I’m an old-fashioned communicator. I’m no communications minimalist. I don’t believe less is more—more is more. There is no such thing as too much communication. It’s like when your car stalls and won’t restart: Check the gas tank first. The business is stalling? Check the communications. I could just as easily have titled this chapter “It’s the Communications, Stupid!” And I believe in the primacy of the written word. Put it in writing.

Please.

I’m serious. Try it for a limited period as a way to break the habit of using technology as a substitute for direct communication. Nothing infuriates me more than receiving a voice-mail from someone who could have reached me live and in person at my desk, but chose instead to wait until after business hours or the weekend to leave a message.

What’s he hiding from? Me obviously. I might ask a question, say no, or otherwise complicate his life. But I’m still going to ask a question, say no, or complicate his life. He’s just postponed the inevitable and forced me to take the initiative. And if it is bad news being left on my voice-mail or e-mail, that’s a double bogie. It has the word “coward” written all over it. Bad news is always delivered face-to-face or, if there’s absolutely no other alternative, it gets transmitted human voice to human ear on the phone.

If communications hide-and-seek is happening colleague-to-colleague within an organization, it’s a bad sign. Never mind the internal chaos—which is bad enough—the customers are probably being treated the same way. Want to find out? Call them and ask. And please don’t leave voice-mail. Ask:

• Are you satisfied with the contact you have with our organization?
• When was the last time you heard from us?
• Are you receiving enough information?
• How fast do we respond to your calls and messages?
• Are your calls always returned?
• Do we rely too much on voice-mail and other communication technologies?
• Would you prefer more one-on-one contact?
• How can we improve our communications with you?

Rarely will you be told that your company communicates too much with a customer—unless you’re in telemarketing. But if that’s the case, see if you can find out what purpose was served by the excess communication. Was it necessary? Pestering existing customers only alienates them and leads to doors being slammed in your face when there is a legitimate need to communicate. Try to set up a communication schedule when the relationship is in its early stages. There’s also nothing wrong with checking in with a brief—live—phone call once every thirty days to see if there’s anything a customer needs. Keep it brief and don’t forget to ask about the customer’s family, his or her health, and other personal matters.

Oh, that’s so phony, Frank. The hell it is! What’s phony is a business relationship that lacks a sincere interest in the human elements of life.

Personal relationships drive business relationships. We are all very busy these days, but if things get so hectic that we cannot establish a modicum of personal contact through our communications channels, we’re going to be digitized into oblivion. Some people are delighted to do business on the Internet or push buttons on a Touch-Tone phone for ten minutes for what should be a thirty-second transaction. Others hate it. One size does not fit all.

If your motto is That’s the way we do business, you deserve to be out of business.

A forty-eight-hour moratorium on dehumanizing communications technology is not nearly long enough. I’d prefer thirty days, but I know there’d be a backlash. You need enough time to rekindle personal contact and to demonstrate that it is not necessarily more productive in every case to rely exclusively on technology. For instance, there are ancient and honorable techniques for wrapping up a call or a discussion that’s served its purpose and run on too long. “You probably need to get back to work…” is still effective. “I’ve already used too much of your time…” works too. It is so easy to forget these simple skills when e-mail or voice-mail becomes the principal means of communication.

Sure, some people talk too much. They waste your time and theirs. Figure out a way to deal with it without going into hiding.

One reason to be jumpy about an overreliance on communications technology is that it has yet to find a substitute for the inner ear or the gut-feeling that we use during one-on-one encounters to evaluate the importance of the information. What you should fear is that you won’t pick up on the warning signs from voice-mail, e-mail, or the Internet and suddenly the bottom will fall out of your perfectly healthy business. “I’ve been meaning to tell you” are among the six scariest words in English, along with these four: “I thought you knew.”

Technology is perfect for avoiding conflict. I hate conflict. But I hate the consequences of avoiding it even more. Most adults can sense when there is trouble brewing. We may choose to ignore it, but we know. You’ve probably been in too many meetings where you sensed that there was a hidden agenda or some camouflage draped over the proceedings. But instead of a meeting, if there’s an exchange of position papers or a moderated discussion on the company Intranet, will you be as sensitive? I doubt it.

I’m a worrywart about a lot of things, so I’ll introduce you to my standing list of communication worries. You might want to add these to your red notebook.

