Communication-Powered Growth – Workshop 1 (Communication Consistency Reset)
The Appleton Greene Corporate Training Program (CTP) for Communication-Powered Growth is provided by Ms. Spencer Certified Learning Provider (CLP). Program Specifications: Monthly cost USD$2,500.00; Monthly Workshops 6 hours; Monthly Support 4 hours; Program Duration 12 months; Program orders subject to ongoing availability.
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Learning Provider Profile
Ms. Spencer has been passionate about using words with purpose since she was a young girl who realized the power that written and spoken communication had in her own life.
After spending 10 years in the nonprofit world as a humanitarian worker in Hungary and Greece, and 3 more years as a book services provider, she started working with business owners exclusively. Ms. Spencer taught her clients how to tell their personal stories as a way to improve their marketing based on the knowledge she acquired in both the Comparative World Literature program at California State University of Long Beach (2005) and her Copyediting Certification from the University of California, San Diego (2020).
That’s when she realized that she could use her love of language to transition into the professional space of business development and became trained as a Certified Copywriter through the Written Results Academy (2020). Several years later, she pursued more specific business through completing Cornell University’s Women’s Entrepreneurship program (2023).
Ms. Spencer has since written over 30 books and spent time as a ghostwriter on the bench for Forbes Books, where she worked with businesses to use book writing as a strategic tool combined with custom-created offers to grow their businesses. Plus, she helped them increase both their impact and influence.
In addition to this work, Ms. Spencer is also a founding member of the consulting group She Has Infinite Potential (SHIP), which has worked to create better and more profitable opportunities for professional women in industries where they are underrecognized, such as business development and technology. In 2023, SHIP was recognized as having one of the most influential panels at the Women in Tech Global conference.
Ms. Spencer’s skills include: customized offer creation; expert level copywriting; creative marketing solutions; business-wide communication improvements; diversity and equity training; creative mindset coaching; conflict resolution; business storytelling; futurecasting. Ms. Spencer has over 15 years of experience as a professional writer and communicator and is a lifelong learner who helps her clients improve their revenue and productivity.
MOST Analysis
Mission Statement
When your organization goes through the process of changing the language in your marketing, your organization needs to be able to maintain consistency, and the best way to do that is to do a multi-departmental reset. During this process, we educate all team members in attendance on how to listen and communicate based on the powerful principles we plan to use as a vehicle to propel future growth. There will also be mindset work to help everyone combat their own scarcity mindset as we visit potential changes for the organization moving forward.
Objectives
01. Creating Clarity: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
02. Constructing Concision: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
03. Producing Consistency: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
04. Enforcing Correctness: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
05. Benefit Focused: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
06. Organization Values: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
07. Organization’s Purchaser: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. 1 Month
08. Touchstone Principles: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
09. Reducing Friction: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
10. Strategic Subtraction: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
11. Communication Efficiency: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
12. Encouraging Curiosity: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
Strategies
01. Creating Clarity: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
02. Constructing Concision: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
03. Producing Consistency: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
04. Enforcing Correctness: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
05. Benefit Focused: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
06. Organization Values: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
07. Organization’s Purchaser: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
08. Touchstone Principles: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
09. Reducing Friction: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
10. Strategic Subtraction: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
11. Communication Efficiency: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
12. Encouraging Curiosity: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
Tasks
01. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Creating Clarity.
02. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Constructing Concision.
03. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Producing Consistency.
04. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Enforcing Correctness.
05. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Benefit Focused.
06. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Organization Values.
07. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Organization’s Purchaser.
08. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Touchstone Principles.
09. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Reducing Friction.
10. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Strategic Subtraction.
11. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Communication Efficiency.
12. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Encouraging Curiosity.
Introduction
Have you ever wondered just how much communication influences your organization’s growth? In the first chapter of the Communication-Powered Growth workshop, we’re going to explore the nuances of effective communication through 12 in-depth course manuals to help you understand communication’s real, lasting potential in your organization.
As we work to take your company’s potential to new heights, you’ll learn a vital of effective communication in each course manual—for both your interior team and also your exterior clients or customers.
While we help your organization go through a thorough communication reset, you’ll also learn how to promote clarity in the words you and your team write and say by engaging curiosity on every level.
The Four Cs—Clear, Concise, Consistent, and Correct
We’ll start by learning more about clarity, a basic yet often disregarded communication foundation. Think of your company as a well-known product. Do you know how to describe it in simple, easy-to-understand words? After this course manual, you will. It’s time to abandon technical terms and industry jargon, which is costing you way more than keeping it around is worth. Confused people don’t buy, and when you’re working in a company, you need to make sure that everyone on the outside understands every word you use.
Next, it’s time to focus on time. The number of seconds, minutes, and hours we have are finite. We can never make more time. In this course manual, we will examine instances of language that appear academic in nature, but need to be distilled into more manageable forms. Your company can more efficiently communicate ideas by developing concision, which will save time for both you and your audience.
Then, as we turn to the third C, it’s time to focus in on consistency. Establishing baseline communication and attitudes toward those communications can help to ensure a consistent and united voice across all mediums, both for your organization as a whole right now and also looking forward to future growth.
The fourth C is all about correctness, which can feel tricky in a world where you always want to put your best foot forward. However, nothing damages the confidence of a potential client or customer more quickly than false information. We’ll talk about the value of accuracy in communication as well as techniques for double-checking your messages. Plus, you’ll learn how to maintain credibility and build customer trust—a vital resource for any business.
Benefit-Focused Language
Creating messaging that has an impact requires an understanding of your particular buyer. We’ll look at how to speak to them in a way that engages their curiosity by going beyond simple facts to highlight the ways in which your product or service can change the lives of your clients or customers. To practice, we’ll find and create benefit-focused language that engages your audience by helping them see what real results look like with your expert help.
Organization Values and Purchaser Values
Learning how to combine the values of your company with the values that your unique purchasers expect can feel tricky without expert guidance. The cornerstone of the values of your company are explained by its touchstone principles. We’ll lead you through exercises that help you distinguish between underlying values and financial goals to help you set priorities that truly express the values that characterize your company. Plus, knowing there are different sorts of buyers, we will help you customize your message to speak to each one by working through the three pieces of any successful testimonial.
Discover how to combine your touchstone principles with the values of your unique purchasers to produce a potent guiding force. In this part of the workshop, you’ll learn to ask yourself guided questions that will help you discover and hone these concepts so they your organization can achieve real consistency.
In addition, you’ll learn how to take a psychographic approach over the outdated demographic method that many marketing agencies still employ for their own ease of understanding. It’s time to understand the people who purchase from you in a more inclusive way so that everyone in your organization knows exactly what kind of unique purchasers you serve based on mutual values.
Communicate Efficiently, Decrease Friction, and Employ Strategic Subtraction
Get experience-based guidance on how to gently handle internal conflicts by applying the communication-based lessons you’ve learnt thus far. And if you aren’t able to reduce friction with a specific individual or client, you will also learn to recognize when strategic subtraction is the best course for organizational development.
You will also increase your capacity to turn away clients and consumers that don’t align with your core values to continually improve your communication to draw in customers or clients who your team is excited to work with.
Once you have these foundational building blocks for better communication, you’ll be able to improve your efficiency as an organization overall, and the satisfaction of your team members and unique purchasers.
Encouraging Curiosity
Once your organization adopts a culture of continual curiosity and life-long learning, your company will stay at the forefront of innovation.
Join us as we set out on this life-changing adventure where communication serves as both a tool and a catalyst for unmatched development. Prepare to transform how you interact, connect, and succeed in the ever-changing world of corporate communications.
Executive Summary
Chapter 1: Creating Clarity
Effective communication serves as the vital link between thought, speech, and action in both personal and professional spheres. This exploration of clarity delves into the ways we can enhance communication within teams, with leaders, and among clients, laying a robust foundation for ongoing interactions.
The first crucial step towards clarity involves addressing and editing the use of jargon and industry-specific language. Analogous to a professional editor ensuring reader-friendly content in a book, it is essential to evaluate whether our words are comprehensible to those seeking assistance. Business communication strategists and marketing experts play a pivotal role in interpreting and bridging the communication gap between organizations and their audiences, especially in the absence of editors in the professional realm.
Two fundamental questions guide this lesson:
1. Am I using industry-specific language that might confuse someone on my team?
2. Am I using industry-specific language that might confuse our clients or customers?
Persistent use of jargon, even unintentionally, can impede understanding, leading to diminished trust, potential financial losses, and communication-related mistakes. Poor communication, as reported by Agility PR Solutions, incurs a staggering $1.2 trillion annual cost for U.S. businesses. Clear and simple communication is not just about effectiveness but is also a significant factor in building and maintaining trust.
Ensuring clarity in communication is vital for fostering trust in every interaction. In cases where different organizational departments lack mutual understanding, communication breakdowns occur. For example, if engineers understand a product thoroughly while the marketing department lacks the same knowledge, showcasing the product’s benefits becomes challenging. Clear communication becomes the linchpin for constructing a solid organizational foundation.
Clarity, defined by its ease of understanding, obviousness, specificity, and use of simple, widely-known terms, contrasts with vague language, which is confusing and lacks specificity. Practicing clarity involves anticipating follow-up questions and ensuring the provision of all necessary information.
Chapter 2: Constructing Concision
Concision, a fundamental aspect of effective communication, revolves around the concept of time. The essence of concision lies in expressing ideas, instructions, or principles using the fewest possible words. This emphasis on brevity is crucial because time is our only nonrenewable resource. Although we can delegate tasks to save time, the immutable truth remains that time cannot be created or replenished.
Consider the considerable time wasted in unclear communication—similar inefficiencies occur when communication lacks concision. Exploring the different Cs of communication, including clarity and concision, becomes imperative as they collectively contribute not only to time savings but also to financial benefits for organizations. The absence of concision often results in confusion, highlighting the significance of meticulous word selection.
In most cases, a loss of clarity fosters confusion, which negatively impacts the buying decisions of unique purchasers. Additionally, confusion breeds mistrust—a formidable adversary for any professional organization engaged in selling goods or services.
However, it’s crucial to emphasize that employing fewer words solely for time-saving purposes is insufficient. Concision must coexist in a delicate balance with understanding. If concision comes at the expense of understanding, confusion is introduced, undermining the effectiveness of communication. Therefore, the mastery of concision involves maintaining this delicate equilibrium to ensure clarity, efficiency, and trust in professional communication.
Chapter 3: Producing Consistency
Have you ever had a conversation with a professional whose help you needed and felt a little uneasy? Odds are, something they said didn’t match what you know about the organization, and your brain is suspicious. When you see a discrepancy between what someone says and what you’ve already experienced with them, it’s almost like a mental alarm. The similar thing occurs when you hear a company’s material sounding different than it usually does; you feel an internal alarm.
Even a small discrepancy can undermine your confidence in an entire organization. Or, imagine this: after you have been consistently interacting with a company’s content, they abruptly stop communicating. What comes to mind first? Most likely, your brain asserts, something has gone terribly wrong.
Given that organizations comprise individuals with diverse strengths and ideas, having a company-wide document to articulate your methods, values, and goals is crucial. This document, which we call a messaging breakdown, serves as a guide for everyone, from newcomers to seasoned veteran, outlining precisely what the organization does, the reasons behind these actions, and the values tied to its goals. It’s the compass that aligns every individual with the company’s mission, ensuring a unified and consistent voice, regardless of the person’s tenure.
Chapter 4: Enforcing Correctness
Potential customers or clients of yours have previously been lied to. This is why choosing accurate and truthful communication is so important. You will harm your brand if all of your communications don’t provide realistic portrayals of what your organization is capable of.
Yes, it is crucial to use straightforward language while communicating. However, if your statements are false, it makes no difference how clear, concise, or consistent you are. Correctness is the one of the four Cs that generates the follow-through required for all kinds of growth.
Truth is the foundation of correctness, and many people are inherently able to recognize when someone is lying to or manipulating them. The quantity of liars and manipulators that exist and prosper in today’s world has forced our clients or customers and hone the skill of noticing when things feel even a little off.
Plus, correctness and truth have become a standard not just for purchasing, but also satisfied employment. Every company needs to be dedicated to correctness within its walls (or digital rooms) in order to keep workers and create innovative, productive teams excited and willing to work with them.
Chapter 5: Benefit Focused
In your organization, when communicating with potential clients or customers, a critical question arises: Does your team member truly grasp the benefits clients will see from your products or services? This question shapes our approach to benefit-focused communication.
Emphasizing benefits in communication is essential because how you discuss your offerings must revolve around the real benefits your unique purchasers experience. Many companies get caught by focusing too much on their processes. While internal teams may find excitement in guiding customers through a clear path to meet their needs, clients prioritize the results that wait for them at the end of your journey together. So, what lies ahead for them? Is it the solution they’ve been longing for?
Besides outlining the advantages of your product or service, you must provide additional forms of awareness. Clients must realize that they require outside help before they’ll purchase, but not every individual recognizes they have a specific problem. They might sense frustration and desire change, yet remain unaware that these feelings stem from an issue that you can assist them with.
Introducing the benefits not only highlights the advantages but also unveils a problem they might not be conscious of, it also gives them a way to address their problem. This comprehensive approach ensures that your communication is effective, addressing both known and unknown concerns, guiding potential clients toward a clearer understanding of both their needs and the solutions you offer.
Chapter 6: Organization Values
Your company’s values are like the North Star, the guiding principles that steer your ship in the vast ocean of business. Now, one common mistake many organizations make is coming up with vague values, thinking it makes them sound all thoughtful and relevant. But here’s the thing, if your values are all over the place, they won’t do justice in telling the world what your organization really prioritizes.
In this course manual, you’ll take a more critical look at your current values or mission statement. You’ll discover where the values you have are a specific roadmap or a random list thrown together by some “messaging expert” to please the masses.
As we journey through this course, we’ll focus on the value of specificity. It’s time to put your values under a microscope—the more detailed, the better. But what happens when things change? Recognizing and adjusting these guiding principles over time is crucial. Businesses evolve, and so should their values. But finding a balance between keeping the main thing the main thing and giving into social pressures can be difficult. In this course manual, you’ll learn how which pieces of your values are flexible, and which ones are foundational.
Chapter 7: Organization’s Purchaser
In the dynamic realm of marketing, the conventional approach of targeting the ideal client avatar (ICA) has held sway for decades. However, just because it is considered the standard doesn’t mean it’s the best strategy.
A significant drawback of relying on an ICA for crafting messages and outreach lies in its inherent exclusivity. Those tasked with creating the ICA are often confined to the familiar, interacting repeatedly with the same people or groups. This limitation can result in overlooking diverse potential clients.
Surprisingly, the persistence of ICAs in marketing and copywriting isn’t necessarily for the client’s benefit but rather a convenience for marketing professionals. By tailoring messages to a narrow demographic based on assumed characteristics like race, age, gender, and income level, marketers streamline their setup and testing phases which means they have to do less work and less thinking.
So, if demographics aren’t the most effective means of identifying the right clients for an organization, what’s the alternative?
Enter psychographics—a modern solution that many marketing firms hastily dismiss as too costly. The truth is, they probably haven’t given psychographics a fair chance. While delving into segmented psychographics can be expensive due to testing across various segments, a broader approach to psychographics can unveil unique purchasers who align perfectly with what your organization offers.
So, what sets psychographics apart? Unlike demographics, psychographics delve into the values, lifestyles, personality traits, and convictions of your unique purchasers. By focusing on these nuanced aspects, businesses can tailor their marketing efforts more precisely, resonating with individuals who genuinely appreciate what the organization stands for and how it operates. In this course manual, we will look closer into psychographics to present a more comprehensive and insightful way to understand and connect with your audience.
Chapter 8: Touchstone Principles
In the world of effective communication, we often hear about mission statements, but for your fantastic company, we aim to go beyond mere missions. What we want to create are touchstones—deep, inspiring markers that resonate with every member of your team.
These touchstones serve as powerful reminders, uniting the entire organization in a shared purpose.
You might be asking, “How is this different from a mission statement?” A mission is about what you do—a document outlining your organization’s actions. In contrast, a touchstone goes deeper, reflecting your past, present, and future. It encapsulates who you’ve been, who you are, and who you aspire to be. Touchstone principles can be applied uniquely to your company.
Now, as we steer away from conventional mission statements, let’s delve into building touchstone principles that combine your organization’s values and capabilities. Each touchstone principle should embody a major, specific value of your organization, coupled with a related strength and a connecting pathway.
It’s not just about what you do; it’s about who your organization is and the journey your company is on.
So, within each touchstone principle, there lies a core value that defines your organization, a strength that amplifies that value, and a pathway that guides you from where you are to where you want to go. These touchstones become beacons, illuminating the essence of your company and guiding every team member towards a collective accomplishment.
This section of the course manual will help you think about touchstone principles in a practical way using fictional examples and clear frameworks you can use to build touchstone principles that bring your team together. Plus, we’ll go over how touchstone principles can change, and when they should stay the same.
Chapter 9: Reducing Friction
Every organization operates on four main types of communication: verbal, written, visual, and nonverbal. Professional communication is about sharing ideas and information to foster mutual understanding, adaptable to various work settings. But if communication isn’t handled in a methodical, proven way, there is a lot of room for friction to enter the professional processes in your organization. Let’s take a look at some specific areas where friction enters your company’s communication.
Verbal communication, while essential, often faces challenges like idea juggling, where individuals struggle to address multiple concepts simultaneously. This has the potential to introduce large amounts of friction. To overcome this issue, turning verbal points into a written list helps break down ideas for clearer responses. This is why assistants often take written notes to avoid losing crucial information during verbal exchanges.
In meetings, expecting team members to instantly memorize and respond to questions and instructions can hinder success. Establishing task-oriented written communication with a simple number system helps streamline responses. Each task or question gets a unique number, ensuring clear and concise answers, minimizing overwhelm.
Visual and nonverbal communication play vital roles too. Encouraging teams to make visuals easy to understand and be mindful of body language fosters effective communication.
When it comes to project drafts, a common mistake is asking for a final product upfront. This may lead to micro-management and team members feeling like failures. Instead, set realistic deadlines, asking for a first draft sooner. Clearly outline expectations using numbered or bulleted lists, emphasizing collaboration in the drafting process. This approach prepares team members for inevitable changes, fostering a positive and motivated work environment.
Ultimately, effective communication involves adapting your present strategies, recognizing that processes are often works in progress rather than rigid finalities.
Chapter 10: Strategic Subtraction
This course manual focuses on the advantages of employing psychographics for strategic growth through subtraction.
When you attempt to appeal to everyone, your message tends to resonate with no one—a commonly known challenge for marketers. This is why demographics were initially created, aiming to craft one message for various people in different situations, leading to confusion. However, demographics aren’t as helpful when it comes to refining your focus through subtraction, which is one the reasons why we lean more heavily on psychographics.
In the world of business, there are individuals you shouldn’t try to persuade, as the adage goes: if you can talk them into it, someone else can talk them out of it. Persuasion is a marketer’s job, and convincing someone for a cause only to have them swayed against it is a concern. To navigate this, the course suggests tapping into the psychographic values embedded in your touchstone principles. By communicating in alignment with these values, you can connect with those who share your values and genuinely need your assistance and subtract those who don’t want it.
To identify patterns and refine strategies, short debriefs after each job are recommended. However, it’s crucial to differentiate between difficult tasks within the focus area (the 20%) and those causing significant team-wide emotional exhaustion. While difficulty can lead to growth opportunities, exhaustion signals potential distractions.
When it comes to your team, if a person no longer fits due to shifts in focus or touchstone refinement, they may feel dissatisfied. In such cases, it’s essential to consider whether they’re still a good fit for the team and if their zone of genius aligns with the organization’s goals. Team members feeling out of place may stay for financial stability, but fostering an environment where individuals can thrive in their zones of genius is crucial for long-term satisfaction and success. This is one of the many reasons why strategic subtraction is vital to any organization’s growth.
Chapter 11: Communication Efficiency
This section emphasizes the impact of communication depth on team and organizational efficiency. Curiosity plays a vital role as it fosters empathy and reduces judgment. However, curiosity alone isn’t sufficient for creating the necessary emotional depth to reach your unique purchasers or to better support your team.
It’s time to invest in trust-building through question-asking and encouraging negative feedback. The methods shared in this course manual allow leaders to advocate for individual vulnerability within a safe context, while we build in ways to avoid inappropriate emotional discussions in the workplace.
Using questions to invite new solutions is a great way to find unconventional answers and foster innovation. The goal is to explore less obvious questions and answers, as true innovation is crucial for making any organization stand out among their competitors.
In practice, this involves treating seemingly basic questions from younger or newer team members as opportunities to reevaluate past limitations. Curiosity challenges traditional wisdom by continually asking questions others may have stopped asking. Plus, this practice generates new queries that haven’t been considered before.
To truly embrace a culture of wonderment, it is vital to suspend judgment when faced with suggestions or questions that may seem unnecessary. Training the brain to stay open to new responses and questions is crucial. Encouraging curiosity and minimizing judgment within your team will foster an environment where innovative ideas can flourish.
Chapter 12: Encouraging Curiosity
Curiosity proves invaluable in human communication, especially as individuals often interpret information through a more personal lens. Because of this, developing a habit of objectivity can be challenging, making curiosity a useful tool that promotes better problem solving and more creative thinking from your team.
Encouraging a shift from immediate judgment to a mindset of “yes, and…” enhances communication within teams. Even if parts of a suggestion don’t work, responding with “yes, and…” prompts alternative thinking, fostering a more constructive approach.
The ultimate goal is to make curiosity and objectivity the preferred mental approach, driving innovation. By viewing challenges as enjoyable puzzles rather than personal problems to be solved, individuals are more likely to generate creative and unprecedented solutions.
Despite the professional world’s traditional nature, embracing curiosity and objectivity is crucial for innovation. While traditionalism may resist innovative environments, the potential for increased revenue from creative solutions highlights the importance of fostering an atmosphere where innovation can thrive. This course manual emphasizes the need for a shift in mindset for teams to fully harness the benefits of curiosity and objectivity in the professional realm.
Curriculum
Communication-Powered Growth – Workshop 1 – Communication Consistency Reset
- Creating Clarity
- Constructing Concision
- Producing Consistency
- Enforcing Correctness
- Benefit Focused
- Organization Values
- Organization’s Purchaser
- Touchstone Principles
- Reducing Friction
- Strategic Subtraction
- Communication Efficiency
- Encouraging Curiosity
Distance Learning
Introduction
Welcome to Appleton Greene and thank you for enrolling on the Communication-Powered Growth corporate training program. You will be learning through our unique facilitation via distance-learning method, which will enable you to practically implement everything that you learn academically. The methods and materials used in your program have been designed and developed to ensure that you derive the maximum benefits and enjoyment possible. We hope that you find the program challenging and fun to do. However, if you have never been a distance-learner before, you may be experiencing some trepidation at the task before you. So we will get you started by giving you some basic information and guidance on how you can make the best use of the modules, how you should manage the materials and what you should be doing as you work through them. This guide is designed to point you in the right direction and help you to become an effective distance-learner. Take a few hours or so to study this guide and your guide to tutorial support for students, while making notes, before you start to study in earnest.
Study environment
You will need to locate a quiet and private place to study, preferably a room where you can easily be isolated from external disturbances or distractions. Make sure the room is well-lit and incorporates a relaxed, pleasant feel. If you can spoil yourself within your study environment, you will have much more of a chance to ensure that you are always in the right frame of mind when you do devote time to study. For example, a nice fire, the ability to play soft soothing background music, soft but effective lighting, perhaps a nice view if possible and a good size desk with a comfortable chair. Make sure that your family know when you are studying and understand your study rules. Your study environment is very important. The ideal situation, if at all possible, is to have a separate study, which can be devoted to you. If this is not possible then you will need to pay a lot more attention to developing and managing your study schedule, because it will affect other people as well as yourself. The better your study environment, the more productive you will be.
Study tools & rules
Try and make sure that your study tools are sufficient and in good working order. You will need to have access to a computer, scanner and printer, with access to the internet. You will need a very comfortable chair, which supports your lower back, and you will need a good filing system. It can be very frustrating if you are spending valuable study time trying to fix study tools that are unreliable, or unsuitable for the task. Make sure that your study tools are up to date. You will also need to consider some study rules. Some of these rules will apply to you and will be intended to help you to be more disciplined about when and how you study. This distance-learning guide will help you and after you have read it you can put some thought into what your study rules should be. You will also need to negotiate some study rules for your family, friends or anyone who lives with you. They too will need to be disciplined in order to ensure that they can support you while you study. It is important to ensure that your family and friends are an integral part of your study team. Having their support and encouragement can prove to be a crucial contribution to your successful completion of the program. Involve them in as much as you can.
