Thanksgiving Reflections

I always love Thanksgiving week; not only is the week short, but since so many of our colleagues and clients are on vacation, it’s a great time to catch up and take stock of things at work.  As a result, the first two days of the week are quite busy here at CRNW.  In honor of this season of thanks, I’d like to publicly give thanks for the amazing team that works here to serve our clients.  And, I encourage each of you to do the same for your own incredible staffs who work alongside you to serve clients, both internal and external.

This economy has been stressful for everyone, for firms that have lots of work and firms that are searching for more.  And, given shrinking staffs, our remaining teams are stretched thin, working longer hours to accomplish more work.  In fact, given the procurement “season”, I know many marketing and technical staffs will be spending time over the Thanksgiving holiday writing/editing proposals for late November due dates (and that will be a subject for a later blog – but in the interim, WHAT were those selectors thinking setting proposals due on the 29^th/30^th of November!!!??!!).

A lifetime ago in graduate school, my area of focus was on organizational stress and strain –and I’ve continued to be interested in this area of research.  Stress is a normal part of organizational life that varies with workload, team dynamics, market conditions, and any kind of change – good or bad.  And, most employees cope with stress quite well, with many performing their best work in stressful or chaotic situations.  However, when employees stop being able to cope with and adapt to organizational stress, it becomes strain, which is always a bad thing for the employees and the organization.

Symptoms of strain include a litany of somatic complaints – when physical meets psychological – such as sleeplessness, stomachaches, headaches, etc.  Organizations may see an increase in absenteeism and a decrease in productivity.  Previously high functioning employees become unfocused or even incredibly dissatisfied. Some leave; others simply implode.

The most important thing our own research has revealed is the importance of the relationship the employee has with his/her first-line supervisor relative to the employee’s ability to cope with or adapt to higher levels of stress.  In fact, key to avoiding strain or moving an employee from strain to coping, depends on the strength of the supervisor/subordinate relationship.

In this economy, the relationships we have with our staffs are increasingly important.  Supervisors need to remember the centrality of their role in the organization – not just to manage work, but to be a social support for employees.  This means stepping outside our own stressful work lives to actively engage with employees, learning what they need and how you can help.  It does not mean being sucked into the personal drama of a challenged employee, but it does mean developing a relationship with the employee in which s/he can ask for and find critical assistance.  And, it means obviously, regularly, repetitively thanking employees for their hard work.

Employees who feel their work matters do better work because they feel more connected to and more engaged in a relationship with the organization.   Most supervisors are very good at corrective action, finding problems and resolving them. But, most employees respond much more readily to recognition as a method for improvement.   So, in this week of thanks, set aside some time to not only give thanks for your team members’ work, but to tell them specifically what you appreciate.

As we leave our offices on Wednesday for some much needed time with family, friends, and the turkey, make sure you leave your organizational family feeling good about their jobs, their organization, and their worth to you and your projects.  Then, all of us can come back rejuvenated and ready to buckle down in the hectic weeks before the New Year.  Happy Thanksgiving.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. 

Mark Twain

When coaching presentations, I’m often asked about what team members should wear to the interview.  It sounds like a minor decision compared to the numerous other decisions we make in our professional lives. But, it is a critical one and we do need to spend time thinking about and strategizing our presentation wardrobe.

First impressions make a real difference.  If we make a bad first impression, we can spend the next 20-30 minutes of the interview working hard to change a negative impression of our intelligence, our professionalism, or our diligence.  And, like it or not, much of that first impression is made based on what we look like – our dress, our overall presentation of self, and how we carry ourselves.

As many of you know, I come from the Pacific Northwest – the place that brought us grunge.  My husband has only worn a tie twice in the past ten years, both times under duress.  And, I’ll confess to wearing sandals with socks – to work.  But, even for us devoted Northwesterners, our militantly casual style needs to stop at the interview.  At any interview, in fact, any professional presentation – we need to take care with our appearance and overall self presentation.

I work with a woman who is a contractor for one of our clients.  She’s very intelligent and has years of experience.  But, she comes to work wearing incredibly inappropriate clothing – lingerie type tops and garage cleaning jeans. And, I believe this hurts her when she makes a presentation about her work.  It took me over a week of working with her to believe she was indeed the professional I’d been assured she was. The way she presents herself contrasts sharply with the talent she brings to the work.  Unfortunately, I know I’m not the only one who thinks this.  What we wear and how we present ourselves do make a profound and immediate impact on how others perceive us, and, in fact, how able others are to hear our message.