Include conference calls in your moratorium, and, if you’re really high-tech, suspend video conferencing as well. Conference-calls (and videoconferencing) create the illusion of full group interaction. It’s interaction, but it’s not full. Take your truth serum. During your last conference call did the conversation have your undivided attention”, or were you reading memos, checking your e-mail, or paying your bills?

Conference calls are not all that high-tech, but if you let them replace face-to-face gatherings, you’ll regret it. I have been known to beg top management not to supplant face-to-face meetings with conference calls. One of my principal arguments is to remind them that their mission and vision statements call for a team-based enterprise. What if the New York Jets or the Denver Broncos practiced individually and only got together once a week by conference call before the big game? Great idea, eh?

Come on!

When we pay all this lip service to creating and empowering teams, we shouldn’t then pull the plug on the personal interaction that teamwork requires. Teams are part of the communication circuitry. But there’s a tendency for teams to lose their cohesion depending on how senior the members happen to be. It’s illogical to expect the people on the loading dock to be operating face-to-face as a team, but not middle or top management. If it’s important for the leaders of teams on the warehouse or factory floor to communicate goals and requirements to get buy-in and compliance, why isn’t it just as important for the leader of a team of regional VPs to be held to the same standard? Decisions on the regional level tend to have a lot of impact, as far as I know. If the excuse is that top management is too busy, my question is, too busy for what? Too busy to communicate effectively? Maybe they’re so busy because they’re running around crazy cleaning up the mess that’s created by communications breakdowns.

The last thing you want to have happen is to design different communication standards for different levels within the organization. One that’s direct—for those who wear blue collars or are in the field with the customers. Another that’s indirect—for those who are entitled to stock options and bonuses. That amounts to accountability for one, cover for the other.

Poor communication is a favorite hiding place for all levels within the organization. Whoops, communications breakdown. Nobody’s at fault. It’s the adult equivalent of the dog ate my homework.

Other classic cop-outs:

• First I’ve heard about it.
• That’s not my understanding.
• I was afraid of that.
• I was out of the loop.
• I wasn’t briefed fully.
• It’s news to me!

Establish a Presence with E-mail and Other Tools

After the moratorium is over, you’ll probably realize that you honestly can’t operate without e-mail. It can’t be beat for establishing quick access to all parts of a far-flung operation. At Danka I used a judicious mix of e-mail and voice-mail to stay in contact with my two-thousand-member sales force. I tried not to spam them with broadsides on every topic, though. The idea is to establish your “presence.” Nobody wants a manager and leader who is the recipient of the Caspar Award.

Caspar?

I guess I haven’t told you about my not-so-coveted Ho-Hummer Awards for Mediocre Managers.

Here goes. Imagine yourself seated in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. Billy Crystal is on stage finishing a joke about Jack Palance. They’ve heard it before but the audience howls with laughter anyway. He introduces the sexy actress Charlize Theron, who appears in a glittering designer gown with décolletage that extends so far south it gives new meaning to the term beyond the Beltway. “There are three nominees for this year’s Caspar,” she says. “Bidwell Morris of the Cooper Scooper Corporation for his acclaimed open-door policy. Bidwell’s door opens on an empty desk, empty chair, empty office.”

Applause.

Charlize smiles. “Kent Lockstep of the Gremlin Group. Kent worked at home as the company teetered on the edge of chapter eleven and only communicated by e-mail after midnight.”

Applause.

“And Zoe Smirfler of Gotchas, the investment banking firm that specializes in underwriting hostile takeovers. Zoe hasn’t been seen since July of 1989.”

Applause.

The actress rips open the envelope and pauses dramatically. “The winner of the Caspar the Friendly Ghost Award for the Best Invisible Manager goes to…”

I think it has the makings of an annual event, don’t you?

Which award do you qualify for? Which one does your boss deserve?

It’s a fun way to address serious management shortcomings, and if you go through the list closely, you’ll see that many of the major problems they address are communications related. Here’s a statistic that should alarm you and alert you to the size of the problem. Fourteen percent of each forty-hour work week is wasted because of poor communication. Do the numbers. It comes to seven full work weeks of lost productivity each year.¹

What that tells me is that I can add up to 14 percent to my bottom line if I can ramp up my communications effectiveness.

