7

NOT EVERY MESSENGER IS CREATED EQUAL (But Nearly All Can Be Effective)

“THE BOSS SAID TO CHANGE the sign, so I did.”

I once saw this message on the marquee outside of a local retailer. Actually, I have seen this same message many times over the years on the marquees of other retailers, fast-food restaurants, and convenience stores. It seemed clever the first time. Now I recognize such messages as wasted opportunities, considering the fact that thousands of drivers and passengers go by these businesses each day.

One Saturday afternoon, while performing my various husband and dad errands, I kept track of the content in the marquees I drove by (in a safe manner, of course). Here was my count:

• Seventeen businesses used their signs to announce sales. Quite reasonable.
• Four businesses had a message about a new product. Ditto.
• Two marquees, situated directly under signs featuring the name of the business, simply repeated the name of the business. Not incrementally helpful.
• Two businesses used their marquees to announce “Help Wanted.”
• Three businesses used the marquee to offer non-sales messages (think brief, motivational slogans).
• One marquee had only “Closed.”
• Four businesses had absolutely nothing on their marquees.

Think about all of the people who have a connection to your business and an interest in seeing it (and you) succeed. Depending on your type of business, these may be employees, contract workers, customers, suppliers, distributors, officials, alumni, members, donors, volunteers, community leaders, and friends. Together they represent hundreds—or even thousands—of “marquees” for you as they go about their everyday interactions. Unfortunately, in my experience the majority of potential messengers for most businesses are a blank sign. They are neither equipped with the knowledge of how they could help nor activated to actually do so.

When you look at the totality of your business relationships, do you suspect many of them represent blank, bland, or disconnected marquees? If so, the crickets might be chirping unnecessarily. You have an enormous opportunity to engage lots of these individuals as messengers for growth. You need not be pushy, creepy, or sales-y.

Your relationships are not some monolith, on standby to be programmed and dispatched. They are, of course, a set of individuals with important variations. Some might be longtime friends; you have known each other but never cross paths professionally. Others might be more recent or transactional. Across the board, they likely are a combination of different demographic categories, communication preferences, experiences, and status.

No single script, program, or enticement is going to work with all of them. (That would be an insult anyway!) But those differences are less important in practice than are the similarities.

You saw in Chapter 5 the evidence that, by personality, most of us are naturally wired for these conversations. In this chapter, we will put common assumptions about generational differences under the microscope as well. Spoiler alert: It turns out that professionals across the age spectrum value and use face-to-face conversation to remarkably similar degrees. I have also found that—for nearly everyone—our effectiveness as messengers mostly comes down to three factors that have little if anything to do with demographics.

IS THERE A GENERATION GAP IN COMMUNICATION?

The principles in this book are valuable for professionals across age and cultural categories. Even so, we need to take stock of the major demographic trends affecting workplaces everywhere.

In the United States, the so-called Millennial generation (generally defined as those born between 1981 and 1996) is the largest segment in the workforce. Millennials now outnumber the Generation X and Baby Boomer segments in terms of the numbers of those either working or looking for work. Close on their heels are the post-Millennial (Generation Y) age group, the oldest of whom are now workers too.

I tend to discount the value of wide, clunky categories such as “Millennials” or “Boomers” when it comes to explaining human behavior. However, when it comes to the relationships that professionals have with technology and communication, well, we should recognize the obvious. Technological changes have come at us rapidly. We can expect different communication styles, expectations, and comfort levels based on age categories and experiences.

The Baby Boomers have spent much of their lives immersed in face-to-face and phone conversations before bringing the digital world (at least some elements of it) into their lives. Generation Y is generally regarded as the first digital-native generation. Generation X and the Millennials represent a progression along the continuum. The digital communication world is inherently efficient and scalable. It is also on the sterile side, lacking the intimacy and nonverbal elements of more personal and face-to-face communication. Where is the younger professional set landing?

Wei Lui's research into Generation Y reveals a few characteristics of their preferred communication styles, namely that it be

• Instant (immediate and spontaneous)
• Playful (enjoyable and challenging)
• Collaborative (supportive, unifying, and shared)
• Expressive (open, free, and animated)
• Responsive (alert and quick)
• Flexible (adaptable and accommodating)

What isn't completely clear is how different these preferences are from those of other generations. In fact, some survey research shows that the younger set has some fairly old-school ideas about communication and technology. For example, a study from the HR services firm Randstad showed that most members of Generations Y and Z preferred face-to-face communication with managers over emails or instant messaging. Only 14 percent believed that technology improves personal relationships with co-workers.