The Three ‘C’s of Dress will serve you well for the interview and at work in general:  conservative, clean, and comfortable.  Presenting yourself at work is not the time to assert your outrageous sense of style.  In my humble opinion, others should notice our work, not our dress.  In dressing for presentations, we should take active steps to avoid calling attention to what we wear so listeners can focus on what we say and mean.

Conservative dress means muted colors, classic lines, and quality fabrics. Conservative need not mean staid or old-fashioned.  Think classic, not dowdy. Men and women should own one pair of well-fitted, tailored black pants (or for women, a skirt if they so desire) and a jacket.  Find a good tailor – or personal shopper – and get one outfit that fits well.  Choose good fabrics that last, natural fibers that breathe, and colors and fabrics that cross seasons.

Clothing should always be clean, well-pressed, and in good shape.  While grunge works in some circles, it doesn’t work in an interview.  At the risk of sounding like Emily Post, a clothing brush is an essential tool for any professional.  If you have a hairy pet (I do – thanks, Rosie!), use it right before you leave the house.  Or, choose clothing the same color as the dog.

Finally, in any interview, comfort is critical.  Natural fibers breath and minimize the tell tale signs of stress.  An undershirt can be essential to comfort and appearance.  And, make sure the clothing fits in a non-constraining way.  I need to be able to move in my clothing; when I’m presenting, I don’t want to think about what I’m wearing and whether what I’m wearing will continue to be decent in spite of how I might move around the space.

A good rule of thumb for any speaking team is to dress one step above how you think the selection committee will be dressed.  This communicates professionalism and that you’ve taken the event seriously.  I also believe – though I don’t have any hard proof – that when we dress the part, we have an easier time speaking and projecting an image. 

I’m not sure I’d go so far as Twain in saying that clothing makes the person, but I do know that it makes a very real difference in how audiences feel about us.  I’m also not sure that naked people don’t make an impact on society; but, in the context of a short-list interview, our choice of clothing is important and can make a significant difference to our success.  It’s one more way in which we communicate the type of people we are and how committed we are to the client relationship.

An Extra Hour

With the exception of my friends in Arizona and Hawaii, most of us in the US received the annual fall gift of an extra hour today.  While this hour was given while we were sleeping, it always feels to me as if the day is longer, affording me endless possibilities of things to do.  I feel energized by the opportunity to finish long-avoided tasks, catch up on work projects, or spend time with family and dog.  This hour – 60 minutes – seems so much longer than what it is in actuality.  As I get older, I look forward to “falling” back more than almost any other day on the calendar.  And, to be fair, I resent giving that hour back in the spring.

As with many things, this makes me think of the difference an hour can make to my teams and to my clients.  What if we had an extra hour to get ready for a critical short-list presentation?  What would we do with it?  As you might imagine, I have several suggestions of both what to do, and what not to do with your extra hour.

First, though, in the absence of any cosmic gift of fabricated time, how do we gain an extra hour of preparation and/or rehearsal time?  By planning the presentation development like we would a project, we can capture time by minimizing waste.  In other words, by developing clear milestones for preparation and by holding team members accountable to preparation deliverables, any team can significantly decrease the amount of time it takes to create a good presentation.  And, by establishing realistic milestones right up to the time the team leaves for the interview, we can capture that extra hour between the final rehearsal and the time we leave.

Before writing about what we can do with that time – there are so many possibilities – I should establish what teams and individual speakers should not do.  Teams that practice right up to the time they leave for the interview create nervous speakers and risk being “flat” in the actual performance.  Team members who fiddle with their visuals and PPT slides up until “go live,” create anxiety for themselves and others and buy themselves enormous risk of failure of both content and technology in the actual interview.  And, please, don’t spend your hour rewriting your notes.  Not only will you waste time, but you’ll actually decrease the value of any notes because your eye will no longer recognize the shapes and patterns of words on the page.  Finally, don’t go to your office and return emails or solve problems of your day. The hour before the team leaves for the interview is a time to prepare, to relax, and to get ready.

The hour before the team leaves for the interview can be a gift and can be the most important period of time of all.  Successful teams finish their team rehearsal at least an hour before the team leaves.  These teams keep speakers together to have a snack, rehearse Q and A, and work logistics. This enables each team member to leave for the interview rested, relaxed, and confident. 

In some cases, I put teams through a “blocking” rehearsal.  Blocking, a term borrowed from the theater, means to put speakers through the movement of the interview without practicing the actual content.  This helps speakers know who is on their left and who is on their right, where they move in the space, and where to find visuals.  Blocking creates confidence in movement and interaction.  And, most importantly, it reduces uncertainty and burns off energy to help team members relax into the process of speaking.