How? One of the best ways is to follow the three Rs of communications:

As I’m writing this, it is spring and there is a bright red male cardinal outside the window sounding his mating call over and over again. If it’s important—and it certainty is to that bird—it is worth repeating. Advertising agencies knows this. They fashion a slogan and hammer it home again and again until people can repeat it in their sleep.

At Danka I used “10-5-2”—it was in my memos, e-mails, speeches, and phone calls. It meant that my sales force was expected to have ten sales calls a week, five sales a month for the standard product line, and two special orders for our newly introduced color copiers. I had them stand up at meetings and chant “10-5-2.”

Try it. Say it out loud: 10-5-2. Go ahead, don’t be bashful.

What I just did right here on the page was to repeat 10-5-2 a total of three times (four if you count this sentence, and the fifth is coming right up). The slogan 10-5-2 would have been forgotten in a heartbeat if it hadn’t been repeated over and over again.

When I was at Xerox, the corporation was into TQM, the Total Quality Movement. Hardly an hour went by when we didn’t hear, see, or say the word “quality.” Xerox wanted to win the Malcolm Baldridge Award as a way to demonstrate that it had bounced back from its slump in the 1970s and 1980s. TQM was the vehicle and the word “quality” was the gas pedal. Today, I’m told that quality is mentioned from time to time, but not nearly as often. It’s too bad. Quality makes for a powerful mantra.

Listen Up and Down

One reason that repetition is so helpful is that our listening skills are dreadful. I suspect this is a fairly recent phenomenon. It seems only natural that our listening capability—hearing—would be as acute as our eyesight since primitive men and women spent about half their time in the dark. Furthermore, listening was a way to be entertained and to gather folk wisdom. Reading is only a recently adopted skill. But something has gotten in the way of listening. To counteract the problem, I make a point of summarizing the key points of a meeting before it concludes. Or I’ll go around the room and ask participants to recapitulate. This is also a great way to spot gaps, uncertainty, and confusion.

Your red notebook amounts to a hearing aide. Write things down, both as you hear them and later to summarize the stuff you don’t want to forget. By taking notes, you are training yourself to listen and remember. What’s the alternative title of this chapter? The one I offered as a possibility in the opening paragraph. Don’t look back. If you had taken a note, you’d probably remember: “It’s the communications, stupid.”

And that, by the way, is a paraphrase of political consultant James Carville’s technique for keeping the Clinton presidential campaign on message during the 1992 election. It’s abruptness and borderline rudeness (redeemed by a sense of humor), calls attention to the message and highlights its importance. Business communication needs less jargon and blandness and more Carville-style bluntness in order to overcome the prevailing listening-ability deficit.

Don’t take my word for it, though. Test me. Actually, test your people to see how well they listen. Present a policy change or announce a set of priorities in the usual ho-hum way. Include one variation on the Carville formula. It is easy to do: “It’s the numbers, stupid, it’s the execution, stupid; it’s the stupid.” At the end of the meeting ask them to write a half-page summary. See what they remember.

Serving Pure Protein

I’m a feedback freak. I want to know what you think. Does it make sense? Do you see a problem? Can you add to it? How can you use it? Am I off base? Feedback is the report card of people-ology. If I’m not cutting it, I want to know.

Having a sales background helps. “No” is the ultimate feedback. It gets so that anything else—“You’re an idiot,” “This makes no sense whatsoever,” or “Huh?”—is not a problem. All leaders must develop leather skin. It’s never pleasant or easy to hear, but full-frontal feedback ensures that the communications gap is closed.

Many managers discourage feedback or dabble in it to create the illusion that they want to hear what the troops think. Usually, they’ve made up their minds and, as far as they’re concerned, the feedback is irrelevant. But it’s nice to know who’s on board and who isn’t, what their reservations are, and if better alternative possibilities exist that haven’t been considered.

I’ve gone from hating feedback to making a living off it. I used to seethe when my team started poking holes in one of my brilliant schemes. Probably the most infamous episode was in Cleveland when I rolled out a special bonus plan for my managers and was thunderstruck when they started nit-picking. I had gone out on a limb with corporate to get the plan approved as a way to reward their extra effort and the districts success. Part of it was tied to customer satisfaction rates, and that’s what drew the complaints. I was expecting gratitude, not carping. Tom Bill, the district’s business manager, was about to make a presentation at the front of the room to lay out the exact details. I got up, walked to the overhead projector, and knocked his stack of transparencies to the floor. “We’re not going to talk about this anymore, were doing it,” I said. “The meeting’s over.” There was dead silence. Finally, Tom, who towers over me said, “I guess you don’t want me to bother making the presentation.”

