I wanted to reflect back on a great lesson learned from a situation that happened to me a few years ago. I had realized I was a little disconnected from an internal stakeholder. I decided to insure that I get back in touch and tighten up the relationship. I noticed over the previous month a slight change in our relationship that I was beginning to be uneasy with. It was the little things:

• Less eye contact when I am conveying ideas in meetings
• Short responses to emails
• Objections to ideas that usually would not get objections
• Little to no small talk before meetings

Shame on me that I could make a list that long of negative characteristics about this relationship with this individual that I strive so hard to keep happy. So here is what I did:

1. I spent 1 hour a day for 3 days researching each item of concern that has brought to my attention recently by this contact
2. On 2 emails I picked up the phone to reply to him in person in stead of responding via email
3. A simple report was requested and I decided to go overboard on supplying multiple views of the data to help him summarize the data easier than ever before.
4. He asked me to set up a meeting to go over our releases for the next quarter. I responded with a lunch invite and told him it was my treat.

I feel better about the entire relationship at this point and I know my stakeholder does too.  A few hours investment and it felt like we were old pals again. I now have a weekly reminder in my calendar to insure I invest a little extra time to keep this relationships strong. Once this is on cruise control, I will begin the cycle over to wow the next key business contact I work with.

I am amazed how just a little extra attention at the right times can completely change your relationships at work. I’d love to hear your success stories on how you turned around an internal  business relationship.

A few nights ago we woke up to a call from a neighbor at 1:30AM who is a single mom. She was in a panic and begged for me to come over and see if someone was in her house. After a quick look around the perimeter I called the police to check inside reasoning that their guns probably worked much better than my dog as a threat deterrent. Within minutes I was greeted by 3 police officers.

Now I do not claim to understand all the reasoning of everything a police officer does, but I was flabbergasted when all three came over and talked to me in a casual conversation before going inside. They were not asking about clues or what I have learned so far. Instead I got a lecture on how I should have stayed away and called the police. After about a solid minute of lecturing I had to interrupt the officers to remind them of the potential threat that STILL might be inside and that maybe it was a smarter decision to lecture me AFTER insuring that my neighbor was safe. It was an iconic case of not clearly understanding what the highest priority is.

Are you and your staff constantly evaluating what your highest priorities are? Sure the gut instinct is to say, “Of course we are!”, but are you really?  My experience leads me to believe that when people are given a choice of what type of work to start they will tend to lean towards the easy stuff (also known as low hanging fruit) or the fun stuff. The issue is that very often the easy and fun projects are not necessarily what are needed most by the business.

It is essential for you to better understand the direction your management team is trying head with the company. From there it usually makes sense to translate those objectives into tangible measurable goals. For example if your CEO tells you that by the end of the year, he wants to insure that customer’s data is much more secure, what does that really mean? We all know that every level of data protection you invoke will cost exponentially more to put into place. Its your job to translate the high level wish list into associated costs of those choices so that a decision can be made as to how much risk is willing to be taken for the costs.

For many managers it’s very easy to get stuck in the day-to-day shuffle of issues being passed around. You can get to a point when you start to feel like you are making progress when you go a whole day without a fire to put out. Some managers will put in 60 hours a week, demand heavy hours of their staff, and just about come to a breaking point of fatigue and burnout, and yet their management team is still not satisfied. If you feel yourself in this situation you need to insure you are working hard at the right things. For example putting resources towards an HR tool that is not business critical that saves one person a few hours of data entry time a month is not going to hold a flame to using the same resources on a project that has been requested by a few hundred customers and could possibly be a decision point on whether they renew their contract with your company. This sounds so obvious but you’d be surprised how office politics can alter the business reasoning skills.

Here are a few process bullets that can help you insure that your staff is working on the right stuff:

1. Define high-level goals from your executive team
2. Translate these goals into initiatives that are measurable. Define what success looks like.
3. Insure that your own team understands these goals and further breaks them down into the projects/tasks needed to achieve them.
4. Secure the resources needed to achieve the goals. If this cannot happen then readjust the goals to fit the resources you have.
5. Insure timelines are a little conservative to accommodate the unknown especially when resources needs to support legacy systems at the same time.
6. Have regular progress checks to identify issues as early as possible
7. Be transparent about your progress on the various goals from day 1
8. When things are not going right, establish corrective actions as soon as possible.
9. Constantly monitor for “pork barrel”. These are small initiatives that are not inline with the business objectives and take place at the expense of the business objectives being accomplished.

