Unmute. Part 1.
When I was a CIO, all I wanted was the truth.
In time, I learned the pre-req for truth is psychological safety. It was on me to create a safe place for my team to express their doubts, concerns, and questions.
As an executive coach, the tables are turned. My value is predicated on providing the kind truth. This includes saying things my clients may not want, but need, to hear.
And the ultimate irony is: they need to be nudged to Unmute themselves.
Clients routinely share tough conflicts they’re experiencing with their boss or earning buy-in with their peers. I politely prompt them to, “Tell me what you’ve done to date to resolve this conflict and create buy-in?”
Many times, the answer is simply, “I feel stuck but don’t want to create drama.”
So, for the next three newsletters, I want to unpack this topic. My hope is that it will encourage you to Unmute yourself. Your voice is your power … your power to make positive change and impact.
I’m going to share three key areas of Unmuting yourself: persuasion, clarity, and conflict.
This week, let’s start with persuasion. This is the act of building buy-in or preference for our ideas. Persuasion is not the same as salesmanship, coercion, or any form of disingenuous manipulation.
Instead, persuasion is an honest process of helping someone else consider a new idea. Irrational human behavior will always make this messy, so our approach must be informed by psychology and neuroscience.
Persuasion requires us to respect the three states someone goes through when considering something new: awareness, understanding, and preference.
Awareness. There’s always a first time someone hears an idea. This is traditionally done through email announcements or town hall meetings. Contrary to popular opinion, transparency should not be the goal of this stage. Rather, clarity is the goal.
Transparency vomits endless data points and the recipient is forced to organize what’s important. Clarity provides relevant information that is organized for the recipient so that they may take action.
Next week, I’m going to share a simple formula for clarity that you can use in your communication. Spoiler alert: awareness only requires verbs and nouns. Avoiding fluffy adverbs and adjectives is key.
Understanding. After someone hears a new idea for the first time, their brains immediately shift to impact analysis. They want to know how this will affect their day-to-day work and whether they have the skills they need to succeed.
But to help them, our tactics have to be more than words. We need to provide something experiential. We can do this by piloting the system with real data, letting another end-user provide social proof, or asking people to participate in testing.
Attaching a 40-page document with screen shots of the new system is not experiential. It does not prepare people for change. Full stop.
Preference. Eventually, we want someone to reach a point where they say, “My work is so much better because of this idea.” This is the same as buy-in. Admittedly, this is tricky.
To gain preference, we should use two tactics. First, we should ask for feedback and input about our ideas. We can directly ask, “After hearing and experiencing this idea, what’s your TOP concern?” Then, we have to attend to their response by taking demonstrable action.
Second, we need to provide responsive and empathetic support as soon as something doesn’t go as planned. This is hard for many IT orgs who shift the support burden to help desk employees, who don’t have as much experience as the project team.
This is WHY I always recommend a 30-60 day “burn in” period. Our project team can’t just run to the next thing. In the early stages of change, they must be available to support unexpected issues. This builds trust.
Here’s the key punchline for this week’s newsletter: Most IT leaders stop at building awareness. Some provide “training” to promote understanding, but it isn’t experiential. And few, actually focus on building preference.
In fact, what I most commonly see is a one-liner on a 1,000-line project plan that says “communications and training plan.”
When you consider that 75% of all tech initiatives fail, the one-liner in the project plan is clearly not working.
Please join me next week. I’ll provide a simple formula for clarity in your communication. Hope this helps!
Make it a great day!