In the final hour before departure, I sometimes recommend to particularly nervous speakers that they take a walk around the building, speaking their content out loud to themselves or another team member.  In this way, the speaker reinforces the “body memory” necessary to link content to delivery and s/he continues to manage nervous energy.  Some of my most memorable presentations involved long walks with principal speakers who went on to give the best presentation in the interview room before the real selection committee.

For particularly nervous speakers, helping them breathe can be a huge help. It sounds strange –and sometimes it is – but reminding a speaker to take deep breaths can be enormously helpful.  Getting away from the bustle of energy to sit in a quiet room and calmly breathe in and out can be the best strategy for managing frayed nerves. Let the marketing professionals pack the team up for the interview.

On this day of extra time, I wish each team an extra hour to get ready for each interview.  While the rest of the year only affords us 24 hours in each day, by proper planning and time management, teams can capture an hour to get speakers really ready to present their best and most relaxed selves before selectors.

Election Day Thoughts on Social Media/Marketing

It’s been a long and particularly difficult election season; I’m so tired of negative ads about candidates, issues, and propositions.   Despite my election exhaustion, however, I am hopeful that the majority of my clients, friends, and family have stood up for democracy and voted today.  It really doesn’t matter to me how you vote – just that you do so in a timely and thoughtful manner. 

This election day, I’m amazed at how many politically insensitive statements I’m reading from friends and colleagues about the issues in today’s election on both Facebook and Linked In. This makes me think about how professionals should use social media as compared with our high school and college aged counterparts. 

I’m a fan of Facebook (I love reading what many of you are up to – and it’s nice to know my children are alive and well when I’m not in daily contact). I have a Linked In account, which I use sporadically. As you can read, I maintain a regular blog.   And, at Communication Resources, we send out tweets about articles and events – though I have to admit someone does this for me as I’m not as technically savvy as you might think. 

As technical professionals, we should be different kinds of Facebook users.  We need to hold ourselves to a different standard of care relative to what and how we write.  Most of us in marketing and business development use a variety of social media modalities to report on issues and ideas (as in a blog), highlight events or accomplishments (as in Twitter), and connect with colleagues and clients (as in Linked In, etc.).  However, I’m finding less and less care is being taken in what and how we communicate in these venues.

I’d like to propose a new standard of communication be adopted by all of us who make use of a range of social media/marketing venues. 

My father, a long-time attorney and my business mentor, taught me three things about writing:

1) Never write anything you wouldn’t want read back to you in court.  This sounds strange for social media, which was intended to be more immediate and “edgy.” But remember, the way we use social media is to create an image of our businesses and ourselves.  Posting political statements undermines relationships and exhibits a lack of sensitivity to others’ viewpoints.  All of us need to remember that what we write exists forever as a statement of who we are, what we believe in, and the professionalism of ourselves and our businesses.  So, be thoughtful and careful about what you write and to whom you write it.  If you have a business Facebook (or other venue) account, keep it professional and leave the chatter to the kids. 

2) If you are going to write it down, make it complete, objective, and verifiable.  Blogs were never meant to be conversational.  In my opinion, it’s a mistake to write opinions as facts or to post thoughts that haven’t been vetted.  Blogs written for business purposes shouldn’t be merely stream of consciousness – they are another important vehicle for readers to understand you and your business perspectives.  Assume your words may be printed, copied, and distributed. Take the same care with this writing as you would a letter, a report, or an article.  Don’t write negative things that may hurt you (or others) later.  Check your facts.  Reread before you hit “post”. 

3)Whatever you write should pass the Mom-Test by being exceptionally well-written.  My mother is a linguist, champion Scrabble player, and the best editor in the business.  Passing the Mom-Test meant that any document had to be well-written.  I still hold myself to the standard that anything I write should be well punctuated, grammatically correct, and spellchecked.   Fortunately, my mother (at 83 years of age) is still ever-vigilant, watching my writing and others’ for hanging prepositions, verb-tense agreement, or the lack of a referent.  

For those of you not acquainted with my mother, The Elements of Style is still a great resource and I encourage regular bloggers (and in fact, anyone who writes regularly) to make active use of it.  Read it – it’s quite good and still – for me – the definitive work on what good writing looks like.  In addition, find and use a good editor.  Read through and check the quality of what you write.  Remember, what you write is a reflection of you and your firm.

Social Media venues like Blogger, Facebook, and Linked In provide excellent vehicles for our firms to get the word out about products, services, areas of expertise, and new ideas.  But, as with any written form of communication, these venues come with the responsibility to take great care with what we write and to uphold traditional conventions of good writing.   Communicating through a social media venue doesn’t absolve us from the responsibility to adhere to the standards of good writing.  If we want to reverse the downward trajectory of quality writing in this country, it starts with us.

