Tag: communication

Killer

FabrizioLeave a comment

When you reject, belittle, or forget to follow up to an initiative taken by a member of your team, what happens is next time they will think twice before taking initiative.

It is that simple. And the effect compounds for additional rejecting, belittling and forgetting.

This is not to say you have to accept and follow through with every idea. You just need to communicate clearly what is important and what is not, what is “right now” and what is “maybe tomorrow”, what makes the picture and what makes the frame. This transparency is needed for people to appreciate why some things happen and other do not.

Unfortunately most hide behind busyness, that is often just an expression of ignorance (having no idea) or arrogance (thinking everyone has a clear idea).

It is a killer for motivation.

Agent or spectator

FabrizioLeave a comment

The fact with difficult conversations is that you can delay them, but you cannot delay the negative effects of the situation that made them necessary in the first place.

If a colleague is under performing and you have to pick up their slack, silence will not improve things. If your boss is not giving you what you demand, silence will not make them change. If the team you are working in has a toxic culture, silence will not make that more digestible.

Also, more likely than not, eventually the outcome you fear and that justified the delay is going to materialize no matter what. That colleague is probably going to be fired anyway, your boss is going to get rid of you, or you are going to get rid of them, the team will have to make some drastic changes one way or the other.

So, at the end of the day it is mainly a matter of being an agent of change or a spectator. The former makes you waste a lot less time, and you have no time to waste.

Tired

FabrizioLeave a comment

As a general rule, writing less rather than more is a wise decision.

And when you are tired, writing less rather than more should be an imperative. When you are tired, ideas gets fuzzy, reasoning falters, words get mixed up. Adding another sentence, another paragraph, another page will not make your argument stronger.

Of course, it is also possible to not write at all. Go get some rest, and get back to what seems the most urgent matter of the moment when it does not seem as urgent anymore (a night of sleep has this power).

Businesses would benefit immensely from this practice.

Timing

FabrizioLeave a comment

It might be that after the hyped launch, the excellent marketing execution, the promise of a new way, the vision of a better future, and much more, Hey.com is just asking too much of its audience.

Because investing time and money in a channel (email) that most people consider as that tiny room in their house nobody ever opens, full of unorganised crap you should have trashed years ago but never did, is a huge ask. We can probably all live with that type of mess in our lives. It is stressful, it is impractical, it is clunky. But we can still go there once or twice a day to see if anything worthy happened (usually not), and then go back to using more modern and comfortable means of communication for the majority of our interactions. Who cares if there are 1,346 unread messages, junk messages, when we will never ever pay any attention to them?

And so, Hey.com might just be misplaced in time, based on the assumption that we actually care while we do not. There is no great product, no flawless on-boarding, no inspiring mission that can revert this.

External help

FabrizioLeave a comment

There are three kinds of external help a marketing department can get.

There is the help that is valuable because it provides a competence that is missing. This is typical when you hire a freelancer, for example. Perhaps you have a small team, you lack some skills, you want something specific done that you cannot do yourself.

Then, there is the help that is valuable because it gets things done. Most agencies fall into this bucket. They do not really deliver mind-blowing results, they might or might not have specific competences, some might actually argue they could have gotten pretty much the same outcome by doing the job internally. But the truth is, the team simply does not have enough bandwidth, or it is not well organised, or its skills are not well mapped.

Finally, there is the help that is valuable because it delivers quality. It might be a freelancer, it might be an agency. But in this case, they are at the edge of their field, they are doing things that not many others know, they are reinventing a particular tactic or the way it is approached. Things might get difficult, because the counterpart is somebody with convictions, ideas, opinions, and they might not be willing to simply do what pleases the head of marketing. They repay these difficulties with an outstanding job.

Now, the fact is that often we approach external help in marketing with unrealistic expectations. And so, when we hire for competence, we do not want to do the project management work that is necessary. When we hire for project management, we are unprepared in feeding the right information at the right time because we do not have them. When we hire for quality, we are not ready to change our assumptions and beliefs, and potentially redefine strategy and tactics altogether.

Who are you hiring to help you out? Are you aware of what that means?