Yes, there will be natural variations among employees, colleagues, customers, and everyone else who can serve as messengers. But when it comes to managing your message, let's not make this more complicated than it needs to be. There are important similarities and unifying factors across the generational spectrum. A few factors will tend to determine the success of your messengers, regardless of whether they are long in the tooth, cutting their teeth, or somewhere in between.

THE THREE THINGS YOUR FUTURE MESSENGERS NEED MOST

Think of the people you consider to already be great advocates and messengers. They might be employees, partners, or maybe a customer. What is it about them that makes them so compelling and effective?

Over the years, I found that great messengers had certain qualities. They have something specific to say (typically, an experience they want to share). They are comfortable in the way they express themselves, whether their medium of choice is face-to-face conversation, social media, or something else. They are also proactive about sharing what they know with people they believe will benefit from it.

Putting on the professor and consultant hats, I have come to see these three high-level characteristics of effective messengers as

• Knowledge
• Skill
• Confidence

If that is what the conversation is like when someone has all three elements, what happens when one of the elements is absent? How do we know when a messenger could use our help in a particular area?

If messengers lack knowledge about a particular organization, they will likely make poor recommendations. It's not that they would intend to. But if your knowledge of a company's products, services, or values is incomplete or dated, you lack the basic data to talk about it or recommend it to others.

If communication skill is missing, the audience will likely be distracted. It is simply difficult to get past obvious problems with word choice, grammar, or stories; the audience tends to focus on the communication misstep much like they might “rubberneck” to notice a fender-bender accident on the road to work. As noted in Chapter 6, the lack of skill can lead to a mangled message.

If confidence is low, there is unrealized value—for both the potential messenger and the people he or she can help. Such messengers don't engage and don't offer the world the benefits of their experience and training. It's a shame, because as we have seen most people are naturally wired for competence in conversation.

Let's equip more messengers with what they need so that they will engage, making their recommendations and sharing their ideas in ways that get the right type of attention.

KNOWLEDGE: WHAT DOES EVERYONE NEED TO KNOW?

I once heard the CEO of a fast-casual restaurant chain report that, when she first took on her leadership role, “More people knew how to apply for time off than knew what was on our menu.”

For restaurants, the menu is a literal asset; it sets out all of the things that the restaurant offers to customers. For non-restaurant businesses, your menu is a more symbolic concept. But let's get real here. Do your employees know all of the things that customers can buy from you? Do they understand what your best customers are like and why they choose to buy from you?

This is not a pop quiz, of course. No one expects encyclopedic knowledge. We do, however, want people to have relevant knowledge rooted in the specifics of their most common customer interactions.

Alex Goldfayn consults with many companies—typically mid-sized private companies in mature industries—to help them grow sales revenue. Over the years he has asked thousands of business leaders to estimate what Alex calls their “awareness percentage,” or the percentage of the total portfolio of products and services that their customers are even aware of. Alex reports an average awareness percentage of only 25 percent. That means customers—who often have been customers for many years—do not know about three-quarters of the things the company sells. That can constrict a business.

Without knowledge of the basics—as you define them for your organization—messengers cannot be prepared to offer perspective, advice, or recommendations. Their default mode will be to give customers too many options. That only makes things more difficult. It's the difference between “You must try this great restaurant!” and “There are lots of options . . . I'm sure you will find one that's good for you.”

SKILLS: SAY IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT

It is easy it is to fall into sloppy patterns of speech and other communication forms. Some of those corrosive patterns might be costing you plenty.

Many salespeople, product leaders, and subject matter experts—particularly those in technology companies—are now in the habit of starting sentences with “So.” Buyers are starting to notice and typically find it annoying. I have even caught myself doing it a few times lately; I might need the equivalent of a swear jar to head that one off.

If “so” is potentially a bit annoying, another persistent speech habit can be truly damaging. “Upspeaking,” the pattern of ending a sentence with a rising pitch (so that a declaration sounds like a question), is itself on the rise. The trend even has a name: high-rising terminal (HRT). The pattern gained a foothold among American teens years ago and has unfortunately followed many of them into adulthood. HRT has also spread across age groups in the United States as well as into other nations and cultures.

Interestingly, HRT has long been the norm in Australia and New Zealand (it's known as the “Australian Question Intonation”). American and Aussie TV shows consumed in the United Kingdom are being blamed for spreading upspeak among professional Brits. A study of British managers and executives from the publishing giant Pearson found that most (71 percent) agree upspeaking is a “particularly annoying trait”; more than 80 percent said it is “a clear indicator of a person's insecurity or emotional weakness.” More than half said upspeakers would be limited in job promotions and raises within their organization.

HRT isn't just for Valley Girls anymore, and it obviously damages credibility and persuasiveness.

My observation has been that women use upspeak much more often than do men. A clever study in the journal Gender & Society demonstrated the pattern.