Winning the Q and A Interview

Tired of hearing the same interview over and over by different teams, many owners are turning to interviews comprised of targeted questions and answers (Q and A) in the hopes of really getting to know team members’ thoughts about the project and whether a team is a good fit for the client organization.  These interviews can be extremely effective vehicles for teams to showcase their expertise and personality. But they require specific planning and rehearsal, the same as for a traditional interview.  Teams who come unprepared and unrehearsed do so at their peril and will not give their best possible performance.

Teams should prepare for Q and A interviews by getting immersed in the project, learning as much as they can about the client, the site, the project, and the stakeholders. As with all interviews, we win projects in the details. It is paramount that team members be able to tie rich details into their discussion of approach and philosophy as it relates to the project under consideration. This first stage of interview development is the same for a traditional interview as it is for a Q and A interview; aligning team members to the project and the client is the most important first step in any effective interview planning process.

In addition, I also recommend to teams that they develop a “What we need to prove in order to win this job” list. Commit this list to memory. Use it in your Q and A rehearsal. Keep it with you at the interview if needed; it is the DNA of your pitch. This becomes a check-list to make sure you communicate the information needed in order to win the job.

To increase your chances of success in the Q and A interview, the best strategy is to design a set of mini-presentations that respond to the key messages list above – each with a strong claim, detailed content, and examples to back up your points. These mini-presentations need not be over-rehearsed, but they should be planned and structured around strong, clear claim statements. By creating a set of mini-presentations, teams can make sure they cover the points they need to in a clear and organized manner. 

Team choreography sets the mood for the interaction between client and team. In a Q and A interview, move in closer to the selection committee, even sit around a table, interspersed with the selectors if possible.  Otherwise, move the team close in to facilitate eye contact and true engagement.  Team members should sit up straight (not rigid) and focus their attention on the selection committee, making strong, real eye contact with the person asking the question and smiling in order to come across as engaging and collaborative.

Rehearsal for a Q and A interview is incredibly important – probably even more so than for a traditional interview.  Because of the inherent “impromptu” nature of the context, Q and A interviews can encourage poor presentation behavior by some speakers. Speakers who are more confident and comfortable can inadvertently take over the interview by talking too much - overshadowing the less verbal experts on the team and wasting precious minutes. Rehearsing appropriate presentation behaviors can dramatically increase a team’s chance of success.

Teams should brainstorm a list of possible questions (and their follow-on questions) and should practice answering both the easy ones and the hard ones.  If possible, convene a group of informed professionals within your own firm to practice Q and A with the team in a more realistic rehearsal.  Determine who “owns” what content.  Make sure no answer is more than about two minutes in duration. And, never, ever have more than three speakers speaking on the same question (e.g., the “endless hitchhike”).  Finally, nominate one person in the room to make sure the team has covered everything on your key messages list.

In sum, a Q and A interview does not mean your team cannot plan, strategize, or rehearse. In fact, you probably need even more time together to align team members to the project and get them comfortable with the content and the “rules” governing your team’s approach to Q and A. Only by planning and rehearsing can we have absolute confidence that the team will perform well in the actual interview.   Because so few teams are good at this type of interviewing, there’s ample room for savvy teams to shine in this venue – coming across as prepared, relaxed, conversational, and ready to get to work.

Partnering with Housing Hope: Your Purchase can Make a Difference!

As we move closer to winter and our northwest winds start to blow, we at Communication Resources are very sensitive to those among us who are without shelter this season.  As a result, we are donating $100 for each of our training DVDs purchased in the month of October to Housing Hope of Snohomish County. 

The DVD training, entitled "Winning the Short List," provides a quality training experience to A/E/C professionals on short-list interviewing.  The training is accompanied by a detailed participant’s handbook and a trainer’s guide.  In this training, you can learn Meg’s tested techniques for developing, presenting, and winning short-list interview presentations.  The complete system, including both DVD and Guides, is $395.  With purchase, you may also call Meg and her team directly with any of your training and/or coaching questions.

You can read more about the DVD, preview a segment, and see the guides at www.communication-resources.com.

We’re happy to partner with Housing Hope to help provide shelter and valuable resources for our community’s most vulnerable families.  If you would like to contribute to them directly, please do so at www.housinghope.org.

Walking, Talking, Smiling, and Pointing: Delivery Skills for Technical Professionals

Technically trained professionals – primarily engineers, contractors, and architectural project managers – have typically been perceived as poor speakers.  Companies spend thousands of dollars on standardized delivery coaching in an attempt to make these professionals more compelling and dynamic.  After more than 20 years of coaching such technical professionals, I have found, however, that this standardized coaching method is ineffective. In order to improve the delivery skills of any technical professional, coaches like me need to adapt our approach to coaching to the unique ways in which our technical clients think and communicate.