Successful distance-learning
Distance-learners are freed from the necessity of attending regular classes or workshops, since they can study in their own way, at their own pace and for their own purposes. But unlike traditional internal training courses, it is the student’s responsibility, with a distance-learning program, to ensure that they manage their own study contribution. This requires strong self-discipline and self-motivation skills and there must be a clear will to succeed. Those students who are used to managing themselves, are good at managing others and who enjoy working in isolation, are more likely to be good distance-learners. It is also important to be aware of the main reasons why you are studying and of the main objectives that you are hoping to achieve as a result. You will need to remind yourself of these objectives at times when you need to motivate yourself. Never lose sight of your long-term goals and your short-term objectives. There is nobody available here to pamper you, or to look after you, or to spoon-feed you with information, so you will need to find ways to encourage and appreciate yourself while you are studying. Make sure that you chart your study progress, so that you can be sure of your achievements and re-evaluate your goals and objectives regularly.
Self-assessment
Appleton Greene training programs are in all cases post-graduate programs. Consequently, you should already have obtained a business-related degree and be an experienced learner. You should therefore already be aware of your study strengths and weaknesses. For example, which time of the day are you at your most productive? Are you a lark or an owl? What study methods do you respond to the most? Are you a consistent learner? How do you discipline yourself? How do you ensure that you enjoy yourself while studying? It is important to understand yourself as a learner and so some self-assessment early on will be necessary if you are to apply yourself correctly. Perform a SWOT analysis on yourself as a student. List your internal strengths and weaknesses as a student and your external opportunities and threats. This will help you later on when you are creating a study plan. You can then incorporate features within your study plan that can ensure that you are playing to your strengths, while compensating for your weaknesses. You can also ensure that you make the most of your opportunities, while avoiding the potential threats to your success.
Accepting responsibility as a student
Training programs invariably require a significant investment, both in terms of what they cost and in the time that you need to contribute to study and the responsibility for successful completion of training programs rests entirely with the student. This is never more apparent than when a student is learning via distance-learning. Accepting responsibility as a student is an important step towards ensuring that you can successfully complete your training program. It is easy to instantly blame other people or factors when things go wrong. But the fact of the matter is that if a failure is your failure, then you have the power to do something about it, it is entirely in your own hands. If it is always someone else’s failure, then you are powerless to do anything about it. All students study in entirely different ways, this is because we are all individuals and what is right for one student, is not necessarily right for another. In order to succeed, you will have to accept personal responsibility for finding a way to plan, implement and manage a personal study plan that works for you. If you do not succeed, you only have yourself to blame.
Planning
By far the most critical contribution to stress, is the feeling of not being in control. In the absence of planning we tend to be reactive and can stumble from pillar to post in the hope that things will turn out fine in the end. Invariably they don’t! In order to be in control, we need to have firm ideas about how and when we want to do things. We also need to consider as many possible eventualities as we can, so that we are prepared for them when they happen. Prescriptive Change, is far easier to manage and control, than Emergent Change. The same is true with distance-learning. It is much easier and much more enjoyable, if you feel that you are in control and that things are going to plan. Even when things do go wrong, you are prepared for them and can act accordingly without any unnecessary stress. It is important therefore that you do take time to plan your studies properly.
Management
Once you have developed a clear study plan, it is of equal importance to ensure that you manage the implementation of it. Most of us usually enjoy planning, but it is usually during implementation when things go wrong. Targets are not met and we do not understand why. Sometimes we do not even know if targets are being met. It is not enough for us to conclude that the study plan just failed. If it is failing, you will need to understand what you can do about it. Similarly if your study plan is succeeding, it is still important to understand why, so that you can improve upon your success. You therefore need to have guidelines for self-assessment so that you can be consistent with performance improvement throughout the program. If you manage things correctly, then your performance should constantly improve throughout the program.
Study objectives & tasks
The first place to start is developing your program objectives. These should feature your reasons for undertaking the training program in order of priority. Keep them succinct and to the point in order to avoid confusion. Do not just write the first things that come into your head because they are likely to be too similar to each other. Make a list of possible departmental headings, such as: Customer Service; E-business; Finance; Globalization; Human Resources; Technology; Legal; Management; Marketing and Production. Then brainstorm for ideas by listing as many things that you want to achieve under each heading and later re-arrange these things in order of priority. Finally, select the top item from each department heading and choose these as your program objectives. Try and restrict yourself to five because it will enable you to focus clearly. It is likely that the other things that you listed will be achieved if each of the top objectives are achieved. If this does not prove to be the case, then simply work through the process again.
Study forecast
As a guide, the Appleton Greene Communication-Powered Growth corporate training program should take 12-18 months to complete, depending upon your availability and current commitments. The reason why there is such a variance in time estimates is because every student is an individual, with differing productivity levels and different commitments. These differentiations are then exaggerated by the fact that this is a distance-learning program, which incorporates the practical integration of academic theory as an as a part of the training program. Consequently all of the project studies are real, which means that important decisions and compromises need to be made. You will want to get things right and will need to be patient with your expectations in order to ensure that they are. We would always recommend that you are prudent with your own task and time forecasts, but you still need to develop them and have a clear indication of what are realistic expectations in your case. With reference to your time planning: consider the time that you can realistically dedicate towards study with the program every week; calculate how long it should take you to complete the program, using the guidelines featured here; then break the program down into logical modules and allocate a suitable proportion of time to each of them, these will be your milestones; you can create a time plan by using a spreadsheet on your computer, or a personal organizer such as MS Outlook, you could also use a financial forecasting software; break your time forecasts down into manageable chunks of time, the more specific you can be, the more productive and accurate your time management will be; finally, use formulas where possible to do your time calculations for you, because this will help later on when your forecasts need to change in line with actual performance. With reference to your task planning: refer to your list of tasks that need to be undertaken in order to achieve your program objectives; with reference to your time plan, calculate when each task should be implemented; remember that you are not estimating when your objectives will be achieved, but when you will need to focus upon implementing the corresponding tasks; you also need to ensure that each task is implemented in conjunction with the associated training modules which are relevant; then break each single task down into a list of specific to do’s, say approximately ten to do’s for each task and enter these into your study plan; once again you could use MS Outlook to incorporate both your time and task planning and this could constitute your study plan; you could also use a project management software like MS Project. You should now have a clear and realistic forecast detailing when you can expect to be able to do something about undertaking the tasks to achieve your program objectives.
Performance management
It is one thing to develop your study forecast, it is quite another to monitor your progress. Ultimately it is less important whether you achieve your original study forecast and more important that you update it so that it constantly remains realistic in line with your performance. As you begin to work through the program, you will begin to have more of an idea about your own personal performance and productivity levels as a distance-learner. Once you have completed your first study module, you should re-evaluate your study forecast for both time and tasks, so that they reflect your actual performance level achieved. In order to achieve this you must first time yourself while training by using an alarm clock. Set the alarm for hourly intervals and make a note of how far you have come within that time. You can then make a note of your actual performance on your study plan and then compare your performance against your forecast. Then consider the reasons that have contributed towards your performance level, whether they are positive or negative and make a considered adjustment to your future forecasts as a result. Given time, you should start achieving your forecasts regularly.
With reference to time management: time yourself while you are studying and make a note of the actual time taken in your study plan; consider your successes with time-efficiency and the reasons for the success in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future time planning; consider your failures with time-efficiency and the reasons for the failures in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future time planning; re-evaluate your study forecast in relation to time planning for the remainder of your training program to ensure that you continue to be realistic about your time expectations. You need to be consistent with your time management, otherwise you will never complete your studies. This will either be because you are not contributing enough time to your studies, or you will become less efficient with the time that you do allocate to your studies. Remember, if you are not in control of your studies, they can just become yet another cause of stress for you.
With reference to your task management: time yourself while you are studying and make a note of the actual tasks that you have undertaken in your study plan; consider your successes with task-efficiency and the reasons for the success in each case; take this into consideration when reviewing future task planning; consider your failures with task-efficiency and the reasons for the failures in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future task planning; re-evaluate your study forecast in relation to task planning for the remainder of your training program to ensure that you continue to be realistic about your task expectations. You need to be consistent with your task management, otherwise you will never know whether you are achieving your program objectives or not.
Keeping in touch
You will have access to qualified and experienced professors and tutors who are responsible for providing tutorial support for your particular training program. So don’t be shy about letting them know how you are getting on. We keep electronic records of all tutorial support emails so that professors and tutors can review previous correspondence before considering an individual response. It also means that there is a record of all communications between you and your professors and tutors and this helps to avoid any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation. If you have a problem relating to the program, share it with them via email. It is likely that they have come across the same problem before and are usually able to make helpful suggestions and steer you in the right direction. To learn more about when and how to use tutorial support, please refer to the Tutorial Support section of this student information guide. This will help you to ensure that you are making the most of tutorial support that is available to you and will ultimately contribute towards your success and enjoyment with your training program.
Work colleagues and family
You should certainly discuss your program study progress with your colleagues, friends and your family. Appleton Greene training programs are very practical. They require you to seek information from other people, to plan, develop and implement processes with other people and to achieve feedback from other people in relation to viability and productivity. You will therefore have plenty of opportunities to test your ideas and enlist the views of others. People tend to be sympathetic towards distance-learners, so don’t bottle it all up in yourself. Get out there and share it! It is also likely that your family and colleagues are going to benefit from your labors with the program, so they are likely to be much more interested in being involved than you might think. Be bold about delegating work to those who might benefit themselves. This is a great way to achieve understanding and commitment from people who you may later rely upon for process implementation. Share your experiences with your friends and family.
Making it relevant
The key to successful learning is to make it relevant to your own individual circumstances. At all times you should be trying to make bridges between the content of the program and your own situation. Whether you achieve this through quiet reflection or through interactive discussion with your colleagues, client partners or your family, remember that it is the most important and rewarding aspect of translating your studies into real self-improvement. You should be clear about how you want the program to benefit you. This involves setting clear study objectives in relation to the content of the course in terms of understanding, concepts, completing research or reviewing activities and relating the content of the modules to your own situation. Your objectives may understandably change as you work through the program, in which case you should enter the revised objectives on your study plan so that you have a permanent reminder of what you are trying to achieve, when and why.
Distance-learning check-list
Prepare your study environment, your study tools and rules.
Undertake detailed self-assessment in terms of your ability as a learner.
Create a format for your study plan.
Consider your study objectives and tasks.
Create a study forecast.
Assess your study performance.
Re-evaluate your study forecast.
Be consistent when managing your study plan.
Use your Appleton Greene Certified Learning Provider (CLP) for tutorial support.
Make sure you keep in touch with those around you.
Tutorial Support
Programs
Appleton Greene uses standard and bespoke corporate training programs as vessels to transfer business process improvement knowledge into the heart of our clients’ organizations. Each individual program focuses upon the implementation of a specific business process, which enables clients to easily quantify their return on investment. There are hundreds of established Appleton Greene corporate training products now available to clients within customer services, e-business, finance, globalization, human resources, information technology, legal, management, marketing and production. It does not matter whether a client’s employees are located within one office, or an unlimited number of international offices, we can still bring them together to learn and implement specific business processes collectively. Our approach to global localization enables us to provide clients with a truly international service with that all important personal touch. Appleton Greene corporate training programs can be provided virtually or locally and they are all unique in that they individually focus upon a specific business function. They are implemented over a sustainable period of time and professional support is consistently provided by qualified learning providers and specialist consultants.
Support available
You will have a designated Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and an Accredited Consultant and we encourage you to communicate with them as much as possible. In all cases tutorial support is provided online because we can then keep a record of all communications to ensure that tutorial support remains consistent. You would also be forwarding your work to the tutorial support unit for evaluation and assessment. You will receive individual feedback on all of the work that you undertake on a one-to-one basis, together with specific recommendations for anything that may need to be changed in order to achieve a pass with merit or a pass with distinction and you then have as many opportunities as you may need to re-submit project studies until they meet with the required standard. Consequently the only reason that you should really fail (CLP) is if you do not do the work. It makes no difference to us whether a student takes 12 months or 18 months to complete the program, what matters is that in all cases the same quality standard will have been achieved.
Support Process
Please forward all of your future emails to the designated (CLP) Tutorial Support Unit email address that has been provided and please do not duplicate or copy your emails to other AGC email accounts as this will just cause unnecessary administration. Please note that emails are always answered as quickly as possible but you will need to allow a period of up to 20 business days for responses to general tutorial support emails during busy periods, because emails are answered strictly within the order in which they are received. You will also need to allow a period of up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Please therefore kindly allow for this within your time planning. All communications are managed online via email because it enables tutorial service support managers to review other communications which have been received before responding and it ensures that there is a copy of all communications retained on file for future reference. All communications will be stored within your personal (CLP) study file here at Appleton Greene throughout your designated study period. If you need any assistance or clarification at any time, please do not hesitate to contact us by forwarding an email and remember that we are here to help. If you have any questions, please list and number your questions succinctly and you can then be sure of receiving specific answers to each and every query.
Time Management
It takes approximately 1 Year to complete the Communication-Powered Growth corporate training program, incorporating 12 x 6-hour monthly workshops. Each student will also need to contribute approximately 4 hours per week over 1 Year of their personal time. Students can study from home or work at their own pace and are responsible for managing their own study plan. There are no formal examinations and students are evaluated and assessed based upon their project study submissions, together with the quality of their internal analysis and supporting documents. They can contribute more time towards study when they have the time to do so and can contribute less time when they are busy. All students tend to be in full time employment while studying and the Communication-Powered Growth program is purposely designed to accommodate this, so there is plenty of flexibility in terms of time management. It makes no difference to us at Appleton Greene, whether individuals take 12-18 months to complete this program. What matters is that in all cases the same standard of quality will have been achieved with the standard and bespoke programs that have been developed.
Distance Learning Guide
The distance learning guide should be your first port of call when starting your training program. It will help you when you are planning how and when to study, how to create the right environment and how to establish the right frame of mind. If you can lay the foundations properly during the planning stage, then it will contribute to your enjoyment and productivity while training later. The guide helps to change your lifestyle in order to accommodate time for study and to cultivate good study habits. It helps you to chart your progress so that you can measure your performance and achieve your goals. It explains the tools that you will need for study and how to make them work. It also explains how to translate academic theory into practical reality. Spend some time now working through your distance learning guide and make sure that you have firm foundations in place so that you can make the most of your distance learning program. There is no requirement for you to attend training workshops or classes at Appleton Greene offices. The entire program is undertaken online, program course manuals and project studies are administered via the Appleton Greene web site and via email, so you are able to study at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office as long as you have a computer and access to the internet.
How To Study
The how to study guide provides students with a clear understanding of the Appleton Greene facilitation via distance learning training methods and enables students to obtain a clear overview of the training program content. It enables students to understand the step-by-step training methods used by Appleton Greene and how course manuals are integrated with project studies. It explains the research and development that is required and the need to provide evidence and references to support your statements. It also enables students to understand precisely what will be required of them in order to achieve a pass with merit and a pass with distinction for individual project studies and provides useful guidance on how to be innovative and creative when developing your Unique Program Proposition (UPP).
Tutorial Support
Tutorial support for the Appleton Greene Communication-Powered Growth corporate training program is provided online either through the Appleton Greene Client Support Portal (CSP), or via email. All tutorial support requests are facilitated by a designated Program Administration Manager (PAM). They are responsible for deciding which professor or tutor is the most appropriate option relating to the support required and then the tutorial support request is forwarded onto them. Once the professor or tutor has completed the tutorial support request and answered any questions that have been asked, this communication is then returned to the student via email by the designated Program Administration Manager (PAM). This enables all tutorial support, between students, professors and tutors, to be facilitated by the designated Program Administration Manager (PAM) efficiently and securely through the email account. You will therefore need to allow a period of up to 20 business days for responses to general support queries and up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies, because all tutorial support requests are answered strictly within the order in which they are received. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Consequently you need to put some thought into the management of your tutorial support procedure in order to ensure that your study plan is feasible and to obtain the maximum possible benefit from tutorial support during your period of study. Please retain copies of your tutorial support emails for future reference. Please ensure that ALL of your tutorial support emails are set out using the format as suggested within your guide to tutorial support. Your tutorial support emails need to be referenced clearly to the specific part of the course manual or project study which you are working on at any given time. You also need to list and number any questions that you would like to ask, up to a maximum of five questions within each tutorial support email. Remember the more specific you can be with your questions the more specific your answers will be too and this will help you to avoid any unnecessary misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or duplication. The guide to tutorial support is intended to help you to understand how and when to use support in order to ensure that you get the most out of your training program. Appleton Greene training programs are designed to enable you to do things for yourself. They provide you with a structure or a framework and we use tutorial support to facilitate students while they practically implement what they learn. In other words, we are enabling students to do things for themselves. The benefits of distance learning via facilitation are considerable and are much more sustainable in the long-term than traditional short-term knowledge sharing programs. Consequently you should learn how and when to use tutorial support so that you can maximize the benefits from your learning experience with Appleton Greene. This guide describes the purpose of each training function and how to use them and how to use tutorial support in relation to each aspect of the training program. It also provides useful tips and guidance with regard to best practice.
Tutorial Support Tips
Students are often unsure about how and when to use tutorial support with Appleton Greene. This Tip List will help you to understand more about how to achieve the most from using tutorial support. Refer to it regularly to ensure that you are continuing to use the service properly. Tutorial support is critical to the success of your training experience, but it is important to understand when and how to use it in order to maximize the benefit that you receive. It is no coincidence that those students who succeed are those that learn how to be positive, proactive and productive when using tutorial support.
Be positive and friendly with your tutorial support emails
Remember that if you forward an email to the tutorial support unit, you are dealing with real people. “Do unto others as you would expect others to do unto you”. If you are positive, complimentary and generally friendly in your emails, you will generate a similar response in return. This will be more enjoyable, productive and rewarding for you in the long-term.
Think about the impression that you want to create
Every time that you communicate, you create an impression, which can be either positive or negative, so put some thought into the impression that you want to create. Remember that copies of all tutorial support emails are stored electronically and tutors will always refer to prior correspondence before responding to any current emails. Over a period of time, a general opinion will be arrived at in relation to your character, attitude and ability. Try to manage your own frustrations, mood swings and temperament professionally, without involving the tutorial support team. Demonstrating frustration or a lack of patience is a weakness and will be interpreted as such. The good thing about communicating in writing, is that you will have the time to consider your content carefully, you can review it and proof-read it before sending your email to Appleton Greene and this should help you to communicate more professionally, consistently and to avoid any unnecessary knee-jerk reactions to individual situations as and when they may arise. Please also remember that the CLP Tutorial Support Unit will not just be responsible for evaluating and assessing the quality of your work, they will also be responsible for providing recommendations to other learning providers and to client contacts within the Appleton Greene global client network, so do be in control of your own emotions and try to create a good impression.
Remember that quality is preferred to quantity
Please remember that when you send an email to the tutorial support team, you are not using Twitter or Text Messaging. Try not to forward an email every time that you have a thought. This will not prove to be productive either for you or for the tutorial support team. Take time to prepare your communications properly, as if you were writing a professional letter to a business colleague and make a list of queries that you are likely to have and then incorporate them within one email, say once every month, so that the tutorial support team can understand more about context, application and your methodology for study. Get yourself into a consistent routine with your tutorial support requests and use the tutorial support template provided with ALL of your emails. The (CLP) Tutorial Support Unit will not spoon-feed you with information. They need to be able to evaluate and assess your tutorial support requests carefully and professionally.
Be specific about your questions in order to receive specific answers
Try not to write essays by thinking as you are writing tutorial support emails. The tutorial support unit can be unclear about what in fact you are asking, or what you are looking to achieve. Be specific about asking questions that you want answers to. Number your questions. You will then receive specific answers to each and every question. This is the main purpose of tutorial support via email.
Keep a record of your tutorial support emails
It is important that you keep a record of all tutorial support emails that are forwarded to you. You can then refer to them when necessary and it avoids any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
Individual training workshops or telephone support
Please be advised that Appleton Greene does not provide separate or individual tutorial support meetings, workshops, or provide telephone support for individual students. Appleton Greene is an equal opportunities learning and service provider and we are therefore understandably bound to treat all students equally. We cannot therefore broker special financial or study arrangements with individual students regardless of the circumstances. All tutorial support is provided online and this enables Appleton Greene to keep a record of all communications between students, professors and tutors on file for future reference, in accordance with our quality management procedure and your terms and conditions of enrolment. All tutorial support is provided online via email because it enables us to have time to consider support content carefully, it ensures that you receive a considered and detailed response to your queries. You can number questions that you would like to ask, which relate to things that you do not understand or where clarification may be required. You can then be sure of receiving specific answers to each individual query. You will also then have a record of these communications and of all tutorial support, which has been provided to you. This makes tutorial support administration more productive by avoiding any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
Tutorial Support Email Format
You should use this tutorial support format if you need to request clarification or assistance while studying with your training program. Please note that ALL of your tutorial support request emails should use the same format. You should therefore set up a standard email template, which you can then use as and when you need to. Emails that are forwarded to Appleton Greene, which do not use the following format, may be rejected and returned to you by the (CLP) Program Administration Manager. A detailed response will then be forwarded to you via email usually within 20 business days of receipt for general support queries and 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Your tutorial support request, together with the corresponding TSU reply, will then be saved and stored within your electronic TSU file at Appleton Greene for future reference.
Subject line of your email
Please insert: Appleton Greene (CLP) Tutorial Support Request: (Your Full Name) (Date), within the subject line of your email.
Main body of your email
Please insert:
1. Appleton Greene Certified Learning Provider (CLP) Tutorial Support Request
2. Your Full Name
3. Date of TS request
4. Preferred email address
5. Backup email address
6. Course manual page name or number (reference)
7. Project study page name or number (reference)
Subject of enquiry
Please insert a maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Briefly outline the subject matter of your inquiry, or what your questions relate to.
Question 1
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 3
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 4
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 5
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Please note that a maximum of 5 questions is permitted with each individual tutorial support request email.
Procedure
* List the questions that you want to ask first, then re-arrange them in order of priority. Make sure that you reference them, where necessary, to the course manuals or project studies.
* Make sure that you are specific about your questions and number them. Try to plan the content within your emails to make sure that it is relevant.
* Make sure that your tutorial support emails are set out correctly, using the Tutorial Support Email Format provided here.
* Save a copy of your email and incorporate the date sent after the subject title. Keep your tutorial support emails within the same file and in date order for easy reference.
* Allow up to 20 business days for a response to general tutorial support emails and up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies, because detailed individual responses will be made in all cases and tutorial support emails are answered strictly within the order in which they are received.
* Emails can and do get lost. So if you have not received a reply within the appropriate time, forward another copy or a reminder to the tutorial support unit to be sure that it has been received but do not forward reminders unless the appropriate time has elapsed.
* When you receive a reply, save it immediately featuring the date of receipt after the subject heading for easy reference. In most cases the tutorial support unit replies to your questions individually, so you will have a record of the questions that you asked as well as the answers offered. With project studies however, separate emails are usually forwarded by the tutorial support unit, so do keep a record of your own original emails as well.
* Remember to be positive and friendly in your emails. You are dealing with real people who will respond to the same things that you respond to.
* Try not to repeat questions that have already been asked in previous emails. If this happens the tutorial support unit will probably just refer you to the appropriate answers that have already been provided within previous emails.
* If you lose your tutorial support email records you can write to Appleton Greene to receive a copy of your tutorial support file, but a separate administration charge may be levied for this service.
How To Study
Your Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and Accredited Consultant can help you to plan a task list for getting started so that you can be clear about your direction and your priorities in relation to your training program. It is also a good way to introduce yourself to the tutorial support team.
Planning your study environment
Your study conditions are of great importance and will have a direct effect on how much you enjoy your training program. Consider how much space you will have, whether it is comfortable and private and whether you are likely to be disturbed. The study tools and facilities at your disposal are also important to the success of your distance-learning experience. Your tutorial support unit can help with useful tips and guidance, regardless of your starting position. It is important to get this right before you start working on your training program.
Planning your program objectives
It is important that you have a clear list of study objectives, in order of priority, before you start working on your training program. Your tutorial support unit can offer assistance here to ensure that your study objectives have been afforded due consideration and priority.
Planning how and when to study
Distance-learners are freed from the necessity of attending regular classes, since they can study in their own way, at their own pace and for their own purposes. This approach is designed to let you study efficiently away from the traditional classroom environment. It is important however, that you plan how and when to study, so that you are making the most of your natural attributes, strengths and opportunities. Your tutorial support unit can offer assistance and useful tips to ensure that you are playing to your strengths.
Planning your study tasks
You should have a clear understanding of the study tasks that you should be undertaking and the priority associated with each task. These tasks should also be integrated with your program objectives. The distance learning guide and the guide to tutorial support for students should help you here, but if you need any clarification or assistance, please contact your tutorial support unit.
Planning your time
You will need to allocate specific times during your calendar when you intend to study if you are to have a realistic chance of completing your program on time. You are responsible for planning and managing your own study time, so it is important that you are successful with this. Your tutorial support unit can help you with this if your time plan is not working.
Keeping in touch
Consistency is the key here. If you communicate too frequently in short bursts, or too infrequently with no pattern, then your management ability with your studies will be questioned, both by you and by your tutorial support unit. It is obvious when a student is in control and when one is not and this will depend how able you are at sticking with your study plan. Inconsistency invariably leads to in-completion.
Charting your progress
Your tutorial support team can help you to chart your own study progress. Refer to your distance learning guide for further details.
