I was doing a talk for the Small Business Group for the main women’s networking group here in Singapore.
One of the participants brought up the topic of how to convey admin-type information.
You can’t always have life-changing content, so here’s my thoughts on when you have less than thrilling things to convey.
The first thing you have to be really clear on is your answers to the five planning questions.
1. What do I know about these people?
2. What concrete actions do I want them to take?
3. What are they coming in with in terms of prejudices, preconceptions, attitudes, questions, etc, to do with this topic and me?
4. What’s really important to them? What do they strongly value?
5. How might this affect how I communicate to these people?
When we get into admin/detail land, sometimes we can forget exactly what we’re telling for the sake of telling, and what we’re telling in order to get a particular response/action from people. The clearer you can be about the actions that are necessary, the easier it will be to filter information out from your presentation and into documentation or other formats.
Other things to consider:
~ The first thing to pay attention to is your style. Formal and multi-syllabic is just going to make this more tedious. How can you remain warm, conversational and ordinary? The more you remain an adult, the more it keeps others in the adult role. If you come on all headteacher, they’ll go adolescent on you.
~ What’s worked in the past? What do these people react well to? What have you done that works in other contexts?
Or is it a certain type of person who takes action when others don’t? Is there something you notice about them that you can apply to the others?
Do you know anyone else who has been successful at this? What did they do?
Sometimes it’s possible that we get caught up in the detail and forget to take lessons from other parts of our life/the past and apply them to the current situation.
~ Focus on relevancy. Every word has to be totally and clearly relevant. To them.
~ In the same vein, make it really clear how following your recommendations will lead to them having more of what they value, and how not following your recommendations will lead to them losing what they value. Do this with stories (real stories, of course) if you can, with examples of people in the past who took the ‘bad’ route. Story can be a gentle but strong way of setting up the limits of acceptable behaviour without being patronising.
~ Start from scratch. If all you had was the answers to your first four questions, what would you design to make sure that people took the actions necessary? What combinations of meetings, presentations, documentation would lead most easily to that. What’s stops you doing exactly that?
~ Finally, go easy on the PowerPoint. Aim for conversation, not presentation. But I would say that wouldn’t I?
Stay yourself, treat people like real people, and adapt your content with them and their actions in mind.
Your presentation might not be a real laugh-riot, but you can at least make it pain-free for all concerned.
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I just have to say ‘absolutely’ to this point:
“make it really clear how following your recommendations will lead to them having more of what they value, and how not following your recommendations will lead to them losing what they value. Do this with stories (real stories, of course) if you can, with examples of people in the past who took the ‘bad’ route.”
Working in communications in an HR Admin area I see so many of our project leaders trying to communicate the importance of the admin tasks from the point of view of how it will help US – not the person we want to do the task. Or not communicating any importance of all. Simply a ‘do this’ and ‘how to do this’ but not answering ‘why’ and ‘what if I don’t'… which are usually the triggers that get someone to do something rather than ignore it as a mundance, unimportant task.
Hi Brenda
I think we tend to treat people as machines sometimes, and think of the whole topic of emotions as somehow unsavoury or un-business-like.
The reality is unless you get someone to feel something pretty significant, they aren’t going to change their behaviour.
Especially bearing in mind how overwhelmed people feel these days…