Training an engineer in theatric “tricks” like common gestures, movement in the room, and the ubiquitous smile, typically makes said engineer look over-coached and wooden (think Al Gore in the 2000 presidential elections).  Rather, we should be coaching technical professionals in ways that connect compelling content to their own natural delivery.  I’ve seen literally hundreds of technical presenters in a range of important presentations and frankly, I’ve only met a handful of them who were truly horrible in their delivery.  Most speakers are actually quite competent – if we work with them in a way that is supportive vs. prescriptive.

I tell speakers that there isn’t any right way to present and there’s no simple list of delivery improvements that will work for every speaker.  Most speakers, in fact, are quite competent in the four elements of delivery that really count:  walking, talking, smiling, and pointing.  We just need to help speakers take their natural competence in these four elements and translate them into the context of a compelling presentation.

Technical professionals need to have a strong working outline that they have written, that has strong logic, and that they’ve both had vetted by colleagues and had an opportunity to practice.  In my experience, most technical professionals can’t begin to focus on delivery until they have connected with content.  Coaching delivery before the speaker has a firm grasp of the content results in frustration and stress for both speaker and coach.

Once content is ready, however, we need to coach technical speakers carefully – choosing our “battles” and making minor improvements that are consistent with a speaker’s natural style.  If a speaker naturally uses small gestures and speaks softly, asking him to adopt broad gestures and an effervescent vocal style simply won’t work.  Technical speakers are generally not trained actors and we need to support them in minor changes that will appear natural in a presentation instead of asking them to make major changes that are more consistent with the coach’s prescriptive vision of a good speaker.

Minor changes might include adding a smile, moving closer to the selection panel, slightly increasing volume, or interacting with a visual to show a process or example.  Technical speakers respond well to minor changes that have a major impact.  Any delivery “tweaks” that we recommend as coaches need to be closely tied to the content. In this way, the technical speaker can “see” the logic of the recommendation.  For example, “Suzi, when you identify the major technical challenge, pause beforehand, then speak louder and look the selectors in the eye. This will give that statement much more impact.”  This is more effective than saying, “Suzi, you need to speak louder and integrate more pauses into your delivery.  This will make you a more persuasive and dynamic speaker.”

New Math: Marketing and Business Development Realities for this Economy

For those of us in the trenches of short-list interviewing, we are aware of the current challenges of wnning work in a very different economy than we’ve ever seen.  Right now, firms are proposing on more and more projects, being short-listed more frequently, and preparing and presenting more interviews.  Unfortunately, this is not resulting in proportionately more work.  And, the truly negative outcomes can be seen in less return on investment for marketing dollars and demoralized team members.  What’s needed is an entirely new approach to the entire business development and marketing lifecycle that culminates in the short-list interview. 

What’s required to win work in this economy is “New Math”.  In the lifecycle of business development and marketing, there are four core elements:  Relationship/Reputation, Proposal, Cost or Fee, and Presentation.  Depending on the characteristics of the pursuit, each accounts for approximately 25% of the chance of being selected.  In the past, we might have been able to “wow” a selection committee with an exceptional interview and walk away with the job. That same interview today will bring us only to a close second.  Thus, we need firms to align business development and marketing efforts – looking at the short-list as the end of a long, intentional process instead of being an event in and of itself.

Relationship/Reputation has four levels of effective client “engagement”, the highest being having a strong relationship with an existing client with whom you have completed similar, successful work.  This requires not only superior performance and project management, but also maintaining the solid relationship with the client after the project has been completed. 

The next level is having a relationship with a potential client based on your having provided advice and/or assistance.  While never having performed a project for the client, the client is aware of the firm’s capabilities and trusts that your firm can do work of a certain type and complexity. 

                 

The third level is when the potential client knows of the firm’s and individual team members’ capabilities through conference presentations, journal and trade publications, or even industry-specific blogs.  In this case, the client knows of the firm’s past projects and can link his/her project to similar projects in the firm’s portfolio. 

The lowest level of effective engagement is when the firm or individual has “borrowed credibility.”  Borrowed credibility comes from an outside reference – usually another credible client who strongly recommends the firm and specific team members for the current work.

In the absence of any of the four levels of Relationship/Reputation, I recommend firms and teams take a hard look at their Go/No Go decision.  If any of these levels are missing, the firm should likely not be going after the work at all. The best decision would be to invest scarce marketing dollars in building client engagement vs. participating in a no-win proposal and presentation cycle.  Firm leadership should be actively publishing in trade journals, and they should be out in the field meeting with potential clients.  At a minimum, each client manager should be regularly meeting with the clients from their current and recently completed projects to maintain the strong relationship and the reference.