If HRT serves to frame statements in the form of a question, the game show Jeopardy! would probably be a great laboratory for examining the practice. That's what Tom Linneman did—he examined 100 episodes with 300 contestants and a total of 5,500 responses. On the show, women did indeed use upspeak twice as often as did the male contestants. But another interesting gender difference emerged as well. For the men, the frequency of upspeak changed with success or failure; men who answered correctly used upspeak 27 percent of the time but those who were incorrect used it 57 percent of the time. The female contestants who answered correctly used upspeak 48 percent of the time, and that didn't vary significantly when they were incorrect.

Upspeak is a pervasive and unhealthy communications trend. It will hold you back in a professional setting. Young women are particularly susceptible to using HRT as well as being undermined by it. If you are looking for a professionally limiting habit to shed—or if you are trying to help a work colleague, your child, or a young adult you're mentoring—then addressing HRT might be the place to begin.

So I guess you'll want to get on that?

MORE SKILLS: LEND THE WORLD YOUR EAR

One of the sayings around my Georgia hometown was, “You got two ears and one mouth, so you probably ought to do more listening than talking.” In today's professional world, if you ask high performers about their most valuable skills, you are likely to hear something about “listening” near the top of the list. And yet professionals with great expertise can be the worst offenders. We are problem solvers, with fine-tuned radar to locate patterns. We know (or think we know) the path that will be best, and we want to get right to it.

For example, who is more of an expert problem solver than your doctor? We need our doctor's expertise, yet most patient encounters with their doctors don't involve much in the way of listening.

According to a study of actual doctor-patient conversations, physicians give patients an average of just 11 seconds to describe their issue before cutting them off. Specialists are on average even less patient than are general practitioners. Only 20 percent of specialists give patients the opportunity to describe their issue at the onset of a consultation. That is startling. Sure, the specialist might have received some briefing on the patient's problem through a referral or a nurse's report. But as the study's co-author Naykyy Singh Ospina said in an interview, “Even in a specialty visit concerning a specific matter, it is invaluable to understand why the patients think they are at the appointment and what specific concerns they have related to the condition or its management.”

When the doctor-patient conversation is more interactive, good things happen. Patients even save money. A research team from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, the Duke University School of Medicine, and several other institutions examined actual recorded dialogue from more than 1,700 outpatient visits. The patients were dealing with breast cancer, depression, or rheumatoid arthritis—all conditions with potentially high out-of-pocket costs. The conversations involved oncologists, psychiatrists, and rheumatologists.

The researchers wanted to learn how often cost came up in the conversation, who brought it up, and what the results were. Among the findings:

• Cost was part of the doctor-patient conversation 30 percent of the time. This was an increase from studies conducted several years prior.
• Doctors were just as likely to bring up the topic of cost as were their patients.
• The cost component of the conversation usually lasted one minute or less.
• In nearly half of those times when cost was discussed, either the doctor or the patient came up with a simple strategy to lower cost.

The most typical areas for cost savings included switching pharmacies, using co-pay assistance or drug coupons, switching to lower-cost tests, and using free samples of new medications. The patients' overall care plans were usually not affected.

If doctors are actually becoming more proactive in their conversations, then it would be a promising trend for all concerned. The very notion of “improved patient conversations” has seemed like a double-edged sword to many of the physicians with whom I've spoken. Doctors certainly want their patients to see them sooner (before small issues become larger ones), be more forthcoming, and ask questions. At the same time, more patients have come to those conversations already armed with assumptions (often picked up online) and preferences (based on advertising for prescription drugs). Doctors complain that patients pressure them for unnecessary drugs, tests, or procedures—or don't follow their instructions after the visit. In response, medical groups are trying to regain control of the conversation.

There are important lessons here for medical conversations—but also for anyone marketing complex and/or higher-priced products and services. Issues like cost are uncomfortable for potential buyers; they feel vulnerable because they believe they are at an information disadvantage. You might lose a sale just because the potential buyer isn't aware of options and does not want to bring up the topic.

CONFIDENCE: “I CAN DO THIS”

Have you seen someone who appears to have all the knowledge, skills, and incentives necessary to perform well—yet they never “get into it”? It is relatively easy to come up with excuses, put it off, set other priorities, or leave the conversation to someone else.

When it comes to sharing an important message—even one that people believe to be true, valuable, and important—why is it that some will hesitate or avoid altogether?

I once helped to lead a training event for a corporate client, when new messaging (including a conversation designed to be led from a whiteboard) was introduced to approximately a hundred sales and sales-support professionals. Most of the participants had been with the company, or at least in the industry, for many years.