Today, I’d handle it differently. The decision to go with the plan wouldn’t have been changed. And, no, that doesn’t mean I’m advocating going through the motions on feedback. For one thing, the dispute involved additional compensation that Xerox had to be talked into paying in the first place. The customer satisfaction tie-in was a side issue. Corporate was not about to sweeten the deal. I should have explained that better and just allowed them to vent.

I got away with my temper tantrum because we had always practiced full-frontal feedback and the outburst was considered to be an aberration. But there was an element of calculation involved in it from my standpoint. As leader, I thought my managers were being petty and self-centered. They were all extremely well paid. On top of that, linking customer satisfaction to management compensation is nonnegotiable. I wanted to sober them up. After that the subject was closed. It never arose again.

To Advise and Dissent

Today, it’s nerve-wracking to see a roomful of nodding heads. Are they tuned out? Am I getting the New York nod? The odds are that 20 percent of any one gathering of business people will disagree with anything you put on the table: Let’s give everybody the day off on December 25. I know there’s going to be somebody in the room saying, “What kind of a flaky idea is that?” I’d much rather confront that head-on than have to deal with it later in the form of covert opposition or half-hearted support. I’ll keep probing and pushing until someone raises his or her head to offer a reservation. Usually that’s enough to encourage others to speak out. Another way to go is to shoot holes in your own proposal, if no one else is willing to do the job. Play devil’s advocate.

We owe the people we lead information and explanation. Pete Egoscue, the renowned exercise therapist and author, shared a communications story with Roger that I want to pass along. Pete is a former Marine combat officer who served in Vietnam. As his unit was preparing for its first patrol, the CO told his platoon leaders that the only way they could be certain of bringing their people back alive and uninjured was to make sure that each knew exactly what the mission was. “If I say we’re going out there looking for three blue beebees, you better make sure they know that, know why, and know what we’re going to do about it,” was the way he put it. As they patrolled, the commanding officer would break away with his radio operator and drop in by surprise on various platoons. He’d head straight for the nearest Marine and ask him what they were doing out there in the bushes. Pete recalls, “If that kid didn’t know, your ass was in a lot of trouble.”

The Marine officer was using a formula that we discussed earlier—what, why, and how—and it’s the backbone of effective communication. By discouraging feedback you never know if the what, why, and how has been effective. Don’t assume that they get it.

Bear in mind, though, the purpose is not consensus building as much as information sharing. Consensus will come in time. Blunt feedback rankles so many managers and leaders because it is regarded as evidence of disloyalty, a bad attitude, or poor teamwork. The most disloyal act of all is to withhold the truth. If you believe I’m wrong—tell me, and at the same time tell me why and tell me what you propose that we should do.

In my first book I offered a hard and fast rule—no whining! And this book’s title implies that the rule still holds. But—there is an exception. I’d rather hear whining than have silence. Constructive whining is okay. It’s pointless to play the victim, however. Whining must be accompanied by an effort to improve the situation overall, offer alternatives, or to comply with the disputed policy to the best of one’s ability. Winning requires listening and taking action. Encouraging feedback allows you to look for weakness in your own argument. I believe in making quick decisions, but I’m even quicker to seek as many different perspectives as possible.

 

I can remember any number of decisions that my bosses made that I did not agree with at the time they were announced. But the more I learned about the background and the reasoning behind their moves, the easier they were to accept. “I can understand that,” is a far better reaction than, “Who knows what the hell they’re up to!” Middle management frequently gets caught in a communications trap devised by senior management’s tendency to dictate policy moves without providing adequate explanation. This leaves middle managers with the task of motivating their teams with the most demotivating words of all—You don’t need to know. Just go do it.

Your best people hate that. They want to be included in the planning process and be part of the information loop. Top performers are always seeking to gain control—control of the ball, control of the agenda, control of the process. That’s why they are good at what they do. Information is power. If you deprive them of power and control, they’ll go elsewhere to find it. There are a raft of psychological studies that show that powerless-ness and a sense of helplessness contribute to depression, resentment, and violent behavior. Information is good medicine.