Understanding your Clients: The Value of Ongoing, Internal Research

I’m a nerd – I freely admit it.  I love numbers, complex measurement tools, running statistics, and making graphs.  There’s something seductive about taking a dataset and working with it to reveal the “story” it’s trying to tell me. Over the past 20+ years, I’ve designed and implemented dozens of surveys for public and private organizations, and every time I get a clean, fresh data file, I love to stay up late playing in the data, mining its secrets and learning what it is telling me about my clients and their needs.

The economy is tough right now and looks questionable for the foreseeable future. As a result, many firms are cutting back on any kind of organizational research. This is a bad idea on so many levels. Client, employee,  and project research keeps us in touch with what our clients need and expect and most importantly, provides us a mechanism to take lessons learned from one project to the next, constantly improving along the way.

So, how do we conduct meaningful client research without huge monetary outlay?  Answer:  Bring it in-house and be more strategic about the process.  Many of our clients are asking us to assist in the development of internal research programs in which they can gather regular data from clients – or employees – to drive internal understanding and process improvement. They are spending their outside consultant dollars on the analysis of the data or on gathering only the most sensitive or confidential data.  From a consultant perspective, I don’t view this as threatening; rather, I see this as a way to provide my clients the highest value, while enabling them to continue critical research programs when budgets are tight. And, the bright side to all of it is that my clients are becoming more connected to the data, understanding how to gather, interpret, and respond to client and employee feedback in a deeper way.

Savvy firms are continuing programs of both client and employee research – using data to drive decision-making and process improvement. The big change is that they are the data gatherers and the data managers. This requires a commitment to standards of good research and research protocols and a forced objectivity about the results. This is hard, but absolutely necessary. We are helping our clients develop programs of research – setting up surveys, on-line systems, and data gathering protocols. And, most of our clients are taking on their own research programs very successfully, using us to troubleshoot and provide data analysis on confidential files. 

In this economy, information is power. Firms need good information to fuel growth, improve processes, and drive training. They should never sacrifice reconnaissance, as a continued investment in data yields value far beyond its cost. But, firms can be more strategic in the research they do and their principals can get involved – doing the legwork to continue strong client and employee research even when times are tough.

The Value and Disadvantage of Familiarity

My colleagues and I were down in Los Angeles this morning talking with our friends at SMPS about how A/E/C teams can develop winning presentations in this very challenging economy.  One of the participants asked me a very significant question that really made me think:  “How do we design a winning presentation when we are not the incumbent and the client really likes the firm with which they’ve been working?”  Good question.  My answer was fairly simple: You have to work harder than the incumbent. 

Some of my most memorable wins in short-list interviews in the A/E/C industry have been on projects where my team was not the incumbent.  We won because we did more homework and developed a presentation that clearly addressed the real needs, interests, fears, and expectations of selectors and their organizations.  In those presentations, we spent a lot of time on the “alignment” phase of presentation development - getting each team member’s head in the project so that they were fully engaged in understanding the owner’s needs.  This resulted in presentations that were focused on the unique aspects of the project, targeted on solving the owner’s project “pain”, and centered on the advantages they could bring the owner relative to higher value, better quality, and faster delivery.

I’ve found that it’s actually easier to beat an incumbent firm than one thinks because many incumbents get lazy, assuming that the strength of the relationship will carry them to a win. While in many cases this is indeed true, when my non-incumbent teams compete, they always compete “hungry”, offering the client a value proposition that is so compelling, so interesting, and so seductive that we can easily win against a lazy incumbent. Remember incumbents, “familiarity breeds contempt” – this means that in most relationships, partners can get complacent, leaving the door wide open to the new, shiny, and interesting.  Lazy incumbents create an easy space for coaches like me to help teams “steal” the project through hard work, innovation, and creativity.

For my teams that are incumbents – watch out!  Always compete as if you didn’t have the relationship.  Never take the owner and his/her project for granted, especially in this challenging economy. Do more research, make more effort, prepare more for these interviews than for any other because, frankly, these are the ones that hurt the most to lose. You’ve invested time and resources in the relationship; make the concerted effort to maintain the value of that investment by giving interviews with your regular clients everything you’ve got. These truly are the “can’t afford to lose” interviews.

Partnering Leadership from the Public Sector

I have the honor of being on the communications team for the Asset Management group for a leading power provider in the Pacific Northwest. This group is rolling out a very innovative program designed to increase productivity, reduce risk, and provide safe, reliable power at a reasonable cost to customers across their service area. And, they have partnered with national and local specialists to help them achieve success.

