Language

The words we use matter.  If we are careless in the language that we use, it indicates a carelessness in thinking.  The language we choose reflects our thinking.  Similarly, the words we use can subtly change our thinking.  Consider the following:

• When we travel, we aren’t travelers in a foreign land but foreigners in a traveled land.
• An employee or a customer who is wheelchair bound isn't a handicap or a handicapped person, but a person with a handicap.
• When we are addressing a customer service issue, we are not dealing with a soon-to-be former customer with a complaint but a customer who was not satisfied.  Or if you are a glass half full kind of person, we are dealing with a customer who is giving us a chance to improve.

To some extent we are talking about semantics.  But how we label things makes a difference in how we think and act toward those things.  In a recent blog, I shared a quote by Abraham Lincoln: "We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses."

Would you rather deal with problems or opportunities?  Would you rather be managing a response or leading your team to the answer?  Would you rather be a disruptor or a change agent?

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Quality vs. Control

In today's marketplace, a communicator needs to focus on clarity of message and connecting with key audiences more than controlling the message.

Occassionally a communicator may have the illusion that she can control the message.  It is only an illusion.

Today's marketplace provides us with an opportunity to have a dialog WITH our key audiences (new media) versus a lecture AT our key audiences (old media).  Everyone knows that in a dialog, you can only realistically control no more than one half of the conversation.

So what are we professional communicators to do if we can no longer realistically claim the super-secret ability to control the message?

The answer is something we should have been focusing on all along.  We need to refocus on the clarity and the quality of our messages.  We need to sharpen our pencils (most likely metaphorically) and pay attention to creating carefully crafted, concise messages that clearly communicate one or two key messages.  (For the mathematically inclined reader, or those of you who are aspiring marketing consultants, you would state this as 6C=Q.)

When you can only control your half of the dialog, you need to make sure that is a high quality half!

We need to focus on making sure we are delivering messages that communicate our key message as clearly and engagingly as possible.  THEN, we need to listen for feedback that will tell us if our messages are as clear and engaging as we anticipated.  If they aren't, you adjust and start over again.

If your quality is good, I guess you don't need to worry about control.

It IS the Message that Counts

If you've worked in public relations, marketing or communications for any time, I am pretty sure you've had an experience similar to one I had recently.  A local reporter expressed interest in covering a project I was involved in.  I gave the reporter some background and a framework for the project and connected him to some of the principals of the project.  The reporter talked with some of those principals and wrote his story.

The story, upon reading it in the newspaper, was not what I had hoped it would be.  Some key facts were misstated or left out, pretty much everyone thought they were misquoted, and while generally positive in tone, the article did not portray the project in the way I would have preferred.  I was disappointed.

But then I started talking to people.  Several people told me that they had read the article.  What amazed me is that every single person I talked with recited back to me the key message we were trying to get out.  I thought the key message had been obscured in the article.  Others involved in the project had trouble seeing past the minor factual errors that were in the article. We couldn't see the forest for the trees.

The casual reader, however, got the key message.  Loud and clear.

I guess it was a pretty good article!

Clear Away the Mist: Focus on the Clarity of Your Message

"If there is a mist in the pulpit, it's a fog in the pew."  
                                                                                               Theologian Howard Hendricks

The idea of communications is to share a thought or a message from one person to another.  Sometimes we do this one on one in a conversation; sometimes the message gets amplified through media or circumstance and becomes one to many communication.  Sometimes the message is delivered TO the audience, other times it is part of a dialogue.

Regardless of the size of the audience, the media used, the goal of the communications (making a sale, presenting a point of view, finding out if you should pick up milk or orange juice) clarity of the message is the key.  If your message is clear, you stand a better chance of your audience receiving it as you intended.

The thing about message clarity is that it is ALL in the eye, or ears, of the beholder.  Just like customer service, it is the perception of the receiver that matters.  Good intentions don't score points in football or in communications.  Your message has to be clear to the receiver of the message for it to be a clear message.

This is where Mr. Hendricks' quote becomes relevant.  One of the things that speakers CAN do is to be clear about the message they want to deliver.  If there is confusion in the mind of the speaker as to what the message is, you can be guaranteed that confusion will be multiplied by the time it gets to the listener.  Think of the children's game of Operator.  As a message gets passed from child to child, it becomes more and more divorced from the reality of the original message.

There are many other things that a communicator can do to improve the chances that his or her message will be received with clarity.  Those will be topics of future blog posts.  For today, for the purposes of clarity, I am focusing on just one piece of advise:  Be clear about the message you want to deliver and you increase the chances that you actually will!