An important reminder by Bernadette Jiwa.
If you want to be listened, begin with listening.
If you want to be heard, begin with hearing.
If you want to lead, begin with opening to the people you want to lead.
If you want to sell something, begin with understanding the people you want to sell to.
It is that easy.
The first time I was in a leadership role, I struggled very much to understand the unwanted consequences of what a leader says and does.
The illusion is often that you can still behave like a peer, or a friend.
Yet people will look for direction, not for jokes. They will look for reassurance, not for stress. They will look for development, not for undirected and generic feedback.
Grasp this soon when you become a leader, and understand that your words and actions are now under a different type of scrutiny. The whole team will benefit from it.
There’s a fairly common practice in growing start-ups.
When the headcount ramps up and a more complicated structure is needed, the natural tendency is to promote founders or early stage employees into managerial roles. This happens only marginally because people making or vetting the decision believe those employees are the best for the job. Most of the time, the promotion is seen as a reward: after all, the person has been with the company when things were getting started, typically a difficult moment to be in.
There’s a problem with that, though. The skills needed to do your job are considerably different from the skills needed to have others do their jobs.
In this [new] capacity you have plenty of work to do yourself: setting strategy, hiring and firing, coaching and development, obtaining necessary resources, making certain decisions while delegating others, and embodying the culture you wish to foster.
Ed Batista
Most growing companies ignore this problem, and end up in a situation in which a hiatus develops between managers and employees. Managers are not willing to find the time to do what they are supposed to do, employees are left alone and in the blind. Eventually, one of two things will happen: growth will flatline, as managers factually act as bottlenecks; or value will be destroyed, as negative working culture spreads (think Uber).
Founders and early stage employees can (and should) still be rewarded, but if it is decided to promote them into managerial roles, the company should at least make sure they understand their new responsibilities and get appropriate training and mentoring to deliver on the expectations of their newly formed teams.
There’s a gap between you and everyone else.
A gap between what you do and what they do. A gap between what you want and what they want. A gap between how you think things should be run and how they think things should be run. A gap between what you believe is true and what they believe is true. A gap between how you see yourself in ten years and how they see themselves (and yourself) in ten years.
It is quite easy and instinctual, in front of the gap, to either impose our point of view or completely give it up. Both are ways to avoid conflict. “You better do what I say!” or “Ok, let’s do it your way..” are shortcuts for the short terms. They work for a while. Until the other, or we, realise what it’s been renounced. Then we find the gap is still there, only wider.
Another option, more difficult to practice, taking more effort, energy and empathy, is to work to build a bridge over the gap. You build a little bit on your side, the other builds a little bit on their side. Both work to make their sides more solid, and eventually, with time, the two parts will meet.
The meeting point is something completely new, as it is not your side nor it is the other’s side. It is a new perspective, a new idea, a new way of acting, a new vision for your common future. Built on common understanding.
Great thing about bridges, others can walk on them too.
What does a book from the 80s have to teach to marketers today?
Let’s see.
Advertising is, for the most part, unwanted and unliked. In some cases, advertising is thoroughly detested.
[…]
In general, the mind accepts only that which matches prior knowledge or experience. Millions of dollars have been wasted trying to change minds with advertising. Once a mind is made up, it’s almost impossible to change it. Certainly not with a weak force like advertising.
[…]
as the effectiveness of advertising goes down, the use of it goes up. Not just in volume, but in the number of users.
These are some of the aspects Ries and Trout start from in their book, Positioning: how to be seen and heard in the overcrowded marketplace. And they bear quite incredible similarities to the environment marketers operate in nowadays. Almost 40 years after the book was written.
The solution to this mix of sensory overload and advertising inefficacy is positioning, the process that leads (better, should lead) companies to identify a space in the prospect’s mind and leverage it for growth and success. Contrary to common shared belief, indeed, growth and success are not in the product and its features, they are in how the audience and particularly your prospects remember and talk about you.
Not surprisingly, Ries and Trout share quite many examples of companies who did positioning right and companies who did it wrong (back in the Seventies and Eighties), and perhaps the more interesting examples are the ones the authors dedicate a full chapter each in the second half of the book. Some commonalities.
Positioning is one of those books that anybody who starts a career in marketing should read and keep close throughout their careers. It really is too easy to forget about the importance of everything that is not the product/service you are offering (competitors, environment, audience, etc.) and fall in love with words and messages that mean literally nothing to the people you seek to serve.
This is the classic mistake made by the leader. The illusion that the power of the product is derived from the power of the organization. It’s just the reverse. The power of the organization is derived from the power of the product, the position that the product owns in the prospect’s mind.
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