Midway through the project, this Utility asked us to provide partnering services to the team to help members remain aligned to project goals and expectations as they ramped up towards the implementation phase of their very aggressive project. In a one day session, Utility leadership, project team members and their consultants worked together to document overall goals, design teamwork improvements, and plan the course for the challenging months ahead.  It was, to say the least, an exhausting day. At the end, everyone, the facilitators included, felt they had achieved real understanding across the team and had developed the start of a workable “way forward.”

Currently, the team is working through a very challenging aspect of the project and I’m impressed with how team leadership is using the partnering agreements as a guide.  During the partnering process, the team created a team charter as well as clear metrics to chart the success of teamwork.  During a meeting of team members from across the project team, one of the first agenda items was to tie the current work and difficult decisions with a renewed focus on the charter and project goals.  This refocus encourages team members to resolve issues and design strategies based on their commitment to a common goal.

A Partnering session is a common way to kick-off a project, particularly in the public sector.  Many teams recognize its importance as a time to talk about teamwork before the team moves quickly through project meetings and milestone dates. However, many times, that’s the last time a team focuses on partnering unless the team is having problems. As a result, at the conclusion of every partnering session my colleagues and I facilitate, I remind team members that the real work of partnering starts after the session is over. The success of partnering occurs when team members working through challenging issues refocus themselves on the project charter – the agreements they made at the start of the project to work together toward a common good.

It’s gratifying to see that one of the largest agencies in my region not only understands the value of partnering, but more importantly, for this project team to actively use the work they did in partnering to drive success at critical milestones. In recommitting themselves to keep the commitments they made in partnering, this team reaffirmed the importance of teamwork, while improving work processes and creating a common understanding of future deliverables. That’s the real value of partnering.

Making an Investment in the Work of Teamwork

As I write, my team and I are on our way to a Partnering session for a large Federal project in the Midwest.  This is an extremely complicated project, with multiple firms and stakeholders representing hundreds of constituents and their needs and interests.  Participants in the session come from the design, development, construction, and support fields. They are coming together to build a framework and foundation for collaboration and team success that will last for the duration of this highly sensitive and critical project.  As their facilitator, I think the partnering process has already begun with team members’ commitment to attend the session and bring issues and concerns to the table in what promises to be a very eventful and content-rich couple of days.  These team members clearly get it; They understand that they have to work together to achieve common as well as individual needs, goals, and expectations.

 

Partnering, done correctly, does not involve the singing of songs or the playing of silly games. Rather, it involves team members making a commitment to come together to discuss their needs in an open environment.  It involves team members, with often competing interests, aggressively working to identify and meet common goals.  And, it involves aligning team members’ beliefs and actions around a common definition of success.

Having completed extensive pre-partnering information gathering, I can tell you that this team faces some significant challenges – most project teams do.  Their challenges relate to the usual suspects of time, money, and resources, but they are also facing the added difficulty of a stressful and changing economy where all of the involved organizations are working harder with fewer resources and increased risk.  That these firms are willing to come together to for their common success, is both satisfying and humbling.  It’s satisfying that the leadership of these organizations understands the value of teamwork and that each are committed to achieving it on this project.  And, as a facilitator, it’s humbling to realize that these leaders have done the real work of partnering already – making time in their incredibly busy schedules to talk about the tough issues associated with teamwork. 

Building a team isn’t easy – and it doesn’t come without cost or conflict.  Teamwork requires airing out concerns and being willing to work through them in an open environment.  It requires revealing your issues to team members and asking for their assistance in resolving them.  And, it requires making yourself responsible for meeting other team member’s needs.  This collection of leaders knows that in this challenging economy, far from being an unnecessary expense, partnering is a proven path to maximizing success for all parties.

Meg Winch, President

For more info about Communication Resources Northwest, click here.

Meg specializes in the facilitation and training of communication and organizational skills, working with project team members to enhance the communication behaviors critical to their jobs.  She is a trained facilitator of formal partnering and public involvement processes.  She regularly works with teams to develop presentations, manage messages, and develop communication strategies and agreements. Meg also works with both public and private sector clients to develop comprehensive programs of both qualitative and quantitative research.

Great Presenters Start Young

As a presentation coach, I love working with teams of great speakers who enable me to focus on my first love, developing strategic and winning content.  My clients have long suspected it, and I’ll go public saying, that my strength is in knowing what content it takes to win.  I’m happiest when I have good speakers to deliver that content.  Fortunately, I have talented presentation coaches on staff who love coaching delivery and who excel at working with problem speakers.  Kristina Corbitt, one of our associate consultants, can take an almost catatonic speaker and make him/her competent in a reasonably short amount of time.  While I’ve worked and won with some pretty poor speakers over the years – coaching them to excellence – I prefer working on developing great, hard-hitting content that keeps the selectors interested and engaged.