Making it work
To succeed, all that you will need to do is apply yourself to undertaking your training program and interpreting it correctly. Success or failure lies in your hands and your hands alone, so be sure that you have a strategy for making it work. Your Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and Accredited Consultant can guide you through the process of program planning, development and implementation.
Reading methods
Interpretation is often unique to the individual but it can be improved and even quantified by implementing consistent interpretation methods. Interpretation can be affected by outside interference such as family members, TV, or the Internet, or simply by other thoughts which are demanding priority in our minds. One thing that can improve our productivity is using recognized reading methods. This helps us to focus and to be more structured when reading information for reasons of importance, rather than relaxation.
Speed reading
When reading through course manuals for the first time, subconsciously set your reading speed to be just fast enough that you cannot dwell on individual words or tables. With practice, you should be able to read an A4 sheet of paper in one minute. You will not achieve much in the way of a detailed understanding, but your brain will retain a useful overview. This overview will be important later on and will enable you to keep individual issues in perspective with a more generic picture because speed reading appeals to the memory part of the brain. Do not worry about what you do or do not remember at this stage.
Content reading
Once you have speed read everything, you can then start work in earnest. You now need to read a particular section of your course manual thoroughly, by making detailed notes while you read. This process is called Content Reading and it will help to consolidate your understanding and interpretation of the information that has been provided.
Making structured notes on the course manuals
When you are content reading, you should be making detailed notes, which are both structured and informative. Make these notes in a MS Word document on your computer, because you can then amend and update these as and when you deem it to be necessary. List your notes under three headings: 1. Interpretation – 2. Questions – 3. Tasks. The purpose of the 1st section is to clarify your interpretation by writing it down. The purpose of the 2nd section is to list any questions that the issue raises for you. The purpose of the 3rd section is to list any tasks that you should undertake as a result. Anyone who has graduated with a business-related degree should already be familiar with this process.
Organizing structured notes separately
You should then transfer your notes to a separate study notebook, preferably one that enables easy referencing, such as a MS Word Document, a MS Excel Spreadsheet, a MS Access Database, or a personal organizer on your cell phone. Transferring your notes allows you to have the opportunity of cross-checking and verifying them, which assists considerably with understanding and interpretation. You will also find that the better you are at doing this, the more chance you will have of ensuring that you achieve your study objectives.
Question your understanding
Do challenge your understanding. Explain things to yourself in your own words by writing things down.
Clarifying your understanding
If you are at all unsure, forward an email to your tutorial support unit and they will help to clarify your understanding.
Question your interpretation
Do challenge your interpretation. Qualify your interpretation by writing it down.
Clarifying your interpretation
If you are at all unsure, forward an email to your tutorial support unit and they will help to clarify your interpretation.
Qualification Requirements
The student will need to successfully complete the project study and all of the exercises relating to the Communication-Powered Growth corporate training program, achieving a pass with merit or distinction in each case, in order to qualify as an Accredited Communication-Powered Growth Specialist (APTS). All monthly workshops need to be tried and tested within your company. These project studies can be completed in your own time and at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office. There are no formal examinations, assessment is based upon the successful completion of the project studies. They are called project studies because, unlike case studies, these projects are not theoretical, they incorporate real program processes that need to be properly researched and developed. The project studies assist us in measuring your understanding and interpretation of the training program and enable us to assess qualification merits. All of the project studies are based entirely upon the content within the training program and they enable you to integrate what you have learnt into your corporate training practice.
Communication-Powered Growth – Grading Contribution
Project Study – Grading Contribution
Customer Service – 10%
E-business – 05%
Finance – 10%
Globalization – 10%
Human Resources – 10%
Information Technology – 10%
Legal – 05%
Management – 10%
Marketing – 10%
Production – 10%
Education – 05%
Logistics – 05%
TOTAL GRADING – 100%
Qualification grades
A mark of 90% = Pass with Distinction.
A mark of 75% = Pass with Merit.
A mark of less than 75% = Fail.
If you fail to achieve a mark of 75% with a project study, you will receive detailed feedback from the Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and/or Accredited Consultant, together with a list of tasks which you will need to complete, in order to ensure that your project study meets with the minimum quality standard that is required by Appleton Greene. You can then re-submit your project study for further evaluation and assessment. Indeed you can re-submit as many drafts of your project studies as you need to, until such a time as they eventually meet with the required standard by Appleton Greene, so you need not worry about this, it is all part of the learning process.
When marking project studies, Appleton Greene is looking for sufficient evidence of the following:
Pass with merit
A satisfactory level of program understanding
A satisfactory level of program interpretation
A satisfactory level of project study content presentation
A satisfactory level of Unique Program Proposition (UPP) quality
A satisfactory level of the practical integration of academic theory
Pass with distinction
An exceptional level of program understanding
An exceptional level of program interpretation
An exceptional level of project study content presentation
An exceptional level of Unique Program Proposition (UPP) quality
An exceptional level of the practical integration of academic theory
Preliminary Analysis
Based on what you’ve gone through in the course document, you’ve already seen references to some important reading materials on the different subjects related to communication-powered growth. In this section, you’ll find recommended reading that you can do in the form of books and articles to expand your knowledge and give you more examples of these strategies in practice. The following reading recommendations are categorized by type.
Books
They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer
by Marcus Sheridan (author, keynote speaker, and inbound content expert).
10X Is Easier Than 2X: How World-Cass Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less
By Dan Sullivan (Strategic Coach co-founder) and Dr. Benjamin Hardy (author, speaker, and organizational psychologist).
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
by Ed Catmull (Co-Founder of Pixar and former President of Disney Animation Studios).
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author, essayist, mathematical statistician, and risk analyst).
Positive Intelligence: Why Only 20% of Teams and Individuals Achieve Their True Potential and How You Can Achieve Yours
by Shirzad Chamine (Chairman of Co-Active Training Institute, C-Suite advisor, faculty member at Stanford and Yale).
Online Articles
“Investigating Pragmatic Failures in Business Letters of Kazakhstani Professionals”
By Aliya Aimoldina, Sholpan Zharkynbekova, Damira Akynova
Procedia Economics and Finance, Volume 39, 2016, Pages 65-70
Abstract:
When this article was written in 2016, the Republic of Kazakhstan’s economy had shifted and developed in a way that brought business professionals from various cultural backgrounds and language knowledge-bases together. As they were engaged in dealing with different economic ventures, the effectiveness with which they communicated using English is illuminated in this article by taking a direct look at 100 business letters. These pieces of business communication were written by executives to their foreign counterparts using a non-native language, English, on both sides. By studying these letters, the researchers came up with several instances that show how the cultural context of speech differ noticeably, complicating the process of clear communication. Because of the differing cultural contributions based on the individual communicators, problems arose in several instances and specific patterns emerged that point to the combination of different issues that contributed to multiple issues that happened during the communicative process.
Introduction:
To experience how much of an impact communication has in business dealings, it is helpful to look at a model of research that combines speakers of different languages that come from diverse cultures to amplify the issues that can occur when one isn’t easily understood. The researchers of this paper did this by examining 100 business letters written by Kazakhstani professionals in English to their cross-cultural counterparts in the businesses they were working with.
The types of misunderstandings or miscommunications that happen when people are communicating in a second language but don’t share cultural context for their native languages are especially vital to examine in the business world. Mistakes in communication are particularly important to note in business communication since misinterpreting corporate messages can result in financial losses, failed business deals, or legal liability.
After viewing the different letters and examining them for patterns the following issues were seen in increased frequency:
-The incorrect use of salutations (greetings) and courteous closings in business correspondence.
-Overly-direct attempts at requesting information.
-Incorrect usage of the passive and active voices.
-Non-traditional construction of business text.
The findings of this article state that in order for effective communication to take place between two parties, even when using the same language, both must have a reasonable understanding of the culture of the person who will be reading or listening to that communication.
If you would like to know more, click here:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212567116302416
“Long-term workplace communication needs of business professionals: Stories from Hong Kong senior executives and their implications for ESP and higher education”
By Clarice S. C. Chan
English for Specific Purposes, Volume 56, October 2019, Page 68-83
Abstract:
As of yet, other studies have not offered a long-term and comprehensive view of how professionals’ use of English changes as they gain seniority, what language difficulties they encounter at different stages of their careers, and how they overcome these difficulties, despite previous research demonstrating some differences between junior and senior employees’ use of English for workplace communication. In order to close this gap, this study examines how three senior Hong Kong business professionals’ language and communication requirements changed as they advanced from entry-level roles to their current standing. It aims to shed light on the long-term professional communication demands of university graduates in addition to understanding the needs of senior executives in terms of workplace English. The accounts of the informants’ professions, which cover more than 20 years, show how, after graduation, their positions have changed in relation to the level of their positions. The anecdotes also highlight the challenges the informants had while attempting non-technical genres, which need tact and diplomacy in addition to advanced English ability. Overall, this paper demonstrates how ESP research and practice, along with higher education institutions that wish to develop tomorrow’s leaders, can benefit from taking a long-term perspective on the workplace communication requirements of business professionals.
Introduction:
Since English is widely used in business as a lingua franca (Nickerson, 2005, 2013), it is more crucial than ever for colleges all over the world to give their students the language skills they need to communicate successfully in increasingly globalized economies. The workplace communication needs of university students and graduates have been studied by ESP researchers and practitioners working in university contexts in a number of countries. Data were gathered from the employers of graduates (e.g., Crosling and Ward, 2002, Lehtonen and Karjalainen, 2008) or from the students or graduates themselves (e.g. Goby, 1999, Taillefer, 2007). The results of these studies provide insight into the language and communication requirements of recent graduates as seen by various stakeholder groups, and they may aid academic institutions in devising strategies to better prepare their graduates for entry-level positions.
The goal of many institutions today is to develop “tomorrow’s leaders,” thus while it is important, it is insufficient to know what language and communication requirements university graduates will have when they enter the workforce. Researchers must be conducted by higher education instructors in order to shed light on the communication demands of graduates as they advance in their jobs and assume management and leadership positions.
In this study, three seasoned Hong Kong professionals—all of whom began their careers in business more than 20 years ago and are currently in senior management positions within their organizations—have their evolving needs for business communication examined. This study aims to understand not only the current workplace communication needs of the senior executives but also how those needs have changed since they graduated. Interview data that illustrates the informants’ experiences with using English at different stages of their careers, the communication challenges they have faced and the ways they have tried to overcome them, are used in the study. The long-term perspective offered in this research has consequences for higher education and ESP instructors.
If you would like to know more, click here:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0889490618303016
Course Manuals 1-12
Course Manual 1: Creating Clarity
Each and every day, we use words, whether in thought, speech, or writing to bring action and progress into the world. In our personal lives, we use powerful, simple phrases “I love you” and “how are you?” to communicate with the people who mean the most to us. But how are we using our words to interact with those who mean the most to us business wise? In this section on clarity, we’ll talk about how we can improve our communications with team members, leaders, and clients or customers to build that same simple-yet-powerful language in the workplace to create a stronger foundation for all present and future interactions.
The first thing we need to address and edit is the use of jargon, or industry specific language. When a professional editor is going through a book and taking out jargon, it’s always because their main job is to think about the reader. They ask questions like, “Will the person who picks up this book, that someone who wants help, know what this word means or will they have to look it up?” They also go through each line looking for confusing passages that will cause the reader to stop. Why? Because when you’re trying to help someone understand you so they can take action on what you’re saying, which is the point of communication, you don’t want them to feel frustrated.
In the professional realm, we don’t have editors, but we do have business communication strategists and marketing experts. It is the job of individuals who possess these titles to interpret between your organization and the people whom your organization serves. The reason we are going to look at the principles and questions that we will examine in the following paragraphs is to get a look at what it’s like to step between the professional, the initial communicator, and the person who is meant to absorb and act on that communication.
So, while we’re going through this lesson and discussing how to communicate with more clarity, hold these two questions in the back of your mind:
• Am I using industry-specific language that might confuse someone on my team?
• Am I using industry-specific language that might confuse one of our clients or customers?
When you get in the habit of using jargon, it comes out even when you don’t mean for it to. Your brain says, “Hey, we use that all the time so let’s set this to default.” And the next time you go to explain a complicated concept or system, you don’t have the simple words the other person needs in order to gain understanding.
This is especially important in the business world because when you’re working with team members, clients, or customers, you want to actively build trust in each and every interaction with them.
When people feel confused, they don’t feel trust. The moment they feel that they don’t understand what you mean, an off switch flips off in the trust area of their brains. That’s the opposite of what we want.
Plus, when jargon confuses team members, not only is that costing your team money in minutes and hours spent in adjusting confusion-based mistakes, it is literally costing you money. According to Agility PR Solutions, in 2022 they found that poor communication costs businesses in the United States $1.2 trillion annually. That is a huge number.
Communicating clearly and simply is the best way to approach organization-wide communication. And if you have departments who don’t understand what each other does, it’s time to get them together to clarify why and how they matter to each other. This is necessary so the company can build a better foundation of communication.
For example, if an engineer knows exactly how a product works and why it’s built a certain way to maximize customer benefits but the marketing department doesn’t know that same information, then the marketing department can’t showcase the level of care that went into creating the results the customer will see. And they also can’t accurately showcase the actual benefits that the customer will experience. At the same time, if the engineers don’t understand what kinds of talking points will help marketing craft more compelling copy and campaigns, they won’t know what to share with them to help them increase sales.
Each and every member of your team needs to feel the freedom to gain clarity at every step so that they can do their jobs better. This doesn’t mean that every person in your organization needs to know how to do every job. That would be impossible. However, the clearer you can get when it comes to communication at the developmental levels where the touchstone principles of the organization are created, the more that clarity will spread throughout each department over time.
Exercise 1.1: De-Jargon the Phrases
Nature of Acronyms
Next, let’s take a look at the true nature of acronyms. Are they really saving the people in your organization as much time as you’ve been led to believe?
When people in the professional realm say “alphabet soup,” they aren’t referring to the delicious tomato-based, pasta-letter-filled soup that some of us grew up with. What they’re talking about is the fact that when you introduce too many acronyms into an organization’s communication, you end up with a bunch of letters all mixed together that people have difficulty sorting and understanding.
Case study: Big Box DIY Construction
Mary, a transport coordinator with The Home Depot, explained during a podcast interview that she had noticed a problem with acronyms in her organization.
“If someone is really developing a way to get rid of the alphabet soup inside organizations, we would definitely be interested in that help,” Mary said.
By alphabet soup, Mary didn’t mean the tasty, tomato-based soup with alphabet noodles floating in it. She meant a jumble of different acronyms insider her organization. You see, as a transportation coordinator, Mary knew that there were different kinds of team members who needed to be able to communicate with each other well for everything to be transported smoothly. And, in addition, she shared that they used a third-party contractor to actually drive the trucks that carried the construction supplies from the distribution warehouses to each individual store.
Because there were multiple departments, and even multiple organizations involved, the custom acronyms her organization had come up with didn’t translate well when used. Not everyone knew what they meant. And when professionals don’t recognize acronyms, they look them up on their smartphones. If the answer isn’t on the internet somewhere, they will try to guess what the letters mean. Given the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each shipment is worth, it makes sense that you wouldn’t want to risk confusion between the person building the pallet for transport, the transport company, and the receiving location due to a guess.
But team members usually feel too embarrassed to ask for clarification when it comes to acronyms because they feel like once they hear what the letters stood for, they could have figured it out if they tried harder. The truth is, they probably wouldn’t have been able to guess the words associated with the acronym, but after they have context, their brains tell them, “Oh yeah, that makes total sense. I could have figured that out.”
And Mary had seen that exact scenario play out over and over again. She knew they needed to address the problems acronyms were causing in their organization.
Should I Sound Sophisticated?
A lot of organizations think that if they use scholastic-styled language that they will seem more intellectual and competent. The unfortunate thing is that marketing firms will agree with them and take this approach just because they want the business. When you work with a true business communication strategist, they will push back on anything that they know will create a barrier for your unique purchaser. It is their job to stand between you and the person you serve and interpret as if you were each speaking a different language. But this is exceptionally difficult work and takes immense energy, which is why many marketing firms can’t be bothered.
But, when you take a scholastic approach to communication outside of the educational field, you are doing both you and your customers or clients a huge disservice.
When someone goes to your website, do they see a long string of sophisticated words that sound nice? Or do they gain an instant understanding of how you can help them?
Those are two extremely different outcomes, and the one that thriving organizations focus on is the latter. Every piece of communication should aim to create understanding, and the only way to do that is by using clear language.
Scholastic-inspired language has no place in the professional realm.
The Science of the Sponge
In every place in every culture, one of the things that is an absolute in life is the fact that dishes will need to be cleaned. In many places throughout the world, this happens using either a rag or a sponge. In this lesson, we’re going to take a look at how scientific innovation has taken the humble sponge to the next level. Why? Because it gives us a concrete example of what clear communication looks like in contrast to more scholarly, industry-specific language.
Even if your organization doesn’t sell, make, or move sponges, this lesson applies to your company’s communication.
There is a certain brand of sponge that has taken the American consumer by storm. Maybe you’ve even seen it on the popular business show, Shark Tank.
The special thing about this sponge is that it can transform in texture depending on the temperature of the water being used. This means when you have a dish with stubborn, caked-on food, all you have to do is switch the faucet to cold to create a scrubbing experience with a more rigid and less flexible sponge. If you cook a lot, you’ll understand how amazing this sounds. And if you need to fit the sponge in a hard-to-reach spot, all you have to do is switch the faucet to warm, and you’ll be able to squeeze a softer sponge into any tight spot.
In theory, this sounds simple to explain, right? However, if you were trying to tell someone how the sponge works from a marketing perspective, it would sound totally different than if you were trying to educate them on the actual science of how this modern marvel works.
Right now, I am going to give you the scientific explanation of the different processes that contribute to the innovative design of the sponge (to the best of the knowledge we have, as the technology for the actual method is a closely-guarded trade secret).
Polycaprolactone is a member of the thermoplastic class of polymers, which undergo a change in stiffness as they go from a cold, rigid state to a hot, soft one.
Interestingly, polycaprolactone finds application in numerous biological devices, including bone and cartilage construction, drug administration, and sutures.
If you are someone who wants to wash dishes faster with more flexibility, and you read that description of what a polycaprolactone does, would it help you understand in clear, simple terms how this sponge can help you do what you want better than the sponge or rag you’re currently using?
Probably not.
What Does Clarity Look Like?
Since we’re learning about clarity, it makes sense to get clear on what it looks like, and what hallmarks true clarity has.
When language has clarity, it is:
• Easy to understand
• Obvious
• Can only be interpreted in one way
• Applied to a specific use
• Explained using simple, widely known terms
Clear language is not:
• Vague
• Confusing
• Complicated
Let’s take a look at the most common offender on the “not” list, vague language.
Vague language:
1. Uses a pronoun that could identify multiple subjects or objects in the sentence.
2. Is not clearly identifying a subject or object in a sentence and assumes that the reference is implied.
Examples That Use a Vague Pronoun:
Example 1:
Kristin and Maria are both trained copyeditors, you can trust her to work on your nonfiction business book to make it everything you’ve been hoping it can be.
Work with who? Kristin and Maria can both be identified as “her.” It would be much better to write the sentence this way:
Corrected:
Kristin and Maria are both trained copyeditors. You can trust either one of them to work on your nonfiction business book to make it everything you’ve been hoping it can be.
Example 2:
Kristin told Maria that her new dog was the cutest.
Corrected:
Kristin told Maria that Maria’s new dog was the cutest.
Or
Kristin told Maria that Kristin’s new dog was the cutest.
Example 3:
The course and the workbook are sold separately, but are both amazing and will help you get the results you’ve been looking for, make sure to sign up today to get it.
Get what? Which one? Here, “it” can be used to identify the course or the workbook.
Corrected:
The course and the workbook are sold separately, but are both amazing and will help you get the results you’ve been looking for. You can sign up for the course here, and follow this link to purchase the workbook.
While thinking about whether something is confusing or clear can feel difficult at first, some practice will help your brain learn to do this on autopilot.
Here are a few quick prompts that will help you exercise clarity in your communication
until your brain starts to do it on its own:
– Did I give the person I’m chatting with each piece of information they need to execute the project or make a decision?
-Is the language I’m choosing easy for them to understand (or does someone need to have my level of expertise to understand it)?
-Can I anticipate any follow-up questions they might have right now so I can include the answers?
Communication Measured by Reading Level
Throughout the last few decades in many professional spheres, the marketing departments will aim to make all of their communications match a sixth-grade reading level. But recently, organizations like Acquistion.com have been working to see what might happen to conversion rates if they took the sixth-grade language they’ve been using, as an industry standard, and edited it to reflect a third-grade reading level.
According to Khrisdigital, when copy is written at a third-grade reading level, it will receive 36% more responses. That’s over two-thirds more responses.
And inside your organization, think about what it would look like if the people you work with and sell to responded 36% more of the time. Or, to adapt this idea into communication terms, understood their tasks more clearly 36% of the time. Think about what would change in your organization if you made this transition.
So, what does it look like to take communication that matches a sixth-grade reading level and edit it so that it matches a third-grade reading level? Let’s take a look.
Sixth-grade level:
When you want to wash your dishes quickly and easily, it’s best for you to use a sponge that has polyester that changes based on how hot or cold the water is, that way you have a sponge that flexes based on the job.
Third-grade level:
Wash dishes fast and easy by using a sponge that is stronger or squishier with warmer or colder water.
You can see that we’re using more universally recognized words in the second one, and that it’s also shorter. When you can give them the same information with fewer words, you’re also respecting their time and increasing the likelihood of them interacting back with you in a way that you want.
Great tools to help you think about simpler ways to communicate are Rewordify.com and Grammarly. Just make sure you don’t depend too heavily on Grammarly with actual grammar help, as it has been known to introduce grammar errors in addition to fixing them.
Exercise 1.2: Describe Your Sponge
Course Manual 2: Constructing Concision
When we talk about concision, what we’re really talking about is time. Concision means that we communicate an idea, instruction, or principle in as few words as possible. Why is this important? Because time is our only nonrenewable resource. While we can pay other people to do things for us to get back some of our time, we can never make more time.
Think about how much time is wasted going back and forth when communication isn’t clear. The same thing happens when communication isn’t concise. This is why we’re going through the different Cs of communication, because when we harness the power of each one, we’re not only saving your organization time, we’re saving your organization money as well. When concision isn’t used, the problem that causes confusion is the lack of care that is taken when selecting what type of words to use.
In the last lesson, we worked on clarity, which is an amazing first step. In this section, we’re going to talk about brevity, but with a link to clarity as well.
When you use extra words, you are much more likely to lose clarity. This causes confusion. Confused people don’t act. Confused unique purchasers don’t buy. Confusion also causes mistrust, which is the single biggest adversary of any professional organization that sells goods or services.
However, using fewer words just for the sake of saving time won’t work. Concision always has to live as one half of a constant balancing act. Opposite of concision on the other side of the scale is understanding. If we have achieved concision at the expense of understanding, then we’ve introduced confusion into the situation.
In the book Matilda written by Roald Dahl, there is a character who wants the children to be concise for the sake of concision itself, the hulking Ms. Trunchbull, a woman known for putting small children into a closet filled with pointy metal spikes for misunderstanding a simple order. In your organization, you don’t want to be known as Ms. Trunchbull. Why? Because she didn’t care about actually teaching any of the children. She wanted to enforce rules like concision for the sake of those rules.
In this training, you are learning rules that will help your organization communicate so that it can grow and thrive. Concision for its own sake won’t do that. This is why you have to think about which words can really be removed and which words need to be adjusted or kept in for the sake of improved understanding.
Exercise 1.3: Removal without Compromise
Thinking About Communication Differently
The reason we’re taking the time to talk about written communication ideas like word counts and the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease test is to help you shift the way you think about communication. It’s not that we want you to be so caught up in how you communicate that you fear communicating at all. Instead, we want to treat our communication in the business world as a strategic tool.
When it comes to concision, what we’re looking to bank more of is time. Time for our team members so that they can focus more on the important work they do inside our organization. Time for our clients and customers because when we value their time, we show them that we value them as humans.
If each organization can be compared to a living being, think about concision like the nervous system. When it is running well, it helps all of the different systems and sources in the organization communicate more efficiently. When times interrupt the things being communicated or the paths of those communications, the entire organism slows down. It isn’t as effective.
And when what is going on inside the organism is effective, the things that the organism produces will be higher in quality.
In the case of your organization, this means that the unique purchasers you serve will feel the efforts of your collective concision. And, when you spend time with them, you will make sure that you get the most out of that time, which shows how much you care about delivering high-quality results instead of quantity-based deliverables.
The concept of concision is dynamic in that it has the power to change everything that happens in each department across your entire organization.
The Big Idea Behind Concision
When working to make concision one of the capstone communication principles in your organization, ask the question, “What else can we leave out?”
In other words, what communications are actually necessary and which ones are being used as a form of habit. What things do your team members really need to know? What time of theirs are you taking up because of outdated protocols? And most importantly, how much time is everyone wasting in meetings or in group-dialogue sessions when they could be doing meaningful work in their individual zones of genius?
