourselves at times). Worse, people are rather quick at constructing these stories. Many won’t even listen until the end of what you’re saying before starting to construct their own story.

And once they’ve built it, it’s hard to let it go.

As a communicator, there’s no use in complaining about that. Which leaves us basically two ways to deal with this.

First, we can insist on our story. Keep correcting their story. “No, that’s not what I mean.”
“No, that’s not how I mean it.”
“No, that’s not what I was trying to say.”

Or, we could start from our audience’s perspective. Try to understand which stories they construct; where these stories are coming from. What do we know about their struggles? About their lives? About their believes?

And attach to that. So that the stories we tell are more like the stories they tell. So that it’s easier for them to look at our story through their lens.

Enough! I need a rest.

“Enough! I need a rest.”

As a leader that’s among the most difficult sentences to say – even just to ourselves.

And yet, how are we supposed to light the path and lead the way for others if we can’t even lead ourselves? We take responsibility not only for the well-being of our team but also for ourselves, if only because we’re part of the team.

A team is strongest when two conditions are true: Everyone can work to their full potential. And everyone aligns to walk on the path.

These were the two leading themes that Kyla Cofer and I discussed on her podcast “Leadership School” (where I shared a story about my early career that I never shared in public before).

Listen to the full episode over on Kyla’s page.

That’s a lot

But really is it? Or when you say “That’s not much!” how few are we talking about?

The thing is that what’s a lot to you might be just peanuts to someone else. What’s peanuts to you might be a fortune to others. So how much is it really?

It’s the Curse of Knowledge at play. What’s clear to us might be totally unclear to our audience. They don’t know what we know. They have a different frame of reference than we have.

The tricky part is that numbers can be equally misleading. When you speak about “5 million”, is that a lot or just peanuts? And for whom? If you’re telling me that failure rates have dropped by 2% is that a lot or not?

If we’re trying to get our audience to see what we see, we need to look from their perspective and enable them to make sense of how much it is.

A huge Black Friday deal

What are you planning to buy today?

I’m buying time. My own time.

I offered myself a huge Black Friday deal. 100% off. A no brainer.

And so I’m free to do whatever I want on this day.

What are you going to do today?

Speaking with clarity is a habit

Speaking with clarity is a habit.

As is the lack of clarity. If a team tolerates lack of clarity it trickles into every corner of the team. It becomes ok to use complex and confusing language. Even though that slows everything down. And leads to a lot of time being wasted as the team fights over what was actually being said or meant.

Turning that habit around and making speaking with clarity the habit is among the most valuable investments a team can make. And it starts with you, as the leader.

If you don’t settle with confusing communication, your team won’t, either. Try pushing your team for one week:

  • to use simpler words whenever you don’t understand something
  • to design simpler graphs that show exactly what they want it to show
  • to find anecdotes that we all can relate to rather than only the speaker

And even force them sometimes to go back to the drawing board and find those simpler words instead of having the team figure it out together. As Wolf Schneider famously said: “Someone’s got to suffer, either the reader or the writer.”

Yes, it might slow things down in the beginning. But the acceleration you’ll experience down the road overcompensates for it manifold.

Clarity really is a habit. Start looking for it and you’ll discover it – or the lack of it – everywhere. Start speaking with clarity and you’ll gradually transform the way you communicate.

And that of your team.

Spread the Word

Dr. Michael Gerharz

Dr. Michael Gerharz