Your Communication Tip of the Day – Be Sure to “Read the Room”

There are some great messages – delivered, unfortunately, to the wrong audiences.  Be sure to connect to your audience; this audience, the audience in front of your eyeballs.

In one of the great pieces of advice from a rhetorical theorist (he used a much more academic term), a speaker should always be very intentional about building a bridge to his/her audience, using stories, illustrations, examples, sources that both the speaker and the audience members understand and can relate to.

In other words, always speak to the audience in front of your eyeballs – not to some other audience. 

We miss our audience when we speak to concerns the audience members do not share.
We miss our audience when we cite a source of authority that the audience does not respect.
We miss our audience when we simply are oblivious to the needs and concerns of this audience.

So, the communication tip of the day is one I read this past week.  It came from a pundit, observing a politician who had failed to connect well to his immediate audience.  The comment was “he still doesn’t know how to read a room.”

So, “he needs to learn to read his room.”

Don’t we all!?

The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies

Here is the executive summary of a recent report featured online by The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI),  the business and economics research arm of McKinsey & Company. MGI was established in 1990 to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving global economy. Our goal is to provide leaders in the commercial, public, and social sectors with the facts and insights on which to base management and policy decisions.

MGI research combines the disciplines of economics and management, employing the analytical tools of economics with the insights of business leaders. Our “micro-to-macro” methodology examines microeconomic industry trends to better understand the broad macroeconomic forces affecting business strategy and public policy. MGI’s in-depth reports have covered more than 20 countries and 30 industries. Current research focuses on six themes: productivity and growth; the evolution of global financial markets; the economic impact of technology and innovation; urbanization; the future of work; and natural resources. Recent reports have assessed job creation, resource productivity, cities of the future, and the impact of big data.

MGI is led by three McKinsey & Company directors: Richard Dobbs, James Manyika, and Charles Roxburgh. Susan Lund serves as director of research. Project teams are led by a group of senior fellows and include consultants from McKinsey’s offices around the world. These teams draw on McKinsey’s global network of partners and industry and management experts. In addition, leading economists, including Nobel laureates, act as research advisers.

The partners of McKinsey & Company fund MGI’s research; it is not commissioned by any business, government, or other institution.

*     *     *

To downloard this report, please click here.

For further information about MGI and to download other reports, please visit www.mckinsey.com/mgi.

Dennis Crowley (Foursquare) in “The Corner Office”

Photo Credit: Librado Romero/The New York Times

Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided uring an interview of Dennis Crowley, co-founder and chief executive of Foursquare, the location-based social networking site. He says its employees — himself included — occasionally change seats so that they can get to know one another better
To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

*     *     *

Bryant: What are some leadership lessons you’ve learned since you started Foursquare

Crowley:  I learned early on not to feel badly about reaching out for help, and not to feel embarrassed about saying that you’re in over your head. We have a fantastic group of investors, and I’ve always felt comfortable asking for guidance. Early on, everyone in the organization became really comfortable with the idea that if there’s something you can’t do, just talk to someone about it or find someone to help you.

Bryant: Other things you’ve learned?

Crowley: The importance of overcommunicating. We’ve been working in this space for a long time, and it’s taken me a while to realize that just because I understand things doesn’t mean that everyone else understands them. In our company meetings, I’ll say things that sound repetitive, but you have to do that. You have to make sure that everyone is on the same page.

As the company has grown, I can sometimes start to feel disconnected, and I’ll decide to randomly meet with one person a day, and we’ll go out for a half-hour coffee. You do that for six weeks or so, and then all the channels of communication are open again. People feel like they can come and talk to me. I learn about the things that are troubling them or challenging them, or questions they might have.

I always ask them for feedback, too. “Is there anything that I can do better to make your job easier? Is there anything I can do to make the company better?”

Bryant: How do you make sure you get honest feedback?

Crowley: We’ve taught people that it’s O.K. to be critical. We try to air all that stuff in public at company meetings, and I think it creates a really healthy environment so that people aren’t running off to a conference room and saying, “I can’t believe we’re doing this.” If you want to talk about that, talk about it in public. That’s one of the things that have made it easier for us to be 120 people and still feel relatively small.

*     *     *

Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.