You don’t need to know. Just do it also hurts the manager’s credibility, because he or she seems to be a candidate for the Robo Award—doing it by the book, doing what the boss demands no matter what the consequences. If middle management has the information it can at least put it on the table and let people make up their own minds. You don’t need to know. Just go do it is read as an indication that an illogical, poorly thought out policy is coming down from the top, and it’s time to hide.

Before I close this section of the chapter, I want to follow up on Pete Egoscue’s Marine Corps communications experience with material sent to me by John A. Olsen, another former Marine officer. After hearing one of my speeches, Mr. Olson went home and dug out his own red notebook—and it was red—from officer candidate school. In it, he found these eleven points about effective leadership:

1. Be technically and tactically proficient.
2. Know yourself and seek improvement.
3. Know your men and look out for their welfare.
4. Keep your men informed.
5. Set the example.
6. Ensure that the task is understood, supervised, and accomplished.
7. Train your men as a team.
8. Make sound and timely decisions.
9. Develop a sense of responsibility in your subordinates.
10. Deploy your command in accordance with its capabilities.
11. Seek responsibility and take responsibility for your actions.

Curing Meeting Madness

Time for another Pacetta Poll. Ask your people:

• As an organization, grade our communications skills from A to F
• Grade your team leader’s communications skills on the same basis.
• Grade your team members’ communications skills on the same basis.
• Is information shared from team to team, routinely, occasionally, rarely, never?
• Do you believe what you’re told is the truth all of the time, most of the time, some of the time, or none of the time?
• Do you have more than enough information to do your job well, just enough, or not enough?
• Are you listened to by your manager and colleagues?
• Is feedback encouraged or discouraged?
• Are you made to feel comfortable or uncomfortable about expressing disagreement or contrary views?
• Have you been penalized for expressing your opinion, yes or no?
• How often is there a communications failure—never, occasionally, frequently?
• What is our strongest communications mode overall—written, verbal, one-on-one, group?
• Is our communications policy consistent?
• Are there too many meetings, a sufficient number of meetings, or not enough meetings?
• Are meetings very productive, productive, occasionally productive, unproductive?
• How often are you in direct face-to-face communication with your manager?
• Would you prefer those contacts to be more frequent, less frequent, or at about the current level?
• How often are policy changes imposed without explanation—never, occasionally, frequently, always?
• Is our communications with the customer poor, fair, good, excellent?
• Grade how well we listen to the customer—A through F.
• Would you describe your knowledge of company long- and short-term goals as good, fair, or poor?
• When was the last time we communicated our vision and mission statement to you—today, this week, this month, within the last six months, or can’t remember?

This Pacetta poll is more detailed than most because communication is too important to be given ho-hum treatment. Communication is ground zero for Murphy’s Law: What can go wrong will go wrong. We have to keep watching and working at it constantly. When you think it’s finally perfect, there will be a breakdown a few minutes later.

Some communication sectors are more accident prone than others. The reason meetings are dreaded by many people is that we allow the communications value to leak out of the meeting and leave everyone wondering why they bothered attending.

We hate meetings because:

Meetings must be prepared as carefully as you arrange for an important dinner party at your home. The casualness and indifference involved in calling meetings is astounding. No wonder we consider them a waste of time. Most of them are a waste of time.

There are two questions to ask—one at the beginning of the meeting and one at the end:

• What’s the meeting intended to accomplish?
• What are we going to do as a result of this meeting?

I never close a meeting without asking this question: What are we going to do now?

If we go to the trouble of having a meeting, shouldn’t some action take place based on what was discussed?

Of course. But too many meetings are held with loose or impossibly ambitious agendas. Focus is lost, and at the end it’s impossible to sort out what needs to be done. I rate my managers on their ability to conduct meetings. I’ll tell them if they need to improve their skills and coach them along by inspecting the agenda for future meetings and exposing them to team leaders who have mastered the art of “giving good meeting.” And while it is an art, the techniques can be learned. It’s a mistake to lose this communications tool by using it badly or deciding that meetings are a waste of time.

I’m also a firm believer in unstructured meetings, otherwise known as bull sessions. Break your people into small groups and allow them to talk. Throw out a few topics and let the discussion flow where it may. Is this productive? Very. Among other things it builds a sense of openness. Talk is not just something that goes on through official channels and according to a strict set of rules. Some people will be more inclined to open up in a less formal setting. And the opposite is true too. Without official sanction and imprimatur, there are those who are reluctant to express an opinion or take a stand. They have to be encouraged to participate. Mix your teams together and do some cross pollinating with different departments and functions. I hate it when ghettos form. At Xerox, I made it a point to get “the wrenches” as the service people are known—how’s that for white-collar snobbery?—to mingle with the sales, support, and admin people.