Again, being concise isn’t only about brevity. We also talked about how balanced concision must also be understandable. When you’re thinking about how easily someone can understand what you’ve written, it is important to consider the “who” listening to or reading what you’re communicating.
For example, your marketing team leader wouldn’t speak to a potential client the same way they would speak to a team member. Why? Because the understanding each person brings to that conversation is also different. The goals of those conversations are also different.
Think about the information they probably already know. Explaining concepts or needs in too much detail will cause confusion, even if it comes from a place of your wanting to be assured that the other person understands.
If the person you’re communicating with experiences a wall of words coming from you or your organization, this makes you feel less approachable and less trustworthy.
Plus, when you explain things simply, you are less likely to deal with misunderstandings or have people intentionally skip over a piece of information they don’t like. This will help you and those in your organization avoid unnecessary frustration.
You will be able to deal with the objections of others easier when they understand you better, and have to address fewer follow-up questions as a result. Plus, when communication is shorter, people often feel less intimidated and are likely to respond quicker, and with more confidence that you can address whatever questions they still have.
Invest Time Now to Save Time Later
Even though it may seem like being clear and concise takes up too much time when you’re crafting your initial communication, you will actually save time later.
Concision itself is an investment in saving time in the future. While it can seem like a time-consuming, thought-heavy process to choose words more carefully, concision will result in less confusion and fewer instances of needed follow-up communication.
And not only will this save time in the future, it will also save the money that gets spent when there are time delays or communication-related mistakes.
We promise that taking the time to craft a message carefully will be well worth the investment in the long run.
Case Study: Being Clear from Day One
When Ben Goodwin and David Lester were starting their business, Olipop, they knew exactly what they wanted to do and they created language to communicate that simply.
Their goal was to create a delicious drink that was gut healthy, full of fiber, and low in sugar. The differentiator they chose was to put all of these simple words and ideas into a soda.
With their simple, concise mission, they were able to grow their business to 20$ million in just 5 years.
The concise goals made creating their product and then launching it less complicated than other pro-biotic beverage brands because the language they were using to drive them was simple and easy to understand for everyone involved in the process.
It’s not surprising that customers also caught on to Olipop’s clear, concise language when choosing a soda that tasted good and improved gut health.
That’s the power of concision.
Concision Builds Better Connection
Many times, a lack of concision can be rooted in an individual’s lack of confidence. They believe that if they fail to articulate even one tiny detail, they will be judged as less-than-stellar at being able to perform in their position. This causes a great deal of over explanation and a byproduct of those excessive details is confusion.
Instead of adding more, using fewer words will actually project more confidence and get better results. When possible, simplify, and watch what happens as your team not only gets the information they need without added fluff, but they are able to start create a more concise communication style that sends ripples of efficiency and productivity through the entire organization.
An amazing residual effect of putting concision into practice is better connection between those in your office and the unique purchasers you’re all communicating with in the outside world. How does this happen?
People notice that you say what you mean and that you don’t waste their time. They value the fact that you’re telling it like it is so they know what to do. Their trust in you skyrockets as you give them the exact information they need without any sugar coating or extra details. They feel comfortable being concise with you in return and this earns you all kinds of relatability points.
Because you’re saving time, you have the time to ask about how their life is going and this makes them feel safe and cared for. Because you’re saving time, you are able to answer their questions about your life and the connection between you and your team gets even stronger.
Think about it this way. When you’re younger and your great aunt Trudy gets you socks and underwear for the holidays, you get irritated. You really wanted a toy or something else that you didn’t actually need. But as you get older and realize how necessary and expensive socks and underwear are, you start to appreciate aunt Trudy’s gifts. And then, one day, when she is gone and you don’t get that gift anymore, you miss it and you miss her. You appreciate how practical she was.
Concision will create the same connection in your organization. At first, new team members might feel irritated that you aren’t adding in extra communication to make them feel more comfortable. Eventually, though, they’ll realize that you’re giving them exactly what they need. And when you retire or move to another organization, they’ll miss the concision you used with them. It has endeared them to you because it helped them perform better.
Talking about new technology implementation is always going to sound more impressive than concise communication, but one has a lasting legacy. Think about how concision can shape the communication in your organization to create connections that have legacy elements to them.
Concision Amplifies Power
There is a common misconception that being short, or using concise language, gives others the impression that you’re rude. While using angry, short language, can be rooted in irritation or arrogance, that doesn’t mean concision itself is problematic.
To understand the difference between frustrated, short remarks, and clear, concise, action-driving language, we need to dive a bit deeper.
Let’s look at an example of a common communication theme that happens in every organization—the ever-present deadline.
We’re sure you’ve seen a communication like this floating around your organization.
“Joan, if you could have that copy written up as soon as possible for the marketing review team, that would be amazing. Make sure you don’t forget to add the things I mentioned in the meeting and be sure to have Anna proof it before you send it over just in case. We don’t want a repeat of the errors we saw last time. Also, can you add in a line about the new features we mentioned two weeks ago? Like I said, the sooner the better. Thanks. Team Leader Pam.”
The truth is, this communication isn’t clear or concise. And, it’s missing information that Joan is going to have to dig for. Is it her job to keep track of this information? Yes, but Pam probably already knows exactly what she wants Joan to include.
There is a crucial piece of information missing from this message as well: the actual deadline. Communicating that she wants this from Joan “as soon as possible” is extremely vague.
Joan is probably juggling a bunch of different tasks, and this message doesn’t let her know where this new task sits in the queue of everything she’s currently trying to accomplish.
The unknowns related to this message are likely to set off alarm bells in Joan’s head as she tries to find the vague information her team leader wants. And then she has to guess what “as soon as possible” really means. Plus, she has an added layer of communication built in since she’ll be sending her copy to Anna for proofing before she can send it to team leader Pam.
Let’s look at an example of what a clear, concise message might say.
“Joan, I need a copy written for the marketing review team based on the meeting we had last week where we covered the new banana slicer benefits by next Friday. It should be around 200 words.
Make sure you talk about:
-The increase of banana sales in the previous quarter.
-The uptick in the popularity of joke gifts over the last two quarters.
in the brief before the copy.
I’d like to have Anna proofread it, so I emailed her and said you’d send over the text by Thursday. Please feel free to adjust what’s on your plate to prioritize this task. Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, team leader Pam.”
Right now, you might be thinking, “The second email is longer, so how is that more concise?” The answer is, it’s more concise because it eliminates every invisible question that the first message left room for. Now, Joan knows exactly what needs to happen. She knows when it needs to happen. And she knows who is involved and what role each of them plays.
It is more direct, but it doesn’t come off as rude, does it? There is still a “please” in there as well as a moment of trusting Joan to reprioritize her tasks based on this new information.
Using Humor and Clarifying Questions Increase Concision’s Power
Whenever you can, infuse humor and leave room for questions in your communications. Not only does this increase concision because it improves information retention, but it builds better connection into everything you say and write.
The use of humor reduces the possibility of someone thinking that your straight-forward language is rude. While leaving room for questions they have actually builds concision into the process, because they won’t guess and then have to redo the task.
Just make sure that whatever humor you use is appropriate for the workplace and not based on a person or groups religion, race, or sexual orientation. I used the banana slicer in this example because it is safe and silly for any person in any organization.
Moving Forward
One of the temptations that comes with learning new information, or discovering that you can look through information you already had through a different lens, is to feel regret for past communications that maybe weren’t as concise as they could have been. However, the only thing to do about your communication skills is to move forward with the knowledge you’ve just gained.
Resist the urge to go back over previous organization documents and strip them down for concision’s sake. As we go through the rest of this program, you will be creating new documents and analyzing the ones you already have. For now, the goal should be to employ both clarity and concision for each new correspondence or document you create.
Even an extra five minutes spent looking back over a piece of communication to make sure it is clear and concise can make a huge difference. And think about the exponential effects that will take place as you do this several times per day over weeks, months, and years.
Exercise 1.4: Concise Communication
Course Manual 3: Producing Consistency
Have you ever been chatting with someone from an organization and had a moment of pause? Odds are, your brain is setting off a small alert that something the person said doesn’t quite match up with what you already know about the organization. Or when you’re reading an article or watching a video by a company and you notice that the tone and attitude you sense that the words they’re using don’t match up with what you’ve heard from them before. That alarm goes off again.
Even a small inconsistency can communicate to the brain of the observer that an entire organization is unworthy of trust. This time, imagine that you’ve been engaging with daily content from an company for months, and suddenly, without warning, they go radio silent. What is your brain’s first assumption? That something is wrong.
The power that comes with consistency isn’t just about maintaining the same information, tone, and attitude in your communication: it’s also about frequency. And while consistency is the single most important concept when it comes to communication inside your organization and about your organization, most companies get this really wrong—which costs them so much time and money.
So, how can you train the individuals inside your company to get this right? Great question.
The most important piece of consistency has to do with building a solid foundation. Later on in this course, you’ll learn how to create touchstone principles that will act as the foundational information for everything else your company does and says. For now, it’s important that we dive into the why and how of producing consistency.
Because each organization is full of individual people with unique strengths, talents, and ideas, it is important to have a company-wide document that communicates to each person—whether they’ve been there for one day or twenty years—exactly what your organization does, why it does those things, and what values are attached to those goals and actions.
This type of document has been called a messaging guide, messaging breakdown, company bible, branding handbook, etc. Whatever you call it, the goal of this collection of foundational words and ideas about your organization should be constantly used by every person who writes, speaks for, or creates systems within your company so that they can maintain consistency. A good rule of thumb is to encourage team members to read through the guide once each week, or before creating any important content.
Let’s take a look at the most important pieces of information a messaging breakdown must contain.
Touchstone principles are the non-negotiable goals and attitudes of your company based on the collective goal everyone in the organization shares. These principles may change over the years, but usually remain similar. For example, a main touchstone principle of Apple is that they aim to provide consumers with the greatest possible user experience through cutting-edge services, software, and hardware. While some may know this concept better when it’s described as a mission statement, touchstone principles also include values that the organization wants to display consistently in both interior and exterior communication.
The big-picture sentence (or main touchstone principle) describes what your organization does, who it does these things for, and the unique mechanism that gets that person or company the results you’re promising. Otherwise known as a unique selling proposition or unique value proposition, this one sentence should be able to sum up the heart and soul of your organization and be easily understood by anyone who reads it.
Next, your company needs a short version of its origin story that communicates how your organization started, what problems it currently addresses, and how it is actively making the world a better place. While this can include a short story from your organization’s founder, it is important that this story is clear, compelling, and concise.
These items will be followed by a guide that points out the needs, values, and characteristics of your unique purchasers (an updated approach from traditional ideal client avatars that is more psychographic as opposed to demographic).
After that, there should be a section that clearly defines your organization’s voice: the heart behind the offers you have followed by a concrete list of the offers your company uses to serve your clients or customers.
Why do all of these concepts matter?
Everything you say should have the same foundational goal. Without this work, you cannot hope to stay consistent: especially when multiple people will be responsible for the various pieces of communication your company puts out into the world. Without a clear, concise document that tells your team exactly how your organization serves others, why it does so, and how the individuals in your collective feel about providing that help, you will not be able to maintain consistency no matter how hard you try.
And the most difficult thing that any organization will ever battle is customer or client mistrust. Without trust, it is impossible to serve clients or customers because they will never feel confident enough to make a purchase. Why? Because there are companies out there actively trying to get money even if they never have plans to deliver anything.
Case Study: Centra Tech Bitcoin Con
If you’ve ever heard the phrase “too good to be true” then you know what kind of skepticism each unique purchaser brings into every single decision they make. And even then, there have been cases when a company cleverly (or not so cleverly) masks their lies in borrowed truth.
In the case of Centra Tech, they borrowed client and customer trust by listing both Visa and BanCorp as providers along with their “technology” when their actual whitepapers were just copied from another organization.
While it seemed like they had done a lot of the development and legwork, they were operating under false pretenses and faking the technology in any displays they used as proofs of concept.
With fraudulent organizations operating out in the world, consumers and business-to-business companies are more cautious than ever when it comes to who they trust with their time and money.
How does consistency battle client or customer mistrust?
When you can show that your organization has produced consistent results, you battle mistrust. When you can show that your company can maintain communication that uses the same goals, tone, and values, you battle mistrust. And when you show up with a consistent frequency, you battle mistrust.
These three different ways of maintaining consistency are extremely powerful individually, but are even more dynamic when used together.
This is how you build and maintain a brand reputation that will encourage growth long-term while your company continues to scale.
What does consistency mean when it comes to organizational language?
Earlier we talked about how your communication needs to have a brand voice. The most important job of any brand voice is to help those in an organization understand what the company as a whole sounds like: These details are what make up your brand voice and they need to be strategically chosen to align with the values of your unique purchasers.
Maybe your brand is hopeful and strategic, serious and dynamic, or playful yet informative (there are endless combinations of thousands of adjectives to choose from). Whatever attitudes you choose to embrace need to match the touchstone principles and the values of your unique purchasers.
Think about organization communication this way. When you were growing up, there was probably an adult you loved being around. It could have been a grandparent, teacher, or a mentor. And when they would talk with you, there were certain words, phrases, and attitudes they used consistently. Maybe they would always tell you how proud of you they were or used a nickname you loved hearing.
Sometimes, though, they would say things that didn’t necessarily sound like them and that would surprise you. Right? Maybe they were frustrated or sick, or maybe they were trying to tell you something extremely important so they spoke in a way they wouldn’t normally communicate. This is the same way that a brand voice functions.
For the most part, you will want to maintain the things you say and the way you say them as an organization. But sometimes, there will be a piece of communication that is so important to your potential clients or customers that you need to step outside of your normal mode of communication for a moment to really get their attention. This other communication should only ever be used when it pertains to your touchstone principles and is agreed upon by the leaders in your organization. Otherwise, moments of communication outside of your brand voice will promote client or customer mistrust, which we want to avoid.
How can everyone in the organization keep track of consistency?
The best way to do this is by building a messaging breakdown or guide that aligns with the touchstone principles of your organization so that you know which types of communications and choices will best serve your organization.
Not only will this help you communicate in a way that builds trust instead of mistrust, it will also help everyone in your organization make better daily decisions that contribute to your overall mission. This helps because in a world of so much noise, where shiny object syndrome wastes a lot of our time, your team will be able to do a quick alignment check using the messaging breakdown whenever they are faced with multiple options. This also helps with analysis paralysis because you have a straightforward, clear list of principles that guide your big-picture growth.
The foundational work you do to build something that allows each individual person to check their work against the values and attitudes of the brand voice is invaluable because it is the only way to keep everyone consistent across multiple departments. And when one department isn’t following these foundational approaches, it is also extremely easy to correct them and get them back on track by pointing to the messaging breakdown.
Consistency Versus Visibility
In modern times, there have been debates around whether consistency or visibility is more important. This question arises as more and more digital marketing agencies emphasize the idea that consistency of frequency is more important than consistency of communication. They want us all to believe that if we have 20 people creating and putting content out into the world, that consistency of communication can be sacrificed on the altar of visibility. But the quantitative approach will always lose to that of the qualitative.
It would be much better to have one person writing high-quality, consistent content once a week than a team of ten people writing inconsistent content twice a day. Why? Because frequency of delivery matters far less than the consistency of communication.
More isn’t always better. Sometimes more is just more. And in this case, it would equal more client or customer mistrust, which we’re trying to eliminate.
How long does it take to establish consistency?
Since we’re on the subject of the frequency of consistency, let’s talk about the long-term. Consistency can only be established in the context of time. We know that each interaction a potential client or customer has with a piece of communication from your organization adds another brick in the bridge you’re building between their needs and your solutions. We also know that the number of interactions a person has with you before the bridge is ready for them to move to your side is probably higher than you might think.
Either the number has increased significantly in the last decade, or people were not acknowledging the real number of touchpoints needed to get an initial meeting or transaction in the past out of wishful thinking.
So, instead of approaching the answer to the question “how long does it take to establish consistency?” from a length-of-time standpoint, it might be better to take a frequency-based approach.
We’ve already discussed the idea that visibility alone isn’t a good goal because super-high frequency is usually achieved through a loss of consistency in communication. But, that doesn’t mean we can treat consistency of frequency as an afterthought.
In his book They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer, Marcus Sheridan writes that in some cases, they observed that potential clients were spending almost 100 hours on their swimming pool installation website before making an appointment to have their company come out to give them an estimate. In their company’s specific case, that meant that people were consuming almost all of the information they had available on their website.
This might tempt you to think that quantity matters, but in the case of Sheridan’s company, he prioritized quality above all else. This is how he kept people on his website for so long: with consistent, high-quality content. Sheridan and his team built that content over time, but that didn’t mean he didn’t see sales almost immediately when he shifted to a quality over quantity approach.
When you’re thinking about how long it takes to establish consistency, you do want to think about which 20 pieces of information your potential client or customer most needs right now. Then you can decide on a due date for having those 20 pieces finished based on how long it will take your team to create high-quality results (or in some cases, to edit previous information).
Then, plan a time when you can start releasing them publicly so that you can get the first few articles out as they are completed. The sooner you release high-quality content, the faster you’ll start to establish consistency in the minds of your potential clients or customers.
From there, you need to decide on a consistent frequency for following articles, newsletters, or posts to come out. As a rule of thumb, you should have at least 2 pieces of short content per week and 1 piece of long content per month (which any great team should be able to manage well).
What does consistency mean for the people in your organization?
How does it feel when you look at a blank page? Intimidating, right? Our brains don’t like the idea of us having to create something out of nothing. One of the best things about having a messaging breakdown in your organization is that your team is never starting any project with a blank page. They already have the touchstone principles to work from. And, they know the exact tone and attitude of the words they need to write before they have to put anything down on paper (or in many cases, digitally via a screen).
Plus, the clear, concise language your leaders have used to explain their responsibilities to each individual team member also lets them know exactly what their job is in every situation. And they can view each task through the lens of the touchstone principles built into your messaging breakdown.
Establishing consistency throughout your organization will build confidence and satisfaction into everything your team does. And this will inspire creativity and innovation along the way. The two forms of consistency (foundational communication and frequency) will create a safe, inspiring environment for everyone on your team, which can only mean one thing: growth.
How does inside consistency translate into public reputation?
When you have consistent communication and frequency, coupled with satisfied and inspired team members, your organization’s public reputation will naturally form as one that can stand against the mistrust of most.
It is important to acknowledge that no organization can stand against all potential client or customer mistrust, no matter how consistent they are.
The good news is that you’re not trying to sell your services or products to everyone. So, the work you do in creating a consistent environment using repeatable frequency, clarity, and concision in communication will be enough to help those you were meant to work with through their mistrust to see your organization as having resources worth paying for.
Taking the time to build foundational touchstone principles for your organization that you can base all future decisions and communications on will give you the best results as far as establishing your organization publicly, and with much more efficiency than you would otherwise have.
Consistency in word and deed communicates character like nothing else.
This is why consistency is key in every business, and really, in every facet of daily life.
Exercise 1.5: Touchstone Principles
Course Manual 4: Enforcing Correctness
Have you ever been on one of those used-car sales lots that almost every sitcom character has visited at least once? The dealer is generally someone that you know is trying to rip off the main character, the one you’re rooting for. How? Well, usually, they don’t give your character all of the correct information they have about the vehicles they’re selling. Maybe they write the year of the car wrong on the sticker placed on the windshield. Or, they scheme even harder and roll back the odometer so that the car-purchaser doesn’t know how many miles are actually on the vehicle.
But schemes like these don’t just happen on popular television shows. They happen in the real world every single day. And this is why television show writers create episodes around this kind of interaction: being swindled is an unfortunately relatable experience.
And the fact that your potential clients or customers have been swindled in the past is the reason that correctness in communication is so important. Unless you have honest representations of what your organization can do in all of your communication, you will damage your brand. Period. And this means you won’t be able to use consistency to deal with client or customer mistrust.
Think about the lessons we’ve learned in this course so far. Yes, it is important to communicate well using simple words. But, it doesn’t matter how clear, concise, or consistent your words are if those words aren’t true. In the name of good communication, we’ve been working through the four Cs that can transform your business both inside and out. Of the four, correctness is the one that creates the follow through necessary for both short-term and long-term growth.
Correctness is about truth, and a lot of people have a natural ability to understand when someone is trying to lie to or manipulate them. They have had to develop this ability because of the number of liars and manipulators who live and thrive in today’s world—many of them enjoying the complicated benefits of capitalism.
This means one of the biggest goals any organization has is to earn trust over time by communicating using true, unexaggerated facts. This is also something that every organization must do inside of its walls (or digital rooms) if they want to retain employees and build creative, effective teams.
Why does correctness matter in business?
In the world of biology, if one organism or system within an organism detects a flaw in that system that it can use for its own benefit, it will. This is true for humans in business-centered systems as well. A few modern examples of this are the Enron scandal and the housing bubble of 2008. Because of this, people are naturally suspicious of any organization that greets them with some sort of promotion or promise. They know that there are those who want to exploit the system, even if that means others will suffer. The people we serve through our products or offers are often most focused on avoiding suffering. This is why we meet them with benefit-focused language (which will be covered in the next area of this course manual).
In business, this gets even trickier because there is a clear incentive to exploit any sign of weakness in any system: financial compensation. Money.
Plus, in many circles, people will split everyone into two groups—those who have money and those who don’t. And often, even those with money will identify with the later group. This makes them feel naturally pitted against those who they believe have money, like your organization.
The single best way to counter this natural assumption and side-taking is to make sure that everything you communicate is accurate and avoids hyperbole (more on that later). This is especially true for businesses. Because of the concepts listed here, we’re going to turn to the writing world for a little guidance and talk about fact checking.
How far is too far when it comes to fact checking in business?
First, let’s talk about what fact checking is. In the world of written publications, fact checkers work to make sure that what the book, newspaper, or magazine is printing is true. Why? Because they want to have reputations of being truth-tellers. The financial inspiration behind this is that they want to avoid libel lawsuits (which can be leveraged against any organization that publishes untrue information that defames an individual’s character).
Inside your organization, there are facts and figures floating about every which way across various platforms. Outside your organization, facts and figures are being distributed and collected and turned into decisions.
Unlike publications, many professional organizations don’t have a concrete system of operations for determining whether those facts and figures are correct. This is a problem for your potential client or customer because if they find one piece of misinformation in your communication, their trust in you will instantaneously cease.
One of the best qualities to put in place to combat a willy-nilly approach to results and research documentation is to encourage everyone on your team (including yourself) to be curious.
Train your team to ask themselves and their team members questions like:
-Where did these numbers come from?
-Is this testimonial really what the client said and have we done any follow-up with them to see how things are going presently?
-How do we know this research accurately demonstrates what is happening to our actual audience?
-Is this information up to date?
Once it becomes part of your organization’s culture to double check facts and figures, that will help you level up when it comes to correctness.
However, you also want to be careful about letting excessive fact checking keep you from taking quick action. Double-checking or triple-checking is fine, but you need to make sure to share with your team that you want a balanced approach to correctness. This means they need to understand that making mistakes won’t instantly get them in trouble.
The ultimate goal is to be as correct as possible with minimal extra time invested in completing correctness checks.
What does correctness mean when discussing proof-of-concept with potential clients or customers?
There is a temptation that every organization faces to only provide potential clients or customers with favorable (or even extremely favorable) reviews or testimonials.
However, limiting the information that is available to your unique purchasers isn’t the best idea. Many consumers feel that something is off if there isn’t any sort of criticism in any review. So please, resist the temptation to doctor which proof-of-concept pieces you share from previous clients too much.
It is also essential to avoid hyperbole when sharing proof-of-concept cases. When you use correctness to share realistic results you’ve gotten for past clients or customers with potential unique purchasers and they hire you, client or customer satisfaction will skyrocket because you were honest with them about what to expect in the sales process. They feel excited to see that what you said is what actually happened.
In many cases, it is better to set expectations a bit below what you can actually deliver because then they are impressed by your ability to do so much more than what you originally shared you could. This makes them feel both lucky and smart, because they’re the ones that picked you and your deliverables blew them away.
Correctness and Testimonials
We’ve already talked about how having zero critical comments in your review section can trigger a warning in the mind of your unique purchasers, but there is one other aspect we need to go over in this area.
Testimonials can be potential land-mines in the world of business communications as far as correctness. Why? Because every organization wants to be seen through the most favorable light. However, this desire has led many companies to navigate the not-so-ethical waters of testimonial editing.
Let’s not assume, though, that this practice started out as malicious. The truth is, many testimonials have grammatical issues or tend to run on for too long. When the intuition to start editing testimonials came about as a response, it might have been pretty pure.
These days, the kinds of liberties many organizations take when “editing” their testimonials has less to do with brevity and grammatical goals.
As business communication strategists, there are several pieces of information and sales psychology that we want to see in each testimonial. For many firms, this means they help their clients edit testimonials to fit into certain formulas. But that step can be unethical. Luckily, there is a much better way to shape testimonials so that they have the information your unique purchasers need to see in them before they’ll make a decision to hire you.