An important element of the training was to have everyone practice the whiteboard conversation with a colleague, after which a couple of people (those who seemed particularly comfortable with it) were asked if they would come to the front of the room and role-play for the entire group. The “winner” according to audience applause would receive a nice prize. On this day the winner was a woman in her twenties. She had been with the company for exactly one day before the training.

It would have been natural and expected for this woman to hang back during the competition. Even when her practice performance stood out, it would have easier to decline the offer rather than get in front of a hundred brand-new colleagues. Where did all of that confidence come from? More importantly, how can we help our potential messengers take what they know and infuse it with enough confidence so that they don't sit on the fence?

We can find some clues in other domains. A study of college athletes, for example, showed that variables such as mastery, demonstration of ability, preparation, and social support were most important in building self-confidence.

When it comes to business messaging, here are the most important confidence-building beliefs that I find in messengers:

• “I can do this.” This is the belief that your knowledge and skill levels are adequate for the types of conversations you will be having.
• “I don't have to be perfect.” Confident messengers know they won't be called out or punished if something is not quite right. Managers can reinforce this belief by making and keeping the promise that, as long as someone isn't lying, they won't face any sanction for doing their best to spread the message and help others.
• “This feels right to me.” Confident messengers believe that the message itself is both authentic and a good fit for how they want the world to see them.
• “I'm not alone.” They see their peers and friends doing similar things and have confidence that members of the group will support one another.

WHAT ABOUT YOUR PASSIONATE CORE?

Sometimes there are employees, customers, members, or volunteers for whom confidence doesn't seem to be a problem. They are the ones who jump into the conversational fray without much prompting or encouragement. They tell lots of other people about their experiences. They might even dream about it, for all we know.

These are the passionate fans, and every organization wants them. They bring energy and enthusiasm. Nevertheless, many passionate and well-intentioned people are lousy messengers for the organizations and causes they are most passionate about.

Consider the example of climate change, an ongoing conversation for several decades now worldwide. (I'm not expressing a political opinion on the issue, by the way. Let's just not.) There has been an interesting evolution in both the language of the debate and public opinion over time. Gallup's annual survey about the environment reveals three segments within the US population when it comes to beliefs about climate change: Concerned Believers (nearly half of adults), the Mixed Middle (about one-third), and Cool Skeptics (about one-fifth). Overall opinions have been relatively steady for several years, although the divisions by segment are increasingly defined along partisan lines. Americans have settled into their views about what policies, if any, are necessary for climate protection.

Beyond policy matters, Americans continue to support the idea of care for the environment. A 2017 survey from the Pew Research Center found that 74 percent of US adults agree “the country should do whatever it takes to protect the environment.” Fair enough. But then the numbers get really interesting.

Since the late 1980s, Gallup has asked Americans this question: “Do you consider yourself an environmentalist, or not?” In May 1989, a total of 76 percent of their sample responded “yes.” In 1995 that still described a majority of Americans but fell to 63 percent. By 1999 the number was down to 50 percent. By 2018 it was 42 percent.

How is it that nearly three-quarters of Americans feel strongly that the environment requires protection, yet fewer than half consider themselves environmentalists? There is no simple answer, but I strongly suspect that the messaging from some of the most passionate environmentalists is part of the issue.

Many climate activists have taken to publicly calling out their opponents as “deniers.” Perhaps they are frustrated and want immediate action. Perhaps they are convinced that the weight of evidence is on their side, even though thoughtful and well-intentioned people can raise legitimate questions about measurements of surface temperatures. But the cycle of “No, I'm not!” and “Yes, you are!” won't lead anywhere.

It's important to remember that the best rallying cries are generally framed toward the positive. Heifer International is about “ending hunger and poverty.” Ambassadors of Compassion is about “equipping youth for life.” Sometimes an effective message is focused on alleviating a negative, as with the Wounded Warrior Project (“the greatest casualty is being forgotten”). In either case, the audience should feel that they can personally affect an improved outcome.

The positive force that brings people into the group can, unfortunately, easily lead to a negative counter force. We know from social psychology that those who identify themselves into a group (for them, the “ingroup”) can easily denigrate those on the outside of the group (the “outgroup”). When the messaging loses its focus on the positive outcomes to be achieved and instead descends into comments on an outgroup, the cause itself can get stuck. That's likely contributing to the Gallup results.

Whether your passion is for the environment, a company, your community, education, economic opportunity, or anything else, the clear and positive discipline of your messaging will to a large degree determine your probability of success. The “Mixed Middle” is on the fence, listening to what both sides have to say and evaluating the tribes.

Your base of messengers and potential messengers is likely diverse—cutting across roles, experiences, and age categories. They also have a lot in common. They are looking for connections.

They will also be looking to others for the example to follow. Another spoiler alert: It very well might be the person staring back at you in the mirror.