Whether they are structured or unstructured meetings, they can be utilized as accurate barometers of your operation’s health. If they turn flat, rancorous, or ho-hum, you’ll know in a minute that there’s a problem. I went to one several years ago that featured a senior executive who spoke without a break for three hours and showed up to three hundred slides. You could have done open-heart surgery without anesthesia on most of the audience, that’s how numb we were. There wasn’t even a bathroom break. I concentrated on the wall behind him, hoping that if stared hard enough I could burn a twenty-foot “CC” into the wall. And he was “clearly clueless,” but it took senior management about a year and a half to get up the nerve to move him out of his job, and in the meantime he did extraordinary damage to Xerox’s field operation. And that meeting was a dead give away that he was trouble.

Perfecting the Write Stuff

Written communication is also accident prone. For many of us, writing is such an unnatural act that we’d rather send smoke signals. Our reading skills aren’t great either. The combination makes for a disaster. It wouldn’t hurt from a training standpoint to require remedial work in writing, reading, public speaking, and listening.

Take some truth serum. How’s your writing? It could probably use a brush up, no matter how accomplished you are. Style is not the issue, clarity is. For all of its many drawbacks, e-mail has actually promoted clarity in written communications. I’ve received any number of one word e-mail replies:

Pretty damned clear. But e-mail’s brevity is also its weakness. Ink needs to go on paper to ensure complete comprehension. When it doesn’t, there’s bound to be trouble. I believe in writing nearly everything. Yeah, it’s a pain, but the record is sure nice to have when you need it.

I wouldn’t dream of operating a business without written contracts. We have them with our customers and our suppliers to make sure both sides know what’s required and when. Management covers itself with paper to make sure there are generous pension, bonus, and stock-option provisions. But when it comes to employee and employer performance we tend to leave everything to chance.

Stop leaving it to chance. Chance has delivered many a cruel surprise.

And it is surprise that is the enemy of effective communications. Hand each new employee a copy of the company’s vision and mission statements, short- and long-term goals, his or her team’s plan to implement those two documents, and a description of the job being filled. Ask them to write a one- or two-page contract describing how they will personally carry out those requirements. This sounds more daunting than it really is.

Let’s say I own a dairy farm, but I want to spend the winter in Florida. When I hire a substitute farmer, what do I expect him to do?

1. Feed the cows.
2. Care for the herd’s health.
3. Milk the cows.
4. Deliver the milk to the processor.
5. Clean the barn.
6. Show a profit.

Here’s what happens next. Two people, Mary and Murray, answer the ad I put in the paper. I show the requirements to Murray, who says okay, and I hire him. A month later I get a call from him to inform me that the cows are dying. What happened? Murray explains that he examined the farm’s cash flow and concluded that we would not make a profit unless he cut overhead costs. His solution was to feed the cows only once a week.

I think we had a communication breakdown, don’t you?

What I should have done is use a contract like the one Mary offered me in response to my job description.

1. I will feed the cows twice a day, morning and evening. They’ll receive a balanced diet that I will develop in consultation with the local vet.
2. The same vet will be on call for emergencies and I will ask him to inspect the herd once a month. I will also get his recommendations on vitamin supplements and begin a program of regular inoculations.
3. The milking routine will be conducted twice a day. All equipment will be sterilized and checked for contamination prior to every session.
4. There will be one delivery a day to the processor. I am establishing an e-mail link with this company and will request biweekly price quotes which I will compare with other processors should we decide to take our business elsewhere.
5. The stalls will be cleaned twice a day and doused with nontoxic disinfectant. Waste products will be stored to be sold on the weekend to area gardeners and local nurseries. The return from selling the manure will add 2 percent to our annual profits.

Murray was an idiot. Mary is a saint. But I was a fool not to insist on a contract with Murray. And I’d have been an even bigger fool not to realize that the major contributing factor to Mary’s sainthood is the contract. Sure, she’s conscientious, but the contract tells me what to expect from her, gives me a standard against which I can measure her performance, and lets her know what she can expect from me. I can’t come back to her and say, “Mary, you didn’t give me the profit margin I wanted.” It’s there on paper, 2 percent. I can’t say, “You shouldn’t be consulting with the vet so much, it costs us money.” The contract stipulates that she will have the vet visit the herd once a month.