We want to guide their testimonial experience by asking questions that will help them give answers that speak to each of the distinct types of purchaser personalities. We will get more into the different types in a different lesson, but for now, here are the questions your organization can ask so that you have the information and sales psychology you need in each testimonial you receive.
• What did this service/product help you do?
• What were the results of you using this service/product and what good things have happened after using it?
• How did you feel before you started using this service/product and how do you feel now that you know more based on the product/service we provided for you?
For some organizations, we do have a section after these questions that asks, “Would you feel comfortable with us editing your review for brevity or grammar purposes?” and if they check “Yes,” we know we can edit their review ethically when needed. If they check “no” then we know to leave the review as it is.
Correctness Versus Political Correctness
Language is tricky, especially in business. So, what do you do when you know that your unique purchasers have values and beliefs that demand you make sure your communications are politically correct?
In the world of writing, we have a specific professional we turn to in cases like these: a sensitivity editor. It is their job to gather recent, relevant information and decide what changes in preferences are based on a fad, and which will last the test of time.
In the world of business, we often foist this responsibility on the Human Resources department, not wondering whether the people in this department have up-to-date language sensitivity training.
At this point, we’re no longer really looking for politically correct language. We want sensitive, inclusive, and bipartisan language.
So, how can we tell which language works with these requirements? Here are a few questions everyone on your team can ask when deciding on language preferences or updates:
• Is the person making a decision on the kind of language we’re using about a specific group part of that group?
There is a saying in the disability community, “Nothing about us without us,” which means that they want to be part of the conversations when it comes to accommodations, care, and especially language.
• Is there a way your organization is keeping track of preferred language decisions?
While not every business has a use for a 40-page style guide, it may be helpful to create a guide that keeps track of preferred language and any updates to language that your team decides on. There are examples of style guides readily available in any search engine query.
• How will your unique purchasers feel when they read or hear your language choices?
While it is always valuable to think about how your team will respond to the language your organization uses, it is even more important to think about how your unique purchasers will respond. One of the main objectives of this course is to help you change communication inside your organization so that when you communicate with potential clients or customers, everything has already been made with them as the main consideration.
Correctness and Hyperbole for Effect
We’ve already talked about how hyperbole can cause issues when it comes to client or customer expectations. But it is also important to talk about how hyperbole can sneak into your organization’s culture via your team.
When team members don’t feel that their work has been acknowledged or that their feelings have been validated, they’re much more likely to use hyperbole to get attention. This can cause lasting issues in your organization because little untruths (in this case, over exaggerations) are sneaking into the workplace and being treated as truths.
The best way for your company to avoid introducing hyperbole for effect into your communication (or to stop it from growing bigger if it’s already there) is for your leaders to frequently acknowledge the work of your team members and to validate their emotions. This doesn’t mean that your leaders make constant changes based on the emotions of your team members, but states that these emotions are understandable considering the circumstances.
Now, let’s dive deeper into the inner-office communication side of correctness to set your organization up to succeed long term.
Correctness Inside the Office
A willingness to be vulnerable helps team members, and especially team leaders, work more toward getting things right instead of trying to be right. In an interview with Adam Grant on his podcast ReThinking (a replay of this episode came out on November 28th, 2023), Brené Brown shares that this one small adjustment in attitude can make a huge difference in any organization.
And while vulnerability goes a long way, there are also some important additional factors to consider when thinking about correctness inside the office.
First, let’s talk about how credit is distributed. This one issue can cause infinite problems inside an organization or infinite growth. It is important to remember to be correct when communicating credit inside your company. Even though there may be a particularly successful and organized leader working with a team, whatever that team accomplishes should be credited across every member of the team. This is one way to promote inclusion within your organization, which most team members and unique purchasers value greatly in today’s modern business environment.
One way to encourage the behavior of shared credit in your company culture is to publicly praise team members when they openly share about contributions that others have made to various projects.
Case Study: Chad Willardson of Pacific Capital
When Chad Willardson, well-known author and President of Pacific Capital, works with team members, he often splits them into smaller groups so that each individual has more time to share in a more intimate situation. In order to promote building each other up, when those small groups have ended, he asks for shares not about what the individual people talked about, but what someone else in their group talked about that was inspiring.
This instantly takes the focus off of the individual, and puts the focus on team wins. Even if your organization only spends a small time encouraging team members to shout out other people doing good work on their team or in a different department, this will transform the way those in your company think about correctness when it comes to sharing credit.
When a team member works hard because they are motivated to help your organization succeed, and they don’t receive any verbal or financial credit, one of two things usually happens. The first result is that your motivated team member might turn into a complacent or even grumpy one. When they don’t feel valued for their contributions to the team, they are much less likely to keep accessing the creative, confident attitudes that shaped their high-value contributions. The second result is that your unmotivated team member will look for another organization to work for where they believe they will be valued openly.
Your company doesn’t want either of those two results to happen, and the single best way to avoid them is to keep correctness of credit as a top priority. But what happens in the name of correctness when someone on the team makes a mistake?
The same culture that encourages team members to share credit will also encourage them to take share in the blame when they are part of a mistake.
Exercise 1.6: Rewrite
Course Manual 5: Benefit Focused
Imagine you’ve been looking for a specific type of help. For example, your child has been drawing ever since they were little and they seem interested in animation, but intimidated by how many people are also interested in it. Then, one day, you meet Jennifer. When you ask what she does, she tells you that she works with kids to help them build amazing portfolios that art schools can’t ignore. And once they graduate, she also helps place them in internships that give them the connections they need using her relationships with past students who are now active in the industry. Jennifer’s help would be a dream come true for your child and their goals.
You know right away what the benefit would be of hiring Jennifer to coach your child as they put together an amazing portfolio: a future shaped by an industry expert with the support and relationships they need to help your child make it into an animation studio.
The big mystery, here, though is how Jennifer knew exactly what to tell you so that you knew she was the help you needed. Once we break down what she said, we can see there is one major focus—helping you see what the benefit is from working with her. If she had just said, “I help art students develop their portfolios and build relationships later after art school,” you wouldn’t have been so eager to get your child on Jennifer’s schedule.
Now, take a step back. When anyone in your organization communicates with a potential client or customer about what you sell or which services you provide, does that person understand what benefits they will see as a result of working with you?
This is the question we’re going to use to shape the way we think about benefit-focused communication within your organization.
Why do we need to focus on benefits in our communication?
The way you talk about the services and products you provide needs to be shaped around what the other person will get from working with your company.
For example, let’s say your company sells pools. You wouldn’t show up and say, “We sell pools, don’t you want one?” Instead, you would talk about the cool water when it’s hot, the relaxation opportunities, the social aspect of being able to host pool parties. You would tell them what life would be like once they had the pool based on everything they could use it for.
And if you’re selling not just the pool, but also promoting pool care services, you would tell them that they would get all of the things you previously mentioned, and not have to worry about maintaining the pool because they will get to pay you to take that off their plate.
A lot of companies get this wrong because they’re so excited about the process. That’s what gets them up in the morning—knowing they get to walk a customer through a clear path to helping them get what they need. But clients and customers care far less about that path than those inside your organization. Unique purchasers want to know what will happen after they travel down that path with you. What waits for them there? Will it finally be the thing they’ve been wanting most?
So, now you know that you need to talk about what benefit they’ll get from working with you. But that isn’t the only piece you need to solve the puzzle and get them to purchase. You also have to give them three other types of awareness that will help them realize that they need someone else to come in and work with them.
The truth is, not every person you talk to will even understand that they have a specific problem. They know they’re frustrated. They know they want something different. But what they don’t know is that all of these feelings are related to a problem. When you introduce the benefits to them, they realize that a problem exists that they don’t know about, let alone know how to solve.
What types of benefits matter most to the people you work with outside of your organization?
This can feel like a tricky question to answer for the team members inside of your company. Why? Because their jobs are to focus on the how behind your systems and the results you get for clients or customers—not the why. It is going to take effort-driven, focus-filled communication to get your team to start thinking about the why your clients and customers are feeling from day to day. Is the effort of such an endeavor worth the results? Let’s talk about it.
When you start to build benefit-focused thinking on the inside of your company, it will naturally start to come out in every piece of communication your organization puts out. This is extremely valuable to your company as a whole, because it exponentially increases the power of every other effort your organization makes.
The simplest way to encourage your leadership and team to think in terms of benefit-focused language is to have them constantly ask this question:
• What is the end result?
These follow-up questions are equally useful:
• How will this person feel when they have the end result?
• What about this end result will change the problem they have now?
• How does this result propel them to address the natural problem that pops up once their present problem is solved, and how can we anticipate helping them with this next natural problem?
In these questions, “this person” could also refer to themselves. And working through this mental maze will train your team members to start thinking about the benefits they will see as a result of the actions they take in every arena. Of course, this most naturally leads to them thinking more about the benefits that your customers or clients will experience from working with your company.
Case Study: Dad Shoes Storm the Market
While other shoes on the market were hyping fashion and status, New Balance embraced its benefit-focused qualities and started to encourage influencers who were already wearing them for durability and comfort to become sponsors.
Then, recently, it took this approach one step further by adding different colors and styles to become doubly benefit-focused. Not only could you get a longer-lasting, more comfortable shoe. Now, you could find them in the colors and styles you wanted, which put them a step ahead of their competition in growth when compared to brands like Nike and Adidas.
Next, they took their dependable, comfort-based shoes to other brands to create impressive collaborations that combined New Balance’s tried-and-true shoes with intense, influence fashion.
In 2023, New Balance became a $5-billion brand. And while it is still considered to be a smaller player in the shoe market, its growth increased more than any other shoe brand in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.
What types of benefits matter most to the people inside of your organization?
Thinking about everything from a benefit-focused standpoint will also increase the efficiency of your teams as they work within your organization. How? Instead of seeing every task as something on a checklist, your team will start asking questions like, “How does completing this one thing benefit me? How does it benefit my team?”
During each process, they will start the mental task of evaluating the potential outcomes. This means that your team will be far ahead of every other team out there because they will be thinking creatively within the scope of the possible results.
When fiction writers start working on a lengthy project, like a novel, without any sort of outline or character chart, they often end up working themselves into a corner and get stuck because they don’t have the minimum information they need to continue. Contrarily, when they have an extremely robust outline with multiple, lengthy character sheets, they also often back themselves into a corner and get stuck. Why? In this case, they have too much information to be able to continue.
This is why experienced writing teachers will often recommend a skeleton outline. It has something magical built into it. You see, they have a minimal amount of information that keeps them going toward a specific goal, but they aren’t sure how they’ll get there. This unknown information is what creates what the writing world calls “the sense of discovery.”
What isn’t well-known is that a sense of discovery is just as important for anyone on your team as it is for any fiction author: The feelings that come with the sense of discovery are what drive innovation.
When your team starts thinking through the lens of benefit-focused communication, they will naturally start focusing on results. Each result is the end of their skeleton outline. They have a clear direction they’re headed for. And, they know where they’re starting from. That’s the beginning.
They must now creatively engage their thinking and use their specific skills to get to the end of the story—the benefits or results.
This type of thinking also extends into the way they talk about how your organization solves problems for your customers or clients—they can now take them on a journey. This is how strategic storytelling propels organizations as they grow and scale. It’s all based on benefit-focused thinking, which turns into benefit-focused communication.
How can we communicate benefits effectively with others?
One of the most important skills to have when thinking about how to communicate benefits effectively with others is empathy: We need to be able to put ourselves in their shoes. We need to ask ourselves questions that they are asking themselves. And we need to separate our affection and knowledge of our products or services from this process.
Ideally, we want people on our team who are passionate about what our organizations provide. It gets a bit tricky, though, when we’re so excited about the thing we’re selling because it makes it extremely difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of clients or customers who have no idea how we can help them. Most of the time, they don’t have the wealth of knowledge surrounding our subject of expertise.
This is why communicating the benefits, or the after of working with us, is so vital. It isn’t their job to understand our process in depth or they would be able to get their own results. But without that picture of what benefits they will see after working with us, they’ll never be open to trusting us to solve their problems.
So, how can we think in a more objective way about the services we offer? One simple way is to think about the physical, emotional, or spiritual results our clients or customers see from working with us, and then asking friends and family outside of our organization if we can explain these benefits to them.
If they can tell what the benefits are with clarity and understanding, you are communicating these benefits effectively. It is important to note, however, that your family and friends aren’t always aligned with the same values of your unique purchasers. So, make sure to think about how effective the benefit-focused communication would be to a unique purchaser. Are you addressing their pain? Do they feel that you understand their problem? Can they see how your solution would change their end results?
What roles do clarity, concision, consistency, and correctness play in benefit-focused communication?
It is vital to use the other lessons from this course so far to make benefit-focused communication as clear, concise, consistent, and correct as possible. The best way to do this is to think through these questions before and after you create benefit-focused language.
• Is the language I’m using easy to understand for anyone who would be a unique purchaser?
• Did I say this with as a few words as possible?
• Does the tone of this match with our organization’s messaging breakdown?
• Do the values displayed here match up with the values we’ve decided to emphasize as a company?
• Will they understand how our solution can transform their problem after reading this?
This works for communicating well with your unique purchasers or inside the office (or digital realm) with your team members.
After everything you’ve learned so far, this is where we see the 4 Cs of communication come together in an impressive way that will take the words your organization shares to the next level.
In the world of business development, we call this skill stacking. You have learned how to take five separate skills and can now create one impressive result. The best part of stacking skills like this is that it requires so much learning and practice that not many companies are willing to invest in their teams being able to stack skills. Your organization is obviously different, and it is important for you to celebrate the results you’re seeing at this point.
Like marketing expert Rachel Pedersen often says, “What you celebrate, you can replicate.” And you want to be able to replicate the skill stacking that we’ll continue to do throughout this program.
How do we gain an edge over competitors by using benefit-focused language?
In the last few lessons, the sheer effort you and your team have expended to acquire or refine communication skills that many organizations never take the time to implement will set apart everything you do from now on.
While many companies will admit that benefit-focused language is a traditional yet proven method, they won’t put in the extra effort to make it an “in context” skill for the people on their teams.
This is why we often see infighting between departments, because the marketing department is usually in favor of using benefit-focused language while other departments want to emphasize different features and proprietary systems.
When you work through each department to cement the principles discussed in this course, you are taking a step that many companies would never be willing to take.
And the people who your company reaches with this organization-wide approach are going to know that you understand them. This goes a long way toward battling against the mistrust that everyone in your industry is fighting against. You have a much more refined approach.
An Example of Benefit-Focused Language
In this two-part email sequence, you can see the benefit-focused language is laser-focused around the company’s unique purchasers.
Email 1 of 2:
Subject: It’s Going to Be Hot This Summer
Preview line: But it doesn’t have to be…
What if you could finally have the relaxing summer you dream of every year, without having to think about where you’re heading to escape the heat?
This year could finally be different, if you weren’t facing the same boring backyard that’s just too hot for summer cookouts.
It’s time to think about what your June, July, and August would look like if there was a place to splash your cares away.
And for way less than you’re probably thinking.
Keep an eye on your inbox for our next email where we’re going to tell you all about Jim, who had the exact same problem.
Sam
Email 2 of 2:
Subject: You’ve Already Tried a Vacation Getaway, But It Just Didn’t Last
Preview line: What if this time, you took a different approach?
In my last message I told you I was going to share Jim’s story with you next. You see, Jim didn’t want to have to fly three hours away every time he felt like cooling off in the water. And he also didn’t want to have to deal with thousands of tourists who had the same idea he did.
It wasn’t just about the money for him. He was looking for a different approach to a problem that had plagued him for 20 years: He actually wanted to look forward to summer.
That’s when I went through our list of dependable pool options and helped him select the best one for his personal budget.
Jim is now a hero to his wife and kids for solving the problem of being stuck landlocked in the middle of a hot summer season.
What if you could finally find a solution to your summertime woes just like Jim did? It’s possible, and I know I can help. Respond and let me know if this focused family time around the pool is what you want more of in your life.
Sam
Now you have all of the knowledge and practice you need to make benefit-focused language a foundational piece of your organization’s communication. You’ve got this.
Exercise 1.7: Pick an Offering
Course Manual 6: Organization Values
Your Unique Organization
The reason that we use the word “organization” when we talk about companies is because each one is like its own living, breathing organism. There are different people accomplishing different tasks, but they all work together in different departments that are organized according to a larger purpose.
With that in mind, it’s valuable for us to take a closer look at your organization so that we can consider what sorts of inputs and outputs will cause your company to thrive. And one of the most important ways we can measure that up front is by taking a deeper look into the values your organization has.
This is about so much more than just writing a group of adjectives on a list and calling it a day. In this section of the course manual, we’re going to walk through the information and questions you need to determine which values your company started with, which ones it has presently been operating with, and which ones you can embrace, exclude, or add to find growth in the future.
First, let’s go ahead and define what a value is and discuss how each value shapes the different aspects and assets of each company.
What is a value?
In general, a value is an idea that communicates the importance that something is thought to merit; the significance, value, or utility of anything; the ideals or standards of conduct of an individual; the assessment of what matters in life.
Your company’s values are its guiding concepts, philosophies, and beliefs.
One of the biggest mistakes that organizations make when setting up their values is to list vague guidelines that they think make them sound thoughtful or relevant. But when company values are chosen this way, they won’t be able to accurately communicate what your organization really does (or hopes to do) to the rest of the outside world in an effective manner.
Think about the values or the mission statement your organization currently has right now. Is it full of specific things, or is it made of a vague list that some “messaging expert” told you would have mass appeal?
For example, many companies use the phrase, “to make the world a better place.” And while that isn’t a bad value to have, it’s too vague to actually communicate anything of importance to the potential customers or clients who want to know what your organization actually does.
A better, clearer value that uses the same phrase might look like this: Our company’s goal is to make the world a better place by extracting carbon from the atmosphere on behalf of other organizations so that we can reduce our collective carbon footprint in the state of New Jersey.
So, as we go through the rest of this course manual, try to filter everything we’re discussing through the lens of the value of specificity.
Recognizing and Adjusting Values Over Time
Because of the way technology has increased, not just in the world, but in our day-to-day lives, the values that organizations started out with even 5 years ago might need significant updating. And for those that have been in the game for decades, it’s definitely worth dusting off that old list of beliefs to see if it still fits with the company’s modern and future goals.
Before we start thinking about your unique purchaser and what they want and need to hear, it’s important to create a firm foundation based on what your organization values. In addition to that, we also need to consider what it is your company provides and when those provisions have yielded the most amazing results (for both you and your clients or customers).
Even though your organization has probably shifted over time, whether it’s that you’ve changed your focus or mechanized some form of your process, there are still essential values you have now that are just as relevant as they were when your business founders preceded you.
Here are a few questions you can think through to help you evaluate present and possible values to focus on:
• At the core of what we do, what ideals matter most?
• If we were describing our company as a cause, how would we describe it?
• Is there something we do or an attitude we have that makes us unique in our space? Do we have values that reflect that?
• Is there a unifying sense of conviction that most of the people in our organization feel toward what we do? How can we make sure that comes through in a specific written value?
The key to being able to adjust your values as your company winds through the hallways of time is to be open to new answers showing up when you ask these questions.
Each organization should also be excited to look at the way they have been transforming every six months through the lens of your values. While you shouldn’t need to make any huge value shifts, it is vital to be able to look at them and say, “Yes, this is what we’re about,” whenever you read them. And if that is no longer true, it’s time to make a few adjustments.
Looking At Updated Values Through the Lens of Your Competition
One of the questions we looked at in the last section was, “Is there something we do or an attitude we have that makes us unique in our space? Do we have values that reflect that?” This is a vital question to answer, but many companies don’t have any response for this question in their mission statements.
Like we discussed earlier, each individual organization is a unique, living organism made up of the people and ideas that operate inside of it. This means that there will undoubtedly be things that your company does that is different from what your competition does. There is usually an urge to cover up those differences and lean hard on brand recognition alone to get your unique purchaser to choose you over the competition.
What would really set you apart from your competition, though, is to highlight those differences. Just like your organization is one-of-a-kind because of the individual people and ideas that live in it, your unique purchasers are, well, unique. They will have certain preferences, even if some of those specific wants are unconscious.
An alarm might be going off in your head right now because you are probably wondering, “But what if the differences we highlight are the ones that show a potential client or customer why they don’t want to work with us?”
We totally understand that concern. However, when you allow unique purchasers to self-qualify as either the perfect fit for your business or not a fit at all, you’re automatically doing something that will only benefit your company: you are improving the quality of the people who want to work with your organization’s specific skill set.
One of your goals for setting or refining values should be to help your unique purchaser be able to make a decision quicker. And making sure that your unique strengths come through in your communications will help those who would naturally choose you over your competition make that decision much faster.
Being Honest About Which Values Aren’t a Match
For many companies, there is a strong desire to attempt to be the answer for everyone when it comes to their area of expertise. But, as the popular marketing phrase goes: If you’re trying to attract everyone, you will end up attracting no one.
A few paragraphs ago, we talked about how knowing your organization’s unique abilities will help people who would naturally prefer those abilities choose your company even faster. To build on that, we’re also going to discuss disqualifying other organizations or causes that are not a good match based on their values and how this can actually improve your brand’s reputation.
In the book 10X Is Easier Than 2X: How World-Cass Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy, we can borrow on the principles from world-class entrepreneurs to apply to organization’s like yours. The authors of this book explain that we should all be looking for the 20% of our businesses that bring in the most revenue and the highest-quality clients or customers. Conversely, this means that we must say no to 80% of the opportunities that are often more work, bring in lower revenue, and make all of our team members the most miserable.
When we evaluate a potential client or customer or partnership, there will probably be those who match up with some of our values, but not all of them. What if we decided to only partner or work with those who felt connected to all of our values?
That would bring us our 20%. So, when your organization is looking to find clients or customers, ask this question:
• Is this person/company as a whole a great fit, or are we making space where values don’t match because we don’t want to lose any potential client or customer?
The answer to this question will tell you a lot not only about that other person or organization, but also about the mindset that is living inside your company right at this moment.
It is also vital to consider the previous question when deciding what kind of social cause your company will partner with financially or with resources or time. The social work you do reflects on your brand, but not all of these reflections will necessarily be positive.
If your team gets really into helping with a cause that doesn’t align with all of your company values, there is a danger that this will water down your brand and serve as a distraction for your team. The truth is, not all charity work is created equal.
There is intense value in learning to be strategic about where your organization invests the assets it has when it comes to both clients or customers and causes. If you can focus your efforts so that everything lines up with your specific values, that will build a focused kind of momentum that is impossible to duplicate any other way.
Values in any organization can act like a compass, helping you steer continually toward the things that are not only important to your founders and team, but also keep you moving toward growth with both speed and focus.
Matching Company Values to Company Strengths
Often, when we’re thinking about which values matter most to any organization, we’re thinking through the filter of what we know our investors or board members want to see and what we think will resonate with our unique purchasers the most. However, there is a factor that’s even more important to consider: the existing strengths of your organization.
One of the best ways to position your company to thrive is to ask this question:
• What is it we’re really great at that doesn’t seem to have a corresponding value?
If you find that you already have every major strength in your organization’s values, then the next best question is:
• How can we refine our values to better encompass our greatest strengths?
Businesses that do well are willing to take risks and refine their filters, and this means focusing in a more intense manner on how to make their strengths shine through when people learn about their companies.
We’ve previously discussed how narrowing each value using specificity will help those inside and outside of your organization be able to better identify why your company does what it does. In this case, the narrowing is based solely on the things your organization does best, instead of focusing more widely on what your company does well.
As the well-coined business saying goes (which is most often attributed to Jim Collins), “Good is the enemy of great.”
If you invest the time and effort in refining your values based on what your company is truly great at, you’ll notice that the ripples from this one action are long-lasting and far-reaching.
Case Study: Nordstrom’s Customer Service
One of the core values that Nordstrom doubles-down on each and every day is excellent customer service. So much so, that the team members employed by Nordstrom are reminded of this core value each and every day they come into work.
In order to honor this value, Nordstrom also has an extreme return policy. Even after periods of time that no other retailer would allow for returns, Nordstrom has been known to take back items that broke after a year or two or use to exchange the item for one in good repair.
They have also been known to add new items to their shops specifically because of the high-value they know these items will bring to their customers. For example, Nordstrom took a risk by stocking Spanx even though they were a newer development by Spanx founder (and inventor), Sara Blakely.
Because of their unique dedication to this specific value, they are known as a quality retailer and trusted by many unique purchasers who want to invest in well-made products in the world of fashion.
Comparing Your Organization’s Values to Your Unique Purchaser’s Values
Now that you’ve thought through the different questions to help you adjust your company’s values based on what lives on the inside of your living, compartmentalized organism, it’s time to think about those who interact with it from the outside.
Let’s talk about that special moment when the values of your organization collide with the values of your unique purchaser, and what potential downfalls might pop up.
The more a unique purchaser’s values align with those of your organization, the more enjoyable the process of working together will be. Whether you sell banana slicers or teach other organizations how to be more inclusive, this is true. And usually, as an added bonus, the quality of work that results from two like-minded entities will be much higher than if the values don’t match up.