 These bullets obviously just graze the surface on some steps that can be taken, but they offer a very simple methodology on how to keep your staff aligned with business objectives.

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Do you have some simple steps you have learned to help your staff stay inline with working on the right objectives? If so, leave a comment below and share them with others.

There is lots of information out there on the do’s and don’ts of email usage, but if you are in a leadership role here are some extra tips to consider:

1.  Be careful assigning new and critical tasks through email.

When possible, you always want to kick off a new initiative in person. The second best case would be video conference, and the last choice would be a phone conversation. Trying to explain all the details in a large initiative is just not a recipe for success. When a subordinate receives an email with marching orders, it can go down two paths; It will either come across as you being “pushy” and throwing out orders over the wall, or it will confuse the recipient since a reasonable size email will lose all the finer points that could be grasped in a quick conversation.

2. Never scold a coworker via email.

If someone writes their opinion or you hear through the grapevine that John thinks your idea that you presented this morning was terrible, email is not the way to handle your beef. In fact it almost always flames up the problem even more. On top of that you have now just put your scold in email to be archived forever. You have to go talk to the person you have issues with in person. If they are not in your office, then call them.

3. Don’t retaliate via email.

Have you ever written an email to a group of people and then someone’s reply to the whole group makes you look bad? As your blood begins to boil you might be tempted to redeem yourself by correcting your mistake, correcting the replier, or even worse attempt to embarrass the sender in retaliation. If you made an honest mistake, then fess up to it and move on. If the senders email was just in plain bad taste and was an obvious attempt to make you look bad, resist all temptation to reply at all. In the rare case where a reply is absolutely needed, you might want to consider using a little humor to try and bring the intensity level down a bit.

4. Don’t “Reply All” when you want to disagree with someone’s point.

This is the flip side of point #3 above. In this case someone sends out their opinion on something and you want to let the whole list know how smart you are that you are going to add a counter-point not considered by the original sender. The polite thing to do in this case is to consider replying only to the sender. This is a courtesy to allow them to correct their email without someone making them look bad. The added benefit is that you gain some trust with that sender.

5. When thanking someone, consider doing it publicly.

If your support team saved the day and really turned around a bad customer situation over the weekend and you want to give them an at-a-boy that’s great. But the best compliment you can give is when it is visible to their peers and managers too. Just be careful to check your facts and thank the right people and not leave out someone.

6. When a list of recipients includes different levels of the organization, be extra respectful to the managers.

In reality you should be respectful to everyone on the list. The point here is that when you are sending emails between peers, you might have a slightly different tone and formality then when you have a mixed audience. You never want to make a manager look bad in front of the subordinates or their boss. If you do, you will surely alienate this otherwise valuable resource of yours.

7. Recognize what your email relationships are.

If you have someone that you don’t see eye to eye with, you have to be even more careful with email wording to this person. Emails will be read wrong, inflections put on the wrong areas, and in general emails sent to these people will have much higher odds of being misinterpreted. Play it safer with your language with these relationships. On the flip side, if your going to lunch two times a week or have had a recipient over for a cookout recently you generally can get away with a little less formality.

8. Test your emails out in popular formats.

A lot of company use a signature template for all emails. If your default email format is HTML and you send frequent emails to people outside the company, insure that you test what the format looks like in text format. The common items that mess up in text format are links, images embedded in the signature, and the big one is when a table is used to line up items in a signature. Consider pushing for a less complex signature that looks decent in both HTML and text formats.

9. If an email  conversation drifts off topic, change the subject line.

I get emails all the time from conversations that have been bubbled up through different approval chains. By the time I see it the subject is completely different and the chain of emails is huge and sometimes barely readable. You can break the chain when you reply by getting rid of all the irrelevant emails and correcting the subject line if needed.

10.  Use caution with mobile device emails.

It’s great to stay connected and take care of a few emails while standing in line at the airport from your blackberry. Just be sure to consider what the recipient might think if the end of your message says, “Sent from my Blackberry”. Some people like to leave this default trailing message to help the recipient understand why the message might be short and to the point, but if responding to a question from potential customer, it may not be a good idea to have this informal type of email sent. Also consider that the spell checker on mobile devices is rarely used and without it can lead to some embarracing messages being sent.

 
In summary to all these points, consider this, “When in doubt, don’t.” If you find yourself rereading a point over and over that you’re about to send, asking someone else’s opinion on a point before sending, or feeling uneasy about how a comment will be interpreted, assume it’s bad and reword it. Email is not the medium for a technology leader to air out their laundry.