To fully close the loop, I should also have offered my own contract to Mary:

1. I will check in with you by phone once a week.
2. You are authorized to spend up to $1,000 for medical emergencies involving the herd. Inform me within twenty-four hours should an emergency arise.
3. Please use Doctor Janice Brown for vet services.
4. Keep the farm’s financial accounts balanced and up to date.
5. Attend the monthly grange meetings.
6. I will pick up 15 percent of the tuition costs at the agricultural college if you pursue part-time course work while on my payroll.

See what’s happening? Mary and I are communicating our expectations.

Personal performance contracts should cascade from the top to the bottom of the organization. They provide a tight system of discipline and accountability. Contracts are not straitjackets or exercises in micromanagement. Get some parameters in place instead of flying blind or making things up along the way. By establishing understanding and agreement on both sides, there is a process in place for achieving long- and short-term goals: To get off the farm—where a native of Queens doesn’t really belong in the first place. If I want to improve my communications companywide, the goal should be part of every contract with every employee from the CEO to the janitorial workers. A manager’s contract might include, for example, a provision stipulating that he or she would “meet with each team member individually once a week for at least twenty minutes to discuss performance, outlook, and problem areas.” As the leader, I can easily check that by asking individual team members to tell me when they last met with their manager. In turn, my contract with the manager should commit me to get together regularly with the executive to discuss and review his or her managerial performance, including the team’s efforts to increase communications effectiveness, and offer any assistance. A contract must be specific, flow two ways, and entail actions that are verifiable.

This isn’t a gun to the head kind of thing. Contract formulation should be a collaborative enterprise involving the individual and his or her direct supervisor. It’s an excellent opportunity for the two of them to forge a close partnership: “Here’s what we need from you, Mary, and here’s how I will help you.” There’s no better way to avoid misunderstandings. In provides both sides with an objective standard for performance. A contract needs:

• Specific expectations, responsibilities, and terms of empowerment.
• Specific long-term and short-term goals with specific actions to meet them.
• Specific personal and professional objectives with specific actions to meet them.
• Specific career development plans with specific plans to meet them.
• Specific requirements to deliver 100 percent of the business plan and specific actions that will be taken.
• Specific actions to exceed 100 percent of the business plan.

A contract is useless if it is not be reviewed. Once a month, those who report to us should be walked through their contracts and asked about what’s been happening with each item. If they are expected to sell five new Lexus cars a month, it should be in the contract and the manager needs to ask, “How come you sold only three?” And the next question has got to be, “How can I help you get up to the quota?” If this happens monthly, or biweekly, you won’t end up at the end of the year twenty-four Lexuses in the hole. Spot the problem and move to fix it. A yearly review comes too late. During monthly reviews, an overly ambitious contract can be adjusted, but don’t be too quick to back off requirements. Challenge your people to stretch and grow.

Some contract provisions must be nonnegotiable, such as ethics, elements of the mission statement, and essential provisions of the business plan. If people know what they’re getting into up front, there won’t be any nasty surprises. It’s not a bad idea to use contract formulation as part of the recruiting process. By asking prospective employees to develop a contract based on their understanding of the job description and the contributions they can bring to it, you’ll see where they’re coming from. If you are committed to close teamwork, and if a hot prospect skates by it in his or her contract, there may be a blind spot in that area. Perhaps you need to keep searching.

In turn, as I lay out my contractual expectations for the new hire, he or she can see how I look at the job. If I’m being unrealistic, it would be great for both of us to find that out sooner rather than later. It’s called communication—and it’s not stupid.

The lack of a solid communication process both internally and with your customers leads to distrust and hinders your struggle against the competition. Not letting people know here they stand causes confusion and lost productivity.

The interpersonal, one-on-one, face-to-face laying out of expectations, soliciting feedback, listening to what our people and our customers are saying, and in turn letting them know where the company stands is imperative.

Communication is not e-mail, voice-mail, phones, etc. We depend too much on technology! It’s an excuse not to face issues, employees, or customers head-on. The companies that use technology but keep it personal will win in the future.