However, there is one area of danger for organizations when they’re thinking about the values their unique purchasers hold dear: an overwhelming amount of values.
In today’s overflow of available information, sometimes unique purchasers will want to make sure that the companies they choose align with them on every single one of their personal values. This may show up in the form of comments on an organization’s social page or a confrontation at a conference.
Instead of trying to form a collective opinion about every issue that unique purchasers could possibly ask about (which is impossible), the best response you can give is actually a redirect. When a unique purchaser asks you to define your opinion on something that isn’t a part of your established value system you can simply say that, as an organization, your main focus is on whatever values you have decided to hone in on. You can add that you’re thankful for other organizations out in the world who care as much about the cause your unique purchaser mentioned as you care about your specific values.
Thinking Deeper About the Long-Term Results of Your Defined Values
Being open enough to think through these ideas is deep work and can feel difficult and frustrating for both you and your team. This means it’s important to give everyone time to reflect on the values, and then time to recover from the deep work of reflecting. We promise that the end results will be worth these concentrated efforts.
You can even use these principles on an individual level to discover your personal values and how they complement your company’s.
Building a Culture That Supports Critical Thinking
One of the best ways to continually achieve company growth from a values and systems perspective is to invite critical thinking. Anyone on your team should be able to come to you or one of their leaders to voice concerns at any point in any process.
In his book Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, Ed Catmull from Pixar explains that when someone comes to you with a problem, they are showing you that they trust you. Being open to critical thinking is a value that every organization should have.
Exercise 1.8: Values
Course Manual 7: Organization’s Purchaser
We’ve already mentioned your unique purchaser quite a bit. In this section, we’re going to elaborate on what a unique purchaser is, how they differ from an ideal client avatar (ICA) and how your organization can ask questions to learn which unique purchasers are a great fit for your company.
Psychographics or Demographics?
In the world of marketing, the ideal client avatar (ICA) has reigned supreme for decades. But just because that’s been the normal way to market to the masses doesn’t mean it’s the best way.
One of the biggest disadvantages of using an ICA as a standard for messaging and outreach is that it’s naturally exclusionary. This means that whoever is coming up with the ICA will be limited to the main people or groups of people that they interact with most.
The reason that many marketing firms or copywriting companies still use ICAs is not for the benefit of their clients, but instead to make their jobs easier. When they are writing to a small demographic based on an assumed race, age, gender, and income level, they have a lot less work to do in the set-up phase and even less work to do in the testing phase.
If demographics aren’t the best way of defining the kind of client or customer that would be a good match for your organization, is there a better way?
Yes, that question leads us to a modern example: psychographics. Many marketing firms dismiss this way of gathering information about potential clients or customers by saying, “That’s too costly,” while the truth is, they probably haven’t even given psychographics a real chance.
While segmented psychographics can become costly, since testing multiple segments is involved, we can use general psychographics to come up with the unique purchasers who will appreciate exactly what your organization does and how they do it. So, what kind of information do psychographics focus on?
Psychographic information is created from data about the values, way of life, personality traits, and convictions of your unique purchaser.
When we talk about demographics, we usually refer to an ideal client avatar (ICA). In the same way, when we talk about psychographics, we also need a term that helps us discuss the individuals who are represented by the data.
Because there wasn’t an equivalent term for psychographics, our team came up with one: the unique purchaser. Let’s take a look inside each category within psychographic data that we want to learn about our unique purchasers.
Value (A Psychographic We’ve Previously met)
In case you need a reminder, a value is an idea that communicates the importance that something is thought to merit; the significance, value, or utility of any thing; the ideals or standards of conduct of an individual; the assessment of what matters in life.
Way of Life:
We can define the phrase “way of life” by looking at the behaviors, traditions, and views of a specific individual or community. For example, if a company that produces vegan food is thinking about the way of life of their clients, one of the common beliefs held by that community is that we should all take more individual and group responsibility for the environment.
Personality Traits:
In general, scholars believe that there are 5 main personality traits that include geniality, interactivity, diligence, amiability, and nervousness. They can be remembered using the acronym GIDAN.
Geniality: When it comes to those considered genial, they have the tendency to enjoy interactions that are socially focused outside of themselves and are often described as warm and friendly. The opposite of genial is usually considered to be introspective.
Interactivity: This trait emphasizes the amount of collaboration and transparency that person is open to as far as thoughts, decisions, and general life philosophies. Someone who is not categorized as interactive might be considered self-reliant.
Diligence: We often see people with this trait focus on how they want to accomplish a task thoroughly and also that they seriously take into consideration the needs of others to complete tasks. The opposite of someone who is diligent would be a person who is carefree, not very productive, and often disorganized.
Amiability: Usually, amiable individuals are perceived as cooperative, considerate, sympathetic, and agreeable. They will often seek a mutual solution that makes all involved parties comfortable instead of putting their own needs or preferences above the needs of the group. To describe the opposite, we might use the word self-concerned.
Nervousness: Those who tend toward nervousness find the outside world upsetting, dangerous, and threatening. They are more prone to experience total emotional turmoil. Someone who experiences the world in an opposite way would understand emotional security or be considered even-tempered.
Each personality trait is only considered to exist in an individual if all three of the following qualities apply: the trait must be evident in continuity, long-term frequency, and unique ability. This means that we expect to see the trait in different contexts, across periods of time, and with qualities that can be applied to different individuals.
These 5 main traits can also be summarized by placing your unique purchasers on a scale for each. They would then range between:
• Genial and introspective.
• Interactive and self-reliant.
• Diligent and disorganized.
• Amiable and self-concerned.
• Nervous and even-tempered.
Where your unique purchasers sit in the different measuring posts will influence how you interact with them. For example, if you were working with unique purchasers who tended toward nervousness, your brand would need to be more nurturing to address that trait.
It is important to acknowledge that situations often influence how far to one side of each 5 scales a person will feel or behave. We can sort of mitigate this by thinking about the situations our unique purchasers are most often in when they need our help and then adjust our approaches accordingly.
Another vital perspective to add to this discussion is that there are positive possibilities on both sides of each scale. While we lack the language to make certain that none of the characteristics sound negative in nature, there are great qualities behind even the most negative-sounding descriptions. For example, someone who tends to be self-concerned is usually quite successful at setting boundaries while someone who is nervous tends to be more thorough during any research phase.
Convictions:
We can define convictions as deeply established viewpoints or perspectives. Personal convictions are significant because they provide a foundation for our values, beliefs, and behaviors. Our convictions guide us through moral quandaries, assist us in making decisions, and help us defend our beliefs. Without these foundational ideas, we wouldn’t be able to express our values.
Now that we have a grasp on what each of the three categories of psychographics are, we can talk about how to use them to identify the unique purchasers we most want to serve (and can best serve) with our products or services.
The 80/20 of Unique Purchasers
Depending on what your organization offers and the values you’ve identified already, there will naturally be people with certain psychographics that make them a better fit for purchasing your products or services.
One amazing way to discover which psychographics are a good match is to ask yourself specific questions which we’ll approach based on the order of psychographic qualities we just discussed. The idea here is just to think through the questions, not take the time to answer them. However, you can always come back later and answer them if you like.
A deep exercise you could do as an organization would be to invest time in discovering and describing your own psychographics as a community. With that in mind, some of the questions in this section will direct you to think about company psychographics as well.
Way of Life Questions:
• Based on what we provide as a company, what way of life most makes sense for a unique purchaser to have so that we can provide the highest quality results?
• When looking at our unique purchasers and their surrounding communities, what behaviors and traditions do they currently practice that would make our organization an amazing fit for them to work with?
• What unique purchasers are a great fit for our organization’s way of life approaches?
• How do they feel about daily living?
• How do they prioritize investments?
• What ethical standards do they use to evaluate the choices they make?
Personality Trait Questions:
Which personality traits make the most sense for our unique purchasers to have based on what our organization provides to our customers or clients? Choose a place that makes sense on each of the five scales below.
• Genial or introspective.
• Interactive or self-reliant.
• Diligent or disorganized.
• Amiable or self-concerned.
• Nervous or even-tempered.
Based on the personality traits you selected, what are the related pain points of each and what benefits do you provide to deal with each of those pain points?
When thinking about the individuals on your team, which of them seem to have personality traits that would allow them to each put themselves in the mental place of your unique purchaser? (These are the people to have follow-up discussions with about your unique purchasers.)
Is there an underrecognized community that matches the personality traits of your unique purchaser? Get creative and try to think of a way that you could serve such a community.
Conviction Questions:
• What deeply established viewpoints or perspectives is your unique purchaser bringing along with them into your interactions?
• Is there a specific community where the deeply established viewpoints or perspectives match up with the values of your organization? Are there needs you can address in that community?
• What personal convictions would make a unique purchaser not just a great customer or client for your organization, but a raving fan and enthusiastic referral provider?
Now that you’ve been through the mental gymnastics of thinking through these questions, you will notice that your pool of potential unique purchasers has gotten a lot smaller. That’s exactly why we thought through the psychographic qualities of your most optimal unique purchaser: to get to your 20%.
While many business professionals insist that business itself is a number’s game, and that you should cast your organization’s potential client or customer fishing net as widely as possible, that isn’t how you’ll get the best results.
Casting that net too widely will actually result in something else for you and your entire team: burnout.
We can learn more about the 80/20 concept by investigating a specific principle. According to the Pareto Principle, 20% of causes account for 80% of effects. This idea, that not everything is equal and that most of the results come from a small fraction of the inputs, is frequently illustrated using this principle. It was originally inspired by the disparity in land ownership in Italy, where 20% of the people owned 80% of the land. The Pareto Principle is not a law, in contrast to other principles; it is only an observation. Even while it is widely applicable, not all situations call for it.
Generally, in the world of business, we have seen that this principle is applicable more often than not.
It is going after the 80% of unique purchasers that will lead to burnout. While they are paying for services, they don’t get the high-quality results you were hoping for, and they expect between twice to ten times as much of your team’s time. They are an emotional drain on your people, and they bring down the morale of the team members they interact with while often making your team question “What is our real purpose in this company if our unique purchasers are so dissatisfied?”
This is why it’s important to target and serve the 20% of your unique purchasers who understand why your help is needed (after you’ve explained why using clear, concise, and consistent language of course). They are also willing to accept your expertise and embrace your help.
Case Study: Stanley’s Vacuum-Sealed Bottles
A traditional company that formerly targeted men working in construction and other outside contracting situations with a solution to keep drinks hot or cold for long periods of time is now bringing in $750 million a year. How?
By being open to a different unique purchaser and collaboration that they could focus on with the intensity of 20%. When Ashlee LeSueur, one of the founders of The Buy Guide, fell in love with one of their lesser-known products, the Stanley Quencher, she approached the company and introduced a way to create collectable colors and themes for women who are concerned with proper hydration and fashion.
This shifted the relationships they had with their unique purchasers in a way that increased the business’s revenue from under $100 million in 2019 to over $750 million in 2023. What a difference a shift in psychographics can make.
Evaluating Past Clients or Customers for Psychographic Commonalities
Using the psychographics of your potential clients or customers is a helpful filter. But, there is an even more powerful way to use psychographics to help you understand who your 20% really is. Let’s take a look.
Every organization has a mental list of clients or customers that their teams absolutely love to work with. This is one of the greatest motivational factors for any team—serving people who appreciate their expertise and effort.
But there is also important psychographic information hidden in that mental list of customer or client superstars. When you look at the list collectively, there will be certain common psychographics that are present. Once you take the time to discover what they are, you have a clearer idea of what type of unique purchaser your team loves working with most and can provide the highest-quality results for.
A great way to mine previous experiences with these favorite clients or customers is to ask your team which unique purchasers they enjoyed working with most. Then, you can follow up with them by asking them to make a list of psychographic qualities using the three areas we’ve been discussing in this lesson: way of life, personality traits, and convictions.
You can also ask each team member to make a list of their three favorite clients or customers and evaluate your team member’s individual psychographics compared to the psychographics of the clients or customers they listed.
One of the biggest factors for success in professional interactions is compatibility. But mining your team’s previous experiences with unique purchasers, you’re looking for the psychographic profile of those your team loved working with most—the ones who are most compatible with your team.
The unique purchasers who end up on this list are also the ones who make up the 20% of the people your team should be focusing on.
As an added step, you can also look at financial factors to help you hone in on your 20%. Which of your unique purchasers netted the greatest profits with the least friction? This will give you an additional filter to use to create a psychographic wish-list that will serve your organization well.
Deciding in Advance Who to Say “No” to
Having to make an on-the-spot decision of whether or not to work with each individual who wants to purchase a product or service from your organization can create excessive stress in your team.
There will be people who are outside your psychographic 20%, and after your team starts working exclusively with that 20%, they will become naturally hesitant to work with people who are not a good fit.
Because of this result, which is something we’re actively trying to cultivate, it is an important step to take to establish a “no” list of people with specific psychographic tendencies that are not a great fit for your organization.
For example, since the industry of messaging and business ghostwriting tends to involve high-ticket prices, our team will automatically say “no” to working with an individual who tends toward the “nervousness” side of the fifth scale of personality traits. Why? Because they require too much of a time investment both in the initial purchasing stages and in the follow-up editing stages. They tend to be nervous about whatever results we deliver to them and this affects our ability to get high-quality results on their behalf.
Exercise 1.9: Personality Scale
Course Manual 8: Touchstone Principles
You now have an extremely clear picture of how important values are for your organization. Plus, you also understand how the values of your unique purchasers contribute to your impact and influence as a company. In this section, we’re going to do a deep dive on how to combine your organization’s values with those of your unique purchasers—all to create what we like to call your company’s touchstone principles. Are you ready?
Touchstone Principle vs. Mission Statement
Many messaging experts will refer to these principles as mission statements. But for your amazing company, we want to create something that goes much deeper than a mission statement. It is more valuable to create touchstones that will inspire each member of your team, organization-wide, to remember why they are in your company and what everyone is working together to accomplish.
You might be wondering, “What’s the main difference?” Excellent question. A mission is something you do. This means that a mission statement is merely a document that reminds you what your organization does: the actions that it takes. A touchstone, on the other hand, reflects who you’ve been, who you are now, and who your future self will be. And we can apply those same principles to your company.
As with every other idea in this course, we’ve chosen precise language to help you understand and remember what you’re learning. So, let’s dive a bit deeper into why we chose to call this collection of values and related actions your touchstone principles.
What is a touchstone?
The phrase “touchstone” can indicate several different things depending on the circumstances. A touchstone is typically a benchmark or criterion that is used to evaluate or compare something. In this case, you are evaluating every choice your organization makes by the touchstone principles you create. These predetermined principles will give you both clarity and speed when it comes to making decisions that might otherwise take considerable time and energy.
Another meaning of touchstone refers to a black stone, similar to flint, that is used to verify the purity of gold and, historically, silver by rubbing the metal against it and leaving a streak on the stone. So, a touchstone is also meant to test the quality of something. In this case, it refers to ideas and plans that are being considered in your organization.
Touchstones help us evaluate the worth or validity of any decision by helping us look more thoroughly and thoughtfully at the quality of a concept while also determining if it fits in with the benchmarks that our organizations set forth from their founding moments. Touchstones are amazing at showing us how our values shape past, present, and future actions.
What is a principle?
Since we’re creating a useful phrase made out of two words, touchstone principle, we should also think about the definition of the second word: principle. A principle is a thorough and essential rule, theory, or presumption.
Principles are well-thought-out ideas that help shape the way we live our lives. For example, a principle that serves society as a whole is that individuals are allowed to have differing opinions (and in some cases are encouraged to do so). For a company, predetermined principles will shape the way everyone in the organization thinks about the company’s interaction with its team members and the outside world.
Building Touchstone Principles
Now that we know that we’re not looking to recreate a mission statement, but combine the values and abilities of your organization by creating several touchstone principles that will be used to guide everyone on your team, let’s look at a breakdown of what lives inside each touchstone principle.
Each touchstone principle should have:
• One major, specific value of your organization.
• A related strength.
• A pathway that connects the two.
Here is a fictional example.
Corinne founded Women InPower to coach women in high-power positions to reach the next levels of success without having to compromise their femininity or make enemies out of other women in their organizations through unnecessary competition.
For this touchstone, her value, strength, and pathway are as follows:
• Value: Helping women be more authentically themselves while contributing to areas of industry they are passionate about and qualified in.
• Strength: Being able to hear what women really want behind all of the language they use to seem not-so-ambitious and not-too-demanding to their team members who are men.
• Pathway: Conversation coaching helps Corinne and her team members get the information they need in order to help their women clients make the next move professionally while maintaining their goals to support other professional women at the same time. Monthly emotional-support check-ins are also part of this pathway.
From those three inputs, this is the kind of touchstone principle we can create:
Through insightful, conversational coaching and monthly emotional-support check-ins, Women InPower helps professional women stay in touch with their empathetic, helpful natures while growing professionally and encouraging other women.
You can see that in this case we’ve swapped the order of the three concepts in the touchstone principle for clarity. When you’re actually writing the touchstone principles for your organization, the order is flexible and should be adjusted in a way that will give the person reading it the easiest possible understanding.
How do we decide on touchstone principles that are reflective of our complex organizations?
In the previous example for the fictional organization, Women InPower, you can see that the touchstone principle is quite specific. Why? Because one of the jobs of a touchstone principle is to show your team members and your unique purchasers why your organization is a specialized fit to be preferred over your competition.
When thinking about how to form your own touchstone principles, consider the three different pieces of each one by going through these questions:
• What is one of our top five values?
• What strength of ours fits best with this value and the associated results we get for our customer or client?
• What pathway or method do we use to help our client or customer get the results related to this value and strength?
To start, it is a good idea to come up with at least five touchstone principles that your team can use for guidance.
When any organization begins to exist and evolve, there are certain goals that are created and shared with new hires as the organization becomes a living, changing organism.
How do we infuse our strengths and values into updated touchstone principles?
As your organization grows and makes changes, because of the specific nature of these touchstone principles, it may be that some of them become outdated or irrelevant. When that happens you can either revise the principle for an updated pathway or method, or you can simply discard it and replace it with a new one based on your updated approaches and new strengths.
However, it is important to note that changing your touchstone principles too often will result in inconsistencies appearing in your previous messaging—this can contribute to unique purchaser mistrust. With this in mind, the touchstone principles should only be updated or replaced when absolutely necessary.
In general, the values themselves should not change, even when you edit your touchstone principles, unless you are going through a hard pivot.
The values act as foundational anchors for your touchstone principles and can help your organization maintain client or customer trust even in the midst of organization-wide transformation.
Touchstone Principle and Unique Purchaser Value Evaluation
Now, it’s time to combine your refined touchstone principle ideas with the values of your unique purchaser. We will do this based on the information you mentally collected in the last section of the course manual.
Since you now understand that each touchstone principle is made up of three different pieces—a value, a strength, and a pathway—we can look at a few principles from the way your unique purchasers are shaped by their psychographics to find commonalities.
Let’s begin by going through the psychographics of your unique company, and then we can double back and think through the same questions for your unique purchaser.
As a reminder, psychographics are made of ideas surrounding one’s way of life, their personality traits (broken down into five scales with opposite characteristics on each side), and their convictions.
Looking at your organization as a whole—based on the intentions of the founders and curated skills over time—how would you describe your company’s way of life?
Here are a few clarifying questions to mentally go through:
• What behaviors do we prioritize?
• What traditions do we uphold?
• What common beliefs unite us when we’re working to achieve our big-picture goals?
Now, thinking about your company as a collective, living organism, mentally rate your organization on each of the five scales (GIDAN) using the qualifiers: full left, left leaning, middle, right leaning, or full right.
Genial or introspective.
Interactive or self-reliant.
Diligent or disorganized.
Amiable or self-concerned.
Nervous or even-tempered.
As a third step, mentally think through the convictions your company holds by asking yourself these questions:
• What moral standards does our organization find to be the most important?
• What values or beliefs shape our everyday actions?
• If we feel that a decision would be an ethical deal-breaker, how do we deal with it?
• If a client asks us to do something we feel is unethical or out of alignment with our company, how do we deal with that?
Now, let’s take a look at the same psychographics from a different view. We want to filter everything through the lenses of the priority and preferences of your unique purchasers.
How would they describe their individual ways of life?
Here are a few clarifying questions to go through mentally:
• What behaviors do they prioritize?
• What traditions do they uphold and value?
• What common beliefs unite them when they’re working to achieve personal or community-based goals?
Now, thinking about the unique purchasers we’ve had the best results from working with in the past, on each of the five scales (GIDAN) using the qualifiers: full left, left leaning, middle, right leaning, or full right.
Genial or introspective.
Interactive or self-reliant.
Diligent or disorganized.
Amiable or self-concerned.
Nervous or even-tempered.
As a third step, mentally think through the convictions your unique purchasers hold by asking yourself these questions:
• What moral standards do our unique purchasers find to be the most important?
• What values or beliefs shape the everyday actions of our unique purchasers?
• If our unique purchasers feel that a decision would be an ethical deal-breaker, how do they deal with it?
Touchstone Principle Use
Now that you’ve matched the values of your unique purchasers with those of your organization, it’s time to create a mental rough draft of your laser-focused touchstone principles.
Feel free to make time on your team’s calendar to hash this out more thoroughly with the input of your executive staff, but for now, just think through five values, corresponding values, strengths, and pathways.
Take a moment to reflect on your mental state. How do you feel now that you’ve clarified what touchstone principles your organization can turn to when making decisions? Do you feel more confident? Does your purpose seem clearer? Are you starting to feel excitement in anticipation of serving your unique purchasers through the formation of these complementary touchstone principles?
When you start to filter your thoughts and intents through psychographics, increased optimism and excitement are both natural results. Why? Because this is a totally different way of thinking about how to best serve your organization, your team, yourself, and your unique purchasers.
The powerful impact this type of thinking has on your organization’s touchstone principles will create exponential growth and satisfaction in both your team members and your unique purchasers.
Evaluating Future Tasks and Targets Using the Touchstone Principles
At this point, even though you haven’t had an official meeting to sit down and iron out your finalized touchstone principles, you have an idea of what they might be. For the purposes of this next part, that’s more than enough.
We’ve officially reached the exhilarating section of this lesson: the application portion. While creating the touchstone principles is an important task, the benefits of having them really come into play once you’re able to start using them for their intended purposes. So, let’s take a look at what the most significant intended purposes are.
Evaluating Future Tasks
Each time you work on a new system of operation (SOP), marketing campaign, or piece of product development, you now have a super-streamlined way of knowing whether this new tool for implementation will be a good fit inside your organization.
When you are looking at evaluating future tasks, the most important first step is to run each one through your specifically defined touchstone principles.
Let’s use the fictional example of Women InPower. We know that one of their touchstone principles is:
Through insightful conversational coaching and monthly emotional-support check-ins, Women InPower helps professional women stay in touch with their empathetic, helpful natures while growing professionally and encouraging other women.
It could be that one day, their chief marketing officer (CMO) comes through the door and has gotten caught up in the hype of creating stand-alone courses. She says that this will create more passive revenue and increase their bottom line by at least 25% in just the next 12 months.
Even though we only know one of the company’s touchstone principles, it has enough information in it to let us know whether this new task is in alignment with the organization.
The most important language to consider in this case is “through insightful, conversational coaching.” In this case, it’s the pathway that lets us know if a stand-alone course meets the criteria the touchstone principle sets forth.
Because stand-alone courses do not include insightful, conversational coaching, the idea for this new task does not align with the touchstone principle and should not be developed. However, if they added a coaching component to a course, that might work.
Evaluating Future Targets
Let’s take a look at the numbers side of this fictional example so that we can see what it might look like to evaluate a future target using the touchstone principle in play.
The fictional CMO of Women InPower wanted to create an avenue for passive income. Her estimation was that as a result of this service, there would be at least a 25% increase in revenue in just 12 months. But, as we saw, we would need to change the offer to have it align properly with the touchstone principle list. Changing the task so that a team member must contribute billable hours to the offer would mean that it is no longer fully passive income.
Because of this, the target would not be met unless other conditions were changed as well.
While it might still be worth it to pursue this new task with an adjusted target based on the input from the touchstone principles, without employing the touchstone principle at all, Women InPower wouldn’t have been able to successfully determine that the new task or target they were considering was out of alignment with their organization’s values.
Case Study: Clarifying Touchstone Princoles at Coinbase
Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, clarified the touchstone principles of that organization in an extreme move. He had a private leadership meeting and offered severance packages to anyone who didn’t feel that their personal values aligned with the clarified touchstone principles he introduced as the updated company mission.
He had realized that some of the causes the company had gotten behind were actually distracting from the main touchstones he wanted Coinbase to pursue, and acted accordingly.
Once everyone who decided to stay was aligned with the new goals, as a company they were able to make progress faster and retain new hires longer because everyone knew exactly what the mission of the organization was. This had far-reaching results for Coinbase, even though initially Armstrong faced a lot of criticism for this choice.
Exercise 1.10: Commonalities
Course Manual 9: Reducing Friction
Defining Employee Communication Priorities Through a Touchstone Principle
Before we get into the methods your organization can use to reduce friction between team members themselves and team members and unique purchasers, we need to create a touchstone principle based on communication within your organization.