So, how does one create speakers who can deliver that content in a compelling and interesting manner?  First, we don’t start the training process during an interview coaching session.  Great speakers take years to develop and firms need to start early in the training and development process. Fortunately, communication is 100% learned behavior.  We learn how to communicate – for better or worse – from our parents, siblings, friends, and later, colleagues.  Humans are sponges; we’re constantly adapting our skills to fit the environment and we’re constantly learning new things.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that as we age, learning is tougher and takes longer. 

The youngest members of firms should take a basic presentation skills course as part of their first year’s training.  And, they should be put in front of an in-house audience frequently to showcase new skills and receive feedback on their communication skills.  Firms should have regular brownbag sessions to present about project successes and challenges.  And, presentation ability should be on every performance evaluation/review form at every level of A/E/C organization.  I also think the same could be said for writing and interpersonal skills.

Great speakers start young and they have speaking skills constantly reinforced through training, regular practice, and constructive feedback.  I truly believe that anyone can be a good speaker – for those of us who are more senior in our professions, it just takes longer to get there.  No one is born a great presenter – great speaking takes time and constant attention to the craft.  But, it’s worth the effort.  Winning work in this market requires good information, strong decision-making, great content, and compelling speakers.  We can’t short our teams on any of these.

Making Presentation Development More Effective: Branding your Presentation

Most A/E/C firms have spent incredible amounts of time and money on branded marketing materials – logos, PPT templates, imagery, proposal designs, etc.  Much like our branded marketing collateral material, a presentation brand reflects the unique character of your organization and your specific approach to particular types of projects.  By developing and using a presentation brand, your organization can create more memorable presentations that reflect your unique culture.

 

A presentation brand makes your team memorable and sets an expectation in the minds of selectors and potential selectors.  One firm with which I regularly work (and win!) has created a knowledge-based brand for their presentations.  At Communication Resources Northwest, we affectionately call them “presentation nerds” and it’s something that works for them more often than not.  Clients routinely say that their interviews are more knowledge rich and research based than any of their competition.  These same clients also report their perception that this firm works harder than any of their competitors. 

This firm’s presentation brand is “hard working and knowledgeable” and they’ve developed and implemented presentation design processes to keep that brand strong.  And, when they are consistent with their brand, they win more often than not.

Getting started with the presentation branding process isn’t that hard. I recommend firm leadership get together (including the Marketing Director!) in a dedicated session to answer two key questions:  How do we want our presentations to be perceived?  And, What would we have to do in every interview to achieve that perception?  For example, if one perception on your list is to be perceived as more creative than your competition, you may want to think about creative approaches to interviews beyond standard PowerPoint slides.  Is your team willing to have fun in the interview, stepping “outside the box” to do something innovative and unusual?  If a desired perception is to come across as polished and professional, your firm is going to have to select (or train) professionals with excellent presentation skills and clearly communicated self-confidence.

One of the most important things I learned in a training program years ago is that communication – in any form – is intentional.  We make decisions about how we want to be perceived and the messages we want to get across.  By establishing and reinforcing a presentation brand, firms become more prepared and intentional about every interview.  While it won’t win all the time – you have to select potential clients who want your brand – you’ll find your process gets easier, decisions get clearer, and you will see an increase in your hit rate.

Coping with a Chaotic Market: Using Standard Presentation Processes

It’s no surprise to anyone in our industry that the market is heating up and that A/E/C firms are writing more proposals and preparing for more presentations than ever before.  Unfortunately, the extra work isn’t translating into higher hit rates or increases in the bottom line.  Firms are working harder for less work, and marketing departments are becoming increasingly stretched and stressed. 

I’ve written before about the importance of being more selective in the projects we pursue and about making strong go/no go decisions.  However, it is true that even when we do our homework, A/E/C firms are still competing for work and their marketing departments are completely tapped out.  So, what can we do?

I’ve recently been working with firms to develop presentation “templates” and standard processes.  In addition to standard visuals, such as always having a site aerial (Google Earth and Terraserver.com are great sources), these might include templated presentation preparation processes, including checklists and meeting agendas.  And, we might go so far as to design standard presentation visual templates or designs for backdrops, boards, or PPTs.

The more we can do ahead of time, before a pursuit, to make the time leading up to the actual presentation easier, the better.  Such planning saves our teams in time, money, and stress.  In our “Winning the Shortlist” video instructional materials, we’ve provided some easy to use checklists and preparation techniques.  One of these tools