As you’ve already learned, a touchstone principle is made up of three parts:
• One major, specific value of your organization.
• A related strength.
• A pathway that connects the two.
In this case, we’re going to look at generic communication values, strengths, and pathways that would apply as-is to many organizations. However, if you find that this touchstone principle doesn’t feel like the best possible fit for your company, please feel free to adjust it with input from your team.
Communication value:
Each on-topic contribution is valuable (during task-specific meetings), even if it is negative feedback.
The reason for this particular clarification is to help your team stay focused. When we add the specification that we expect communication to be “on-topic,” that means that we are looking for appropriate contributions to whatever the specific topic is in any professional situation. While there should be moments throughout each day your team can share relevant personal updates and details to encourage vulnerability and authenticity in your organization, during task-specific meetings is not usually the appropriate time for such shares unless the team is prompted with an opportunity for personal shares from leadership.
Related communication strength:
Clear, concise, consistent, and correct communication.
Pathway to connect the two:
Opportunities for open communication must be available in order to experience growth in your organization.
Combined Points Represented as a Touchstone Principle
Our organization values on-topic communication that is clear, concise, consistent, and correct and will provide opportunities for communication that is both positive and critical, to improve collective trust and accelerate company growth over time.
In this touchstone principle, you can see what the combined efforts of all the course manual education points thus far have the power to create. We also know, based on generalized psychographics, that the values displayed here will work with many organizations who employ the methods taught in this course, and also by the unique purchasers who value their own time along with transparent communication.
This touchstone principle will also serve us as we aim to reduce friction between both interior organization team members on one level and unique purchasers and team members on the exterior on another level.
So, how can we create an executable plan to reduce the two types of friction that every company must deal with? There are a few important concepts to understand.
Communication Structures Depending on Type
Inside of every organization there are four main distinctive types of communication: verbal, written, visual, and nonverbal. Specifically, professional communication refers to the exchange of ideas, opinions, and information in order to build mutual understanding. All four types of communication can be adapted for certain work settings.
One of the biggest difficulties related to verbal communication has to do with to the concept of idea juggling. This is when one person is tasked, consciously or unconsciously, with juggling multiple concepts at the same while attempting to address each one. Because this is a concept that can be more difficult for some than others, the best possible step is to turn a list of verbal communication points into a written list that can then be broken down into individual aspects as responses are created.
Idea juggling is the main reason that assistants often take written notes—because often, in this feat of juggling, important questions or ideas may be accidentally tossed out of rotation and become forgotten.
However, in many verbal meetings, team members are expected to instantly memorize questions and instructions and respond in order. This is not the way to set up your team for success.
Normally, the motivation behind creating an instantaneous verbal list on the part of a team leader is to avoid forgetting to mention any of the important thoughts that have just occurred to them. A quick way to avoid forgetting that will save the team time later (since it will create an opportunity to avoid many potential misunderstandings) is for the team leader to take 2 to 3 minutes to write down the thoughts they’re having, or to ask everyone to wait while they dictate their thoughts to a team member who can write them down.
This jotting session can then be used as a discussion list, where none of the thoughts of the leader are missed.
There is a similar way we can construct thoughts in email or messaging software that often becomes a professional paragraph that resembles a fictional stream-of-consciousness piece.
While it might sound less creative, the best way to establish task-oriented written communication within an organization is to use a simple number system.
Each task or question needs to have its own number so that your team member can answer back in a clear, concise, and correct way that is easy for you to understand. And, each written piece of communication should be limited in number so that your team member doesn’t feel too overwhelmed to form a reply.
Limit your inquiries by deciding beforehand which are the most time-sensitive and vital to the project at hand. After you have communication from your team member that those tasks have been completed or that the answers to your questions are X, Y, and Z, you can combine further questions or tasks with follow-up answers. Ideally, you don’t want to exceed five pieces of communication per message.
As for visual and nonverbal communication, encourage your team to make everything as easy-to-understand as possible visually and encourage them to notice their own body language and shift it to curious and kind whenever they think about it.
Case Study: More People, More Friction
In a podcast interview for Grit & Growth, well-known author and Silicon Valley regular, Robert Sutton explained that one of the reasons that friction increases can be because the volume of communication or the number of people increases past a manageable point.
The two main examples he gives are Google and Salesforce, explaining that as both of these organizations scaled and got larger, even simple things like communication got more difficult to accomplish without friction.
Sutton also explains that when leaders get excited about a new idea or method, they often skip over the normal planning phases of communication that will help the team succeed. Then, when the team fails because the communication wasn’t simple or easy-to-execute enough, everyone feels horrible and the team loses momentum.
And while Sutton states that some friction can be beneficial as the team struggles to improve—by doing a task that isn’t naturally easy for them—creating a friction-filled situation that can be attributed to improper communication doesn’t cause improvements. Instead, it causes emotional chaos.
Establishing Realistic Deadlines Via Clear Communication
Earlier in the course, we discussed how damaging vague language can be both inside your organization and outside when communicating with your unique purchasers. There is one instance inside your organization when vague language can be potently damaging to your team: in the setting and keeping of deadlines.
To define a deadline, the main point of communication is the moment when something is due. A deadline, though, is much more than that. In reality, there is a predetermined objective and mutual expectations between at least two parties. There are many different kinds of deadlines in work that depend on the nature of the given project.
A Lesson from the World of Book Publication
In the world of book production, there are different deadlines, or goalposts (if you will), that quantitatively and qualitatively measure progress in a multi-step process. Books must be created in this order:
• The book must be written and rewritten in drafts.
• The book might be developmentally edited after several drafts.
• The book is then adjusted based on the notes from the developmental editor.
• The book is sent to a copyeditor for line edits (grammar, syntax, clarity, concision, etc.)
• The book is returned to the author for approval of copyedits. (This might take two rounds.)
• The book is then sent to the formatter to be turned into physical and digital copies.
• The proofreader goes through the formatted book to look for egregious errors and sends them to the formatter for correction.
• The book is ready for publication (and a marketing team to start discussing launch strategies.)
Because of the nature of this specific industry, deadlines are extremely important. And since they have had to take deadline setting to an entirely new level with this many steps, there is a lot we can learn from this industry about setting successful, realistic deadlines. Let’s take a deeper look.
Now, book publishers have distinct systems of procedure that help them complete smaller goals on the way to their bigger ones, and often, these come in the form of drafts.
Think back. How often have you asked to see a first draft of a project from one of your team members? Often, there is a temptation to ask for a final product in the interest of saving time. But think again. How often has it happened that you’ve assigned something to a team member for final review, only to fill it with notes and questions and then send it back again?
Even though what you’re doing is completing a collaborative process—one that benefits everyone on the team—what you’ve really done is set your team member to end up feeling like a micro-managed failure.
Mentally, you’ve given them an impossible task. You’ve asked for a “final piece” of the project knowing full well that edits or adjustments will likely be required. This isn’t your fault though. In the professional realm—outside of publishing books, that is—we don’t often think of our processes as being in progress. How can we make adjustments, then?
Before you set a final deadline for your team members, think of when that final deadline needs to be, and give them a deadline much sooner for a first draft. Set them up to succeed by letting them know what you want them to include in that draft (using a numbered or bulleted list), and that you plan to go through it with them to help them understand what changes need to be made before they can complete the final draft.
This way, they understand there will be changes no matter what, before they begin. And when you ask for those changes, they aren’t discouraged or demoralized.
The Power of Unplugging to Recharge
In a world that was shaped and built after the industrial revolution, there is a temptation for organizations and professional individuals alike to attempt to push through day after day to meet demanding deadlines.
However, we are starting to see that pushing through stifles both creativity and productivity in ways that can actually damage both the qualitative and quantitative results of unique purchasers as they engage our services or purchase our products.
In their bestselling book, 10X is Easier than 2X: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less, Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy advocate for what they call kairos-focus and kairos-recovery. In kairos-focus, the goal is to focus on one task for a large chunk of time, instead of shifting your task every hour. This helps you achieve deeper focus and is advisable not just for you as a leader, but also for your team members.
Contrarily, in a move that is both equal and opposite to kairos-focus, they also advocate for kairos-recovery, in which you and your team members psychologically detach from your work tasks and communications completely. Why? Because allowing our brains to detach or unplug from our work gives our subconscious minds time to mull over the problems we’ve been solving. Continued kairos-focus doesn’t allow our subconscious to take time to present less obvious solutions because our active consciousness is working on the problem.
If you really want your team to grow based on better, more creative communication, then you need to present them with regular opportunities to unplug and implement kairos-recovery.
This means that you allow them to disconnect from work when they are outside of their work hours. Specifically, you want them not to access their messages, emails, or work phone when they are in a state of kairos-recovery.
As an organization, this must be a company-wide practice to take full effect. That means that when your work hours are done for the day, even your customers or clients can’t get a hold of anyone from your team. What about emergencies? Well, it is vital for your organization to have a piece of communication that goes out to clients and customers on day one of working with you that explains what you constitute as an emergency.
If you need a team member to be on call to deal with emergencies, then you need to make sure that you offset those hours with true kairos-recovery because they cannot be fully unplugged from work if they are on call.
Applying Communications Preferences Consistently Through Organization-Fronted Advocacy
Since organizations are essentially complex organisms made up of individually-complex individuals, it is important for each company to have a plan of advocacy that gives their team members room to establish healthy professional boundaries.
One quick way to sabotage clear, consistent, concise, and correct communication is to create situations that kill the confidence of your team members.
Let’s take a look at a fictional example to help understand how this happens, and what companies can do ahead of time to avoid it.
Tenisha works for an organization that has been known to allow unique purchasers who don’t value their touchstone principles to hire their company as long as the price tag is big enough. So, when Tenisha gets rude feedback from a client that their high-quality, tested deliverables don’t match up to the service that this client was hoping for, Tenisha heads to her team leader to get instructions on how to proceed.
Because of the extra zeros at the end of the fee this particular client is paying, Tenisha’s team leader tells her that she has to do whatever the client wants. At this point, Tenisha is no longer operating in her zone of genius because the client has expectations for deliverables that Tenish knows will not perform well.
But, Tenisha’s team leader doesn’t advocate for her. He has her complete the second round of deliverables just as the client demands. Now, Tenisha sends over the less-qualitative deliverables and her client doesn’t get the results the team promised this client. Why? Because they gave into the client instead of implementing the tested methods they know will work.
At this point, Tenisha’s confidence is low. She knows she hasn’t served the client well, but she also knows that it was the client’s demands combined with Tenisha’s team leader’s instructions to give into the client demands that tanked the end results. But what is Tenisha to do? Her lack of performance had nothing to do with her actual skills, but more with a “the high-paying client is always right” attitude.
Eventually, Tenisha will grow weary of working for an organization that doesn’t stand by its touchstone principles and will leave. Not only will the company lose a valuable team member, but it will also decrease its consistency by not enforcing its own values in relation to the clients it works with.
In the next course document, we will discuss how important it is to grow your organization via subtraction (including difficult and demanding clients), but for now, it’s important to understand that when it comes to company communication, your leaders must advocate for the touchstone principles on behalf of your team members. Otherwise, you will be missing out on the individual creativity that they bring and also damaging your retention, which stunts company growth.
If you want to have truly consistent communication throughout your organization, this means that you cannot conveniently ignore company communication standards when high-paying clients demand that you do.
Exercise 1.11: Rethinking Collaborative SOPs
Course Manual 10: Strategic Subtraction
When using demographics, like gender, age, and location, it can be a little more straightforward to understand the different types of communication we need to use to reach different audiences. For example, the communication you use for someone in their fifties won’t be the same as what you use for someone in their twenties. This fact might make you rethink giving up on demographics in favor of psychographics, but the benefits of psychographics are still far superior to those gained from using demographics.
In fact, using demographics to subtract potential clients, customers, or partners will not work as effectively as if you were using psychographics. And that’s why, in this part of the course, we’re going to talk about the benefits of using psychographics to help us with the art of growth by subtraction.
When You Try to Persuade Everyone, You Persuade No One
First, let’s talk about your unique purchasers, their psychographics, and your touchstone principles.
When you try to talk to everyone, the things you say won’t resonate with anyone. This is a classic marketer’s dilemma, and the reason why demographics were created in the first place. We know that trying to craft one message that will speak to different people in unique situations and seasons of their lives will seem confusing. In fact, we know that if we try to communicate in a way that resonates with everyone, it will often keep us from finding any of the people who need our help most.
There are people who you don’t want to try to persuade. Like the age-old adage, if you can talk them into it, someone else can talk them out of it. When it comes to the world of business communication, this popular saying is usually scoffed at. Persuasion is the job of all marketers everywhere, and they don’t like the idea that once they’ve persuaded someone for their cause, that person can just as easily be persuaded against that same cause.
So, how can we use our recently honed touchstone principles to avoid the traps involved with trying to persuade and talk to everyone at the same time? Simply. We are going to tap into the psychographic values that the touchstone principles embody to reach out to those who need our help, but also share our values.
For example, if your company is looking for people who consider themselves to be contrarian (like the well-known author, Malcolm Gladwell), you would use language in your communication to establish that as a value, your company is looking to serve clients or customers using non-traditional methods.
This will automatically appeal to your fellow contrarians out in the world, the same ones who need your help because they’re tired of traditional approaches that just don’t work with their values.
Let’s take a deeper look into how we can use communication to help unique qualifiers with similar values either qualify or disqualify themselves as wanting to work with us—based on the communication we’re putting out.
Qualifiers and Disqualifiers
A simple way of helping unique purchasers set realistic expectations for the results we can really get for them while driving away unique purchasers who would cause issues for our team members is to make two distinct types of list.
The first list says something like, “This is for you if…” and it’s one of the headings you might expect to see on any expertly-written sales page.
A “This is for you if…” list will have values weaved throughout it that help the person reading it self-qualify if they are a fit. This type of list is also helpful if you’re hiring. There would only need to be a small shift when it comes to the heading and it might look like, “This position is a great fit for you if….”
Let’s take a look at what this qualifying list could look like using the pool business example from course manual 1.5 on benefit-focused language.
This Service Is for You If…
• You want to have more family time in the summer without having to travel to cool off.
• You want to be the one in the friend group who everyone else is grateful to for hosting amazing pool parties.
• You want to be a hero to your kids by spending more quality time with them splashing around in the sun.
You can see that these qualifiers are values based. They are looking for people who value spending time with family, saving money, being generous to their friends, and being viewed as heroes by their kids. Doesn’t this sound like someone you would love to work with?
This is the same kind of values-based qualification list your company can create to communicate with potential clients or customers during the period before a unique purchaser has hired you. Think about it like sorting your unique purchasers into different Star Wars factions. You know you’re a rebel at heart, and you don’t want to work with anyone who loves the Empire. Now, let’s look at the flip side.
There will also be unique purchasers (or potential team members) you want to discourage from coming into your world. We can use the same technique employed above to get people to disqualify themselves. The only thing we need to change is the heading.
Instead of saying, “This is for you if…” we want to use “This isn’t for you if….” Yes, it’s really that simple.
Using the same pool example, let’s take a look at the “This isn’t for you if…” list, shall we?
This Service Isn’t for You If…
• You don’t want to avoid the hassle of having to travel with your family to escape the heat this summer.
• You don’t care about being able to host epic pool parties that your friends will really enjoy.
• The idea of spending more time with your family in the pool sounds like a nightmare because you hate how pruney your skin gets.
You can see that in this list, we’re using what we can call anti-values. In the first disqualifier, the person is fine traveling and doesn’t think of it as a hassle. They won’t value the pool as much as someone who is tired of traveling.
In the second disqualifier, you see that they aren’t interested in having social events in their house. This, again, means they won’t enjoy having a pool as much.
In the last disqualifier, the value of wanting to avoid pruney skin is something that someone who is easily displeased might identify with.
One of the most compelling reasons to use disqualifiers is to stop people who would naturally give your company an unfavorable review or demand a refund from hiring you. A less compelling but equally important reason to get people to self-disqualify is that you don’t want extremely difficult unique purchasers wearing down your team with this type of unique purchaser’s negativity and inability to be satisfied.
When We Don’t Want to Bust Objections
One of the exterior jobs of every organization’s communication is to bust the main objections that unique purchasers have by calling them out in a clear, concise way and explaining why these objections don’t apply to your company’s carefully-curated approach to doing business.
In some cases, though, objection busting might not be in your best interest. In previous sections of this course manual, we’ve discussed that certain types of unique purchasers will create more friction than revenue inside your business. This can create issues for your team that leaves them demoralized and lacking confidence.
Unless your company has proven methods for working with unique purchasers who exhibit these personality traits, it is best to avoid them due to the issues they can potentially cause.
A unique purchaser who tends toward nervousness will want constant reassurance. This means there will be a lot of hours and emotions spent on helping them feel assured that could be otherwise spent on improving the quality of the results you get a different unique purchaser.
When you have a unique purchaser who is self-reliant and your services or products require collaboration with them, this can also cause your team to have to invest a lot of energy in getting this particular kind of unique purchaser. They usually will not want to relinquish some control over the process or trust the collective experience of your team members.
If a unique purchaser is extremely disorganized, it might take a special team member to facilitate getting all of the information you need from them. Depending on the unique abilities of your team members, you might or might not find this to be too energy draining.
This is why it is vital to have your touchstone principles and understand the psychographics of your individual team members. Once you know what your team loves to do and what will create an extreme difficulty for them, you can decide which objections you would rather not bust.
Quality Over Quantity to Accelerate Your Growth
In course manual 7, we talked about how you can tighten your unique purchaser tool using specific questions and ideas based on the psychographics of your company.
And while using the Pareto Principle, which states that 20% of causes account for 80% of effects, will help your organization focus on the 20% of unique purchasers who are the most satisfying to work with and who get the best results from your services or products, there is also a more practical way to focus on increasing your revenue and honing in on your true 20%.
As you implement your touchstone principles and focus on unique purchasers who have compatible psychographics, you will start to notice something. There will be specific industries or psychographic tendencies that pop up as part of an emerging pattern.
In this pattern, you will start to notice that certain qualities or organizations create even more compelling results and improved satisfaction in your team. While many companies don’t think about the differences between projects that cause their teams to grow, yours can. Take some time to assess when amazing results for corresponding unique purchasers happened. On the other side, notice which projects felt impossible while yielding less impressive results for unique purchasers.
The best way to start noticing patterns as they emerge is to perform short debriefs after each job to discuss what the interaction was like between the unique purchasers and your team, while comparing psychographics.
There is one danger here, though, that is vital to avoid. Just because a job was difficult doesn’t mean that it wasn’t part of your 20%. Focusing specifically on your 20% does mean that you are looking for moments that your team can shine in their respective zones of genius. But, you also want them to have opportunities for growth.
While difficulty itself isn’t a sign that you’re outside of your 20% focus, significant team-wide emotional exhaustion is. Because we still want growth without the distraction that difficult clients or customers can cause, here are a few questions that your team can think about the next time you do a post-project debrief.
• Was there anything we found particularly challenging when it came to the task side of this project?
• Were there any moments of interpersonal conflict between our team and the unique purchaser?
• If yes to the moments of interpersonal conflict, what do we think caused these issues? Did we set our unique purchasers’ expectations correctly before we started work for them?
• What did we learn about our team from this project?
• Do we feel that this type of unique purchaser is part of our 20% focus?
• Do we feel that this particular project used the 20% of our best skills to create an amazing end result (even if there were moments of performance difficulty)?
When these questions become part of your normal post-project process, you will find that your team is able to go into new projects with greater clarity and choose projects based on positive growth-filled experiences that create high-quality results for your unique purchasers.
When Subtraction Needs to Happen on the Organization Side
This is never a fun conversation to have, but there will be team members who are not as excited about learning and growing inside your organization as you hoped they would be. There will also be team members who say one thing when you’re going through the hiring process, but exhibit opposite personality traits once they feel secure in their positions.
Because this is a reality for every company, in this section, we will discuss what to do when it becomes apparent that a team member is no longer a fit for your organization’s touchstone principles or for the position they currently occupy.
There is a popular saying in the world of hiring that goes something like this: Take your time hiring, but don’t wait when it comes to firing.
As you clarify what your 20% focus is, you will also be able to focus more clearly on which members of your team can help your company make that 20% happen better, faster. There will inevitably be people who are no longer a good fit for the team, and taking them off the team as soon as possible is beneficial both for your company and for the person being asked to leave the team. How?
If a person is no longer a great fit due to shifts in focus on your team’s part and also the refining of your touchstone points and organization-wide psychographics, they are unlikely to feel satisfied with their work in your company. The absolute best option for them is to find another place where their zone of genius can be appreciated and utilized while their personality traits are treasured and contribute to another team’s efforts. However, because there is risk involved in looking for a different career, team members who feel dissatisfied or out of place during seasons of organizational-focusing will often remain in their current position as long as possible.
Even though they may be miserable or feel out of place, that often still feels safer to them than quitting and having a short season of financial instability while they’re searching for another job.
Plus, their remaining on the team even though they are clearly no longer a good fit affects the entire team’s satisfaction and attitude toward showing up in their full abilities.
This also applies to leaders who no longer feel like a good fit for the values or team goals.
Case Study: The Exit and Re-entry of Steve Jobs Into Apple
When Steve Jobs first left Apple, the state of his psychographics no longer seemed to mesh well with those of the organization. So, after exploring other professional endeavors and transforming as a person, it made sense to the Apple team when he felt ready to re-enter the organization 12 years later.
While Jobs was away, the company was able to recover from what could have been a serious decrease in growth that, left as it was, might have led the company to bankruptcy.
Not every exit is permanent and not every arrival is forever. It is important to remember that just like in life, in companies and individual careers, there are seasons of transition.
While it is best for everyone involved to have the team member exit as soon as possible, it can also still be done with kindness. Whenever possible, provide an amazing reference that explains how wonderful the team member was, and how your organization is laser-focusing on your new 20%. Do them a favor and use clear, concise, benefit-focused language to help a future employer understand what contributions they can make to a team and where they would be an amazing fit.
This way, you are keeping the relationship positive (when possible), but assuring that your team and the person leaving your team are all getting what they need.
At the end of the day, though, your dedication has to be to supporting your team in the best way possible. Sometimes, the most efficient way to do this is through subtraction.
Exercise 1.12: When Not to Bust
Course Manual 11: Communication Efficiency
In this section, we’re going to talk about how the depth of communication can actually shape how efficient your teams and organizations are. It’s important to think about curiosity as a depth-developer because when people are curious, they are automatically more empathetic and less judgmental. But curiosity alone won’t create the dramatic yet appropriate emotional depth your organization needs.
To go further down the rabbit hole, we’re also going to discuss trust building through question asking and prompting negative feedback, while finishing with a discussion about how you and your team members can be individually vulnerable—in a way that feels safe without having emotional discussions that are inappropriate for the workplace.
Inviting Curiosity Into Every Conversation
One of the best ways to promote innovation and creativity inside your organization is to promote continual wonderment. There are companies that don’t appreciate question asking because they feel like any question is an automatic challenge to their power. But like Ed Catmull says in his book Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, when someone comes to you with a problem, it means they trust you.
But we can do better than just responding well when issues that need to be addressed are brought to our attention. We can go a step further to cultivate an environment where wonderment and curiosity happen more often in early stages of development so that more potential problems can be anticipated and we can create products and services that are more naturally antifragile.
What is antifragile?
In his book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains that there are organisms or entities that are more naturally antifragile. In his book he defines antifragile as being able to withstand a lot of fluctuation and destructive events over time by having smaller systems within the larger ones. He encourages us to embrace redundancy in the background.
While many people attempt to build robust organizations, Taleb shows in his book that being robust will not help organizations long term because they are only planning to be able to survive a disaster (which he refers to as Black Swan events) as large as the biggest, most recent disaster. But disasters normally happen in a way that they far surpass our expectations for their destruction. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be called disasters.
When you build wonderment and curiosity in your organization, “What if…” questions will naturally become part of your company’s culture. This means you will be able to anticipate potential difficulties more accurately and naturally than companies that don’t build wonderment and curiosity into their organizations.
Because you want your company to be more than just robust, you want to build an organization that is antifragile. One of the biggest ways to do that is to encourage your team to first identify potential problems through wonderment and curiosity. Then, encourage every one to keep that creative momentum working for you by coming up with multiple ways to solve each problem while making a list of redundancies that can take place in different systems.
Redundancies within varying systems will help you solve the same problem in more than one way with more than one system so that your product or service is the least likely to fail. This is the approach they used to take in the United States Space Program, and they are being encouraged to move back to this model after a record of recent failures.
Turning Every Question Into an Invitation
A few paragraphs ago, we talked about the power of “What if…?” which is by nature an open-ended question. It doesn’t give the person answering it a clear direction because they can answer in any direction.
A problem that can pop up once you invite your team to ask more questions and give you answers to your questions is that you might feel that they are giving you a “wrong” answer. The key to avoiding this trust-destroying problem is to constantly remind yourself that you are looking for answers and questions you didn’t initially expect.
The main point of using questions to invite new solutions is to look for other questions and answers that you wouldn’t have naturally come up with. You’re on an active journey to discover the least obvious questions and answers instead of the most obvious ones. Why? Because this is how innovation happens. And true innovation is the keystone for creating an organization that cannot be adequately rivaled by competitors.
In theory, this looks like suspending any negativity. In practice, this means that when a younger or newer team member asks a question that everyone else already knows the obvious answer to, you and your team treat this as an opportunity to examine the past limitations surrounding the topic to see if they still exist.
Curiosity is the rival of traditional wisdom in the sense that it looks at what has been done and asks questions about it that everyone else has stopped asking. And on curiosity’s way through already-asked questions, it thinks up 100 new ones no one else has ever thought to ask.
The key to really embracing a culture of wonderment is to suspend your judgment when someone makes a suggestion or asks a question that feels obviously unnecessary for you. Train your brain to be open to new responses and new questions. Be curious yourself to turn down the judgment center in your own brain and encourage your team to do the same.
Case Study: How Many Questions Is Too Many?
In an article in the Harvard Business Review from 2018 titled “The Surprising Power of Questions,” the authors looked at several different group and individual studies dating back as far as 1970 to examine interactions where the person being directed was given a quantity of questions to ask.
Some were instructed to ask a lot of questions. Others were instructed to ask minimal questions.
Across all settings, the study found that people who asked more questions were viewed as more likable than those who were instructed to ask minimal questions.
In addition, when one study looked specifically into romantic relationships, they found that the people who naturally asked more questions knew more important information about their partners.
The authors of the article determined that asking others questions shows interest and creates opportunities to learn more about others and their ideas. One of the final thoughts they explained as a result of the study was that most often, people aren’t asking enough questions.
Prompting Negative Feedback Instead of Waiting For It With Dread
In our current world, we live with an ever-existing, undefeatable enemy that strikes and destroys each and every day. Who is this enemy, you might wonder. It’s entropy.
There are a lot of team leaders out in the professional world who live under a banner that reads, “If I’m not hearing about any problems, there must not be any.” But entropy teaches us that this cannot be true.
Prolonged silence is dangerous for any group of people, and especially for those who work within the confines of a system, as systems are the favorite enemies of entropy. So, what is an effective team leader to do to combat this danger?
Get out ahead of it. The best way to gather negative feedback or face a problem is prompt the discussion of it instead of waiting for someone to muster the bravery to come to you with it. While it is a great sign of trust when team members come to you with problems, not everyone who knows about a problem will trust you enough to bring it to your attention. This is why you must show your team, with consistency, that you want to know what issues they’re facing.
One strategy you can start right now is to have the first part of any team meeting be a time of sharing where team members are specifically bringing problems and difficulties they’ve been having with any project to their entire team. As a leader, you can break the ice the first few times you have such a sharing session by modeling the behavior you want to see. Bring your team a real issue that has you stumped that week, but avoid interpersonal problems if you can, to start.
Make it clear to your team that the goal of sharing problems and difficulties isn’t necessarily to find a solution right away, but to get that information out into the group where multiple minds can work on it in the background as you work on active tasks that aren’t presenting current issues.
At the end of your problem-share session, encourage your team to come to you directly with any issues they want to share privately. They may want to spare someone else on the team from being embarrassed by avoiding a public share. Or, they may not be used to sharing negative feedback publicly and would need one-on-one time to practice before they’re comfortable sharing it with the group.
Since you already know that your team is facing real problems at the behest of entropy, it is much more time efficient to prompt your team for any negative feedback than it is to wait until something becomes a visual issue or meltdown.
Getting to a problem before it becomes a disaster is a huge advantage. And the truth is, many teams are so unwilling to feel discomfort that they’ll avoid doing so until the very last moment, which is when the discomfort will actually be at its highest and its results the most devastating.
Increased Vulnerability and Authenticity from Team Leaders
Two big buzz words in the professional realm in the last few years have been “vulnerability” and “authenticity.” The problem with these two words is that, when we’re applying them to the workplace, they need to be defined within the confines of a professional organization, not just in general. So, let’s do that here.
In an episode of the podcast ReThinking with Adam Grant, Adam interviews Brené Brown on vulnerability and brings up the fact that, in the past, some of his team members have accused him of not being vulnerable. Adam recounts that several team members told him that he hadn’t really shared many personal details about the struggles he was facing with the health of a family member.
As a response, Brené, the resident expert on vulnerability research, shares with Adam that he doesn’t have to share personal family details to be vulnerable with his team. All he had to share was that he was going through something with a family member and that he would let his team know if there was anything specific they could do to support him during that time.
The problem with the idea of both vulnerability and authenticity is the incorrect notion attached to each that in order to achieve either, leaders must overshare. In reality, oversharing can create difficult situations that cause more friction than authenticity and vulnerability alleviate.
With that being said, the best course of action that any leader can take is to use appropriate boundaries based on how they are feeling to establish what we like to call authentic vulnerability.
Authentic vulnerability happens when a leader shares what they are comfortable sharing with their team that is within the confines of what is appropriate to share in the workplace. What we’re working toward is professional connection. What we want to avoid is trauma bonding or the laying of unnecessary and heavy emotional information on one’s team members.
Here is an example of something you might say to express authentic vulnerability in an appropriate way for work:
This is what I am going through in my life right now, and if I need any additional support, I will let you know what you can do as I travel through this difficulty.
But you can also go a step further to help your team understand that you would be glad to have them share additional details, if they feel the need to, when they’re coming to you for support:
These are the details I feel comfortable sharing right now, and I’m always open to hearing how I can better support you and learning the details you want to share when you are going through a difficult season.
These are just two examples of what you could potentially say to use authentic vulnerability at work. Feel free to adjust them to fit your unique situation.
Encouraging Gentle Yet Critical Responses
When you’re setting up your team to share critical responses in an effort to be curious, there are precautions you need to communicate to them so that people don’t feel judged for sharing their ideas or problems.
If you openly encourage questions and discussion, and some of the members on your team with stronger personalities seem to be cutting off or putting down the ideas of your quieter, more introverted team members, that can create tension and shut your team’s creativity down. This is a risk that every group takes when they encourage discussion, but there are ways to mitigate this behavior.
When you first start encouraging your team to have curiosity-based chats with open-ended questions, you can let them know that the reason that you want curiosity to be at the center of these sessions is to help remove judgment. But, on the other hand, you also want them to know that these sessions should feel somewhat uncomfortable in that you are discussing new ideas and solutions. Being curious combined with being willing to get uncomfortable is powerful.
This doesn’t mean team members have your permission to judge someone else based on what might not seem like an obvious answer to them. Feeling uncomfortable is different from being belittled.
Keep in mind that even appropriate, thoughtful responses can make team members feel uncomfortable because of the growth associated with thinking in a more curious, creative way, and try using the following method.
The Pause & Gentle Response Approach
Before any team member responds to a question, have them take a moment to pause.
Encourage them to think about the problem as a distant object, removed from them as a person. Remind them to engage their curiosity and wonderment about the subject.
Now, without personalizing their interpretation of the question or their first mental response, they can join the discussion with objective, gentle language.
Using this response approach over time will build a supportive environment where your team members are willing to be curious and uncomfortable in pursuit of finding more innovative solutions and redundancies inside the systems you use to make your organization more antifragile.
Now, let’s talk about what needs to happen when there are emotional situations that are not appropriate for the workplace.
Establishing a Safe Space by Clarifying Appropriate Shares
While there are some obvious things that are inappropriate to share at work (and the Human Resources department often covers them during employee onboarding), there are a few other types of shares that are worth considering.
There will inevitably be team members who feel they are entitled to share every detail of their lives and their resulting emotions with their team members. They will often defend this behavior by advocating for vulnerability and authenticity. However, it isn’t in the name of vulnerability or authenticity that one person hoists the weight of their emotional difficulties onto their team member.
Here a good rule to use yourself and to teach your team:
Processing and validation happen in private, sharing that the general events that are taking place can happen in public.
One example might be if someone on your team is having difficulties in their marriage. They might tell the team, “My spouse and I are working a few things out, and the way I’m looking to be supported is with a little extra time off for us to spend more time together while we’re going through this.”
However, it would be inappropriate for the workplace for them to say to their coworkers, “My marriage is falling apart because of my husband’s pornography addiction. Don’t you think he ought to be happy with me and not turn to that stuff?”
You can see that the private versus public rule would naturally help them to understand that the second share is too much based on what is appropriate to say in the workplace.
Exercise 1.13: Questions
Course Manual 12: Encouraging Curiosity
In the last section, we introduced the idea of using curiosity to improve innovation in communication, but here, inside the final section of course manual one, we’re going to help your organization make curiosity its communication superpower. This will help you start implementing curious communication on every level to improve the satisfaction of your team members, your unique purchasers, and leaders.
Using Curiosity to Replace Judgment
One of the best ways to be sure there is no air left in a balloon is to fill it to overflowing with water. This is the exact principle we’re looking toward here: replacement. When curiosity lives in the mind, it acts as a natural replacement tool for judgment. In other words, when curiosity is present, judgment cannot be.
Curiosity is a useful tool for communication between humans because some of us have a tendency to take whatever information we’re given and contextualize it in a personal manner. Until we make objectivity a continual habit, it is a difficult concept to employ.
So, as we practice being consciously objective, we can use curiosity in the meantime to fill the space where judgment normally lives so that we can get the best information, ideas, and efforts out of our teams.
In his book Positive Intelligence: Why Only 20% of Teams and Individuals Achieve Their True Potential and How You Can Achieve Yours, Shirzad Chamine introduces the concept of “Yes, and…” to help teams communicate in a less negative, critical, and judgmental way.
Let’s take a look at how this works in practice.
Instead of defaulting to “no,” which we’re going to say is acting as judgment in this case, when team members are discussing a concept, plan, or task, they must respond with “yes, and….” In this instance, curiosity is working behind the “yes, and…” because even if there is an aspect of what has just been said that doesn’t work, they are still forced to think about the suggestion in a way that allows them to say “yes, and…” while the “and” part it allows them to make alternate suggestions.
For example, if one team member of a swimming pool sales company is talking about how summer promotions could include the purchase of a floating balloon shaped like a sun floating over their store, another team member could say, “Yes, and if that’s too cost prohibitive, we could think of another way to get visual interest in the story, like one of those wind-driven standing characters out in front.”
Instead of just tearing the idea down with a “no,” the process of using “yes, and…” helps the team collaborate by building off other ideas. At the end of the day, if the team decides not to use a visual to bring new customers in for summer, that’s also okay. Not every idea or concept is usable, but building off the ideas of other team members allows creative, curious questions and ideas to keep pouring forward. The “no” acts as a natural break, slowing the conversation to a stop. And that isn’t what we want.
Curiosity-Driven Innovation Through Communication
Once your team spends enough time using curiosity to replace judgment and practicing exercises like “Yes, and…,” they will be able to build objectivity into their thinking. Our collective goal for getting their mental operating system to prefer curiosity and objectivity is to drive innovation. How does this work?
When people see a need or a problem as a fun puzzle to be solved instead of as a way they will personally be evaluated or judged, they are much more likely to think of creative solutions that haven’t been attempted before.
In many ways, our professional world is still a traditional one. Traditionalism’s natural dislike for the types of environments that are required for innovation to flourish are only undermined by the potential spike of revenue that innovative solutions can create.
We see this with venture capital firms and technology start ups frequently. The potential for extreme returns on investment dwarfs the practicality the traditional world would otherwise invoke, and firms are ready to take immense risks just to open the doors to all that uncertain potential.
But, your organization can create opportunities for innovation without all that risk, and without having to invent a world-changing and unheard of technology. How? By transforming organization-wide communication to default toward curiosity.
The only reason that every organization isn’t using this open-ended style of communication in their company is because they’re afraid. They think that allowing curiosity to take up residence inside their buildings means that productivity will cease.
This overreaction, however, costs them more than they know. The truth is, encouraging curiosity doesn’t halt tasks or inhibit service- or product-development. Curiosity has a more prominent voice as a project enters into the first stages of conversation. Then, as the project progresses, curiosity shapes the project in a way that focuses on customer or client experience.
In order to combat the potential for curiosity to lead to endless questions that stall progress, all your team needs to do is implement quick decision-making. Once the obvious and less obvious innovative ideas have been presented, a decision must be made as quickly as possible. If there is a disagreement about what the decision should be, the project leader, the one who knows a lot and has a 30,000-foot-view, is usually a great tie breaker.
Using Curiosity to Ask Better Questions
When we get into the habit of thinking past the surface issues of any concept or idea, and learn how to go deep as often as possible, we learn to ask different kinds of questions. And what we’re doing when we ask questions based on being curious about the deeper levels of the services or products we provide is gaining an unnatural advantage over our competition.
How does this work? Asking and answering difficult questions is, well, difficult. Think about your favorite two- or three-year-old child and how many questions they ask. Do you ever get tired of answering them? Do some of these questions lead you both in circles?
Asking and answering questions takes energy and effort, which is why so many parents or adults will say, “Stop asking questions,” to the resident toddler in the building. But that’s actually damaging to the child, who is learning so much by asking continual questions and being prompted to do so by the stage of development they’re in.
In essence, the motto of curiosity is, “There are no stupid questions.” But there are questions that vary in depth. And there are also questions that your unique purchasers want answers to that will never occur to your team unless one of you, the resident anti-expert, asks the most obvious things they’re thinking.
At some point, as it happens within every system, your team will start to realize that certain questions yield more valuable information than others. That’s when you can create a master-question list that will help you approach each new project with quality questions that will drive your team toward innovation. The price to pay to get to that master-question list is being willing to sit through questions that don’t get you answers that drive innovation.
If you want to ride this ride, the only way to get the tickets is by being patient enough to walk through every broken ride that didn’t work the way you wanted it to, first. And most organizations aren’t willing to invest in getting those tickets.
The innovation that waits inside the walls of curiosity is well-worth the time that needs to be invested to get that innovation out and into your organization, but you have to be willing to go through the uncomfortable feeling that often happens when your team is in this process.
Is your company looking to input minimal effort to get just-okay results? Or are you looking to invest time and effort above and beyond what your competition would so that you have access to innovation? The choice is yours.
Being Curious About the 4 Cs
As we wind down the course manual for this section, let’s go back a bit and think about the main foundation that our lessons have been built on.
The most important Cs to think about when developing effective communication are clarity, concision, consistency, and correctness. But a fifth C we need to apply, now that we have so much more than just a foundation, is curiosity.
As you move away from this focused time of learning about communication and the 4 Cs, your brain will naturally stop filtering information through these specific types of communication. That’s why it is vital to employ the fifth C in regard to the 4 Cs. Stay curious about how clarity, concision, consistency, and correctness work inside your communications to make you more efficient.
Stay curious about how your organization communicates using the 4 Cs to make sure that your unique purchasers have the information that helps them understand your company is the best one to help them. Be curious about how to communicate to them that your company can solve their present and future problems in your area of expertise.
Get curious about how each new piece of communication can use the 4 Cs to help you make sure that everyone on your team is on the same page.
Here is a list of curious questions that you can keep around the office to help you remember what you’ve learned in this course manual so that you can keep leveling-up your professional communication as both an individual and an organization:
• Is this piece of communication as clear as it could be? Is there a way to break it down into easier-to-manage steps?
• Can I say this with fewer words?
• Does what I’ve written match with the touchstone principles of our organization? Does it sound like something our company would say?
• Are all of the facts I’m sharing correct? Is there any hyperbole that I need to take out?
If you can use the 4 Cs as a curiosity-based guide on a consistent basis, these questions will start operating in the background of your thinking process each time you sit down to create—whether you’re alone or with your team.
Case Study: Because I Want to Wear White Pants
In 2023, Spanx, a women’s apparel company founded by Sara Blakely, was valued at $1.2 billion. Thinking back to how Spanx got started, it was a quest for curiosity.
Sara Blakely, a former door-to-door fax machine salesperson, wanted to know the answer to a question no one else had been able to answer.
“Why can’t I wear white pants without my undergarments showing?” she wondered.
After thinking about it for a while, she took some scissors, and famously cut off the feet section of a pair of traditional pantyhose. And she wore her white pants over them.
What started as one curious question turned into thousands of other questions, including, “Why is it that women’s underwear is primarily designed by men who don’t understand how uncomfortable these garments are?”
This was the beginning of an innovation trail that Blakely has blazed since the creation of Spanx in 2000.
Unlocking Future Potential Through Curiosity
When we talk about wonderment, what we really mean is that there needs to be time spent, each day, actively wondering. About what? About a variety of things.
Curiosity is beneficial in the business world because it lends itself to the pursuit of the unknown. However, it is unlikely that someone in leadership has ever sat you down and commanded you to wonder about what kind of business your organization could become. Sure, there are often platitudes about quarterly goals and a 5-year plan, but those seem to focus mainly on numbers.
It is valuable for every organization to let each team member wonder, “What if…?” on a grander scale. On a company-wide scale.
It is only when everyone agrees, based on your compelling touchstone principles, on the kind of future they believe your company can have, that everyone can collectively race toward that future.
And it is only when you assist your unique purchasers in wondering about the future they can have with your amazing help that they will race toward their wallets to pull out their cards to pay you.
However, that isn’t all that curiosity and wonderment are good for. In order to be the most effective, they both embody a sort of impossible quality.
Are the things your team is wondering about too straight forward? Will the future you’re all curious about actually help you grow?
In their book 10X Is Easier Than 2X: How World-Cass Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less, Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy share that it’s better for people (and organizations) to set impossible goals. Why? This shifts imagination, in the service of curiosity and wonderment, into overdrive.
If someone asks you to do something that you already know how to do well, you don’t need to imagine other ways of doing it. However, if someone asks you to do something that you have no idea how to do, you will start imagining different approaches and you might come up with a new way to do that very task.
In the same way, if you ask your team to imagine a future that seems totally attainable using the skills and methods your organization has right now, there is no need to be curious or wonder. And there isn’t a need to be creative or to innovate.
If you set goals that feel impossible, though, they will have to start wondering and imagining. And they will be curious about what new way they could approach this seemingly impossible problem to solve it using new, actively-developing skills.
In 10X Is Easier Than 2X, the authors make the argument that many organizations are trying to do something that seems simple: these companies want to double their revenues and impact year after year. But, because they aren’t forcing themselves to think of creative alternatives to what they’re already doing, they usually get stuck at some point. But, if they think about how to 10X their business, it leads them to think of new approaches they never would have come up with in their 2X mode of thinking.
So, next time you’re working with your team to pursue curiosity and wonderment, why not take a more extreme imaginary journey?
Here are some questions that will help you and your team run toward a future that is bigger than you could have possibly imagined—all thanks to curiosity and wonderment.
• If we were being honest about the big goals we’re nervous to say out loud, what goals would we be talking about?
• Is there any service or product that has potential, but that we haven’t really been curious enough about?
• If we could only choose to develop three of the things we’re offering right now, which ones would we stick with?
• When we think about how we can impact the lives of our unique purchasers better, how can we think bigger?
• In the industry we’re in, is there an organization that is more imaginative than we are? What is one way we could shift our way of thinking to be more imaginative than they are?
• Is there anything that I am really passionate about that fits in our touchstone principles as a company that I can wonder about with my team?
Course Takeaways
If there is one thing to remember from this entire course, it’s that communication has the power to create huge shifts. If you can successfully (and bravely) lead your team to be clearer, more concise, more consistent, and to care about correctness, there is so much your company can do.
And if you can take that extra leap to encourage openness, imagination, curiosity, critical (and often uncomfortable) thinking, and wonderment to be part of the communication culture in your organization, you are going to take your company toward a future that many would have thought impossible.
By investing the time you have into understanding more about communication, psychographics, and curiosity, you have created a possibility for intense growth not only in your team, but in your entire organization. Congratulations and see you in the next course manual.
Exercise 1.14: Retrospective
Project Studies
Project Study (Part 1) – Customer Service
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Communication Consistency Reset process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Creating Clarity
02. Constructing Concision
03. Producing Consistency
04. Enforcing Correctness
05. Benefit Focused
06. Organization Values
07. Organization’s Purchaser
08. Touchstone Principles
09. Reducing Friction
10. Strategic Subtraction
11. Communication Efficiency
12. Encouraging Curiosity
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 2) – E-Business
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Communication Consistency Reset process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Creating Clarity
02. Constructing Concision
03. Producing Consistency
04. Enforcing Correctness
05. Benefit Focused
06. Organization Values
07. Organization’s Purchaser
08. Touchstone Principles
09. Reducing Friction
10. Strategic Subtraction
11. Communication Efficiency
12. Encouraging Curiosity
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 3) – Finance
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Communication Consistency Reset process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Creating Clarity
02. Constructing Concision
03. Producing Consistency
04. Enforcing Correctness
05. Benefit Focused
06. Organization Values
07. Organization’s Purchaser
08. Touchstone Principles
09. Reducing Friction
10. Strategic Subtraction
11. Communication Efficiency
12. Encouraging Curiosity
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 4) – Globalization
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Communication Consistency Reset process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Creating Clarity
02. Constructing Concision
03. Producing Consistency
04. Enforcing Correctness
05. Benefit Focused
06. Organization Values
07. Organization’s Purchaser
08. Touchstone Principles
09. Reducing Friction
10. Strategic Subtraction
11. Communication Efficiency
12. Encouraging Curiosity
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 5) – Human Resources
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Communication Consistency Reset process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Creating Clarity
02. Constructing Concision
03. Producing Consistency
04. Enforcing Correctness
05. Benefit Focused
06. Organization Values
07. Organization’s Purchaser
08. Touchstone Principles
09. Reducing Friction
10. Strategic Subtraction
11. Communication Efficiency
12. Encouraging Curiosity
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 6) – Information Technology
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Communication Consistency Reset process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Creating Clarity
02. Constructing Concision
03. Producing Consistency
04. Enforcing Correctness
05. Benefit Focused
06. Organization Values
07. Organization’s Purchaser
08. Touchstone Principles
09. Reducing Friction
10. Strategic Subtraction
11. Communication Efficiency
12. Encouraging Curiosity
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 7) – Legal
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Communication Consistency Reset process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Creating Clarity
02. Constructing Concision
03. Producing Consistency
04. Enforcing Correctness
05. Benefit Focused
06. Organization Values
07. Organization’s Purchaser
08. Touchstone Principles
09. Reducing Friction
10. Strategic Subtraction
11. Communication Efficiency
12. Encouraging Curiosity
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 8) – Management
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Communication Consistency Reset process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Creating Clarity
02. Constructing Concision
03. Producing Consistency
04. Enforcing Correctness
05. Benefit Focused
06. Organization Values
07. Organization’s Purchaser
08. Touchstone Principles
09. Reducing Friction
10. Strategic Subtraction
11. Communication Efficiency
12. Encouraging Curiosity
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 9) – Marketing
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Communication Consistency Reset process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Creating Clarity
02. Constructing Concision
03. Producing Consistency
04. Enforcing Correctness
05. Benefit Focused
06. Organization Values
07. Organization’s Purchaser
08. Touchstone Principles
09. Reducing Friction
10. Strategic Subtraction
11. Communication Efficiency
12. Encouraging Curiosity
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 10) – Production
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Communication Consistency Reset process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Creating Clarity
02. Constructing Concision
03. Producing Consistency
04. Enforcing Correctness
05. Benefit Focused
06. Organization Values
07. Organization’s Purchaser
08. Touchstone Principles
09. Reducing Friction
10. Strategic Subtraction
11. Communication Efficiency
12. Encouraging Curiosity
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 11) – Logistics
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Communication Consistency Reset process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Creating Clarity
02. Constructing Concision
03. Producing Consistency
04. Enforcing Correctness
05. Benefit Focused
06. Organization Values
07. Organization’s Purchaser
08. Touchstone Principles
09. Reducing Friction
10. Strategic Subtraction
11. Communication Efficiency
12. Encouraging Curiosity
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 12) – Education
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Communication Consistency Reset process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Creating Clarity
02. Constructing Concision
03. Producing Consistency
04. Enforcing Correctness
05. Benefit Focused
06. Organization Values
07. Organization’s Purchaser
08. Touchstone Principles
09. Reducing Friction
10. Strategic Subtraction
11. Communication Efficiency
12. Encouraging Curiosity
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Program Benefits
Management
- Solution Inquiry
- Inclusivity
- Clarity
- Confidence
- Interior Resources
- Mission
- Org Reset
- Resilience
- Futurecasting
- Mindset
Marketing
- Communication
- Refined Targets
- Sales Psychology
- Emotional Connect
- Rapid Progress
- Creative Focus
- Concision
- Identify Obstacles
- Psychographics
- Refined Offers
Human Resources
- Alignment
- Correctness
- Interpersonal Comm
- Recognition
- Reach
- Modern Shift
- Valued Skills
- Diversity
- Creativity
- Attention Strategy
Client Telephone Conference (CTC)
If you have any questions or if you would like to arrange a Client Telephone Conference (CTC) to discuss this particular Unique Consulting Service Proposition (UCSP) in more detail, please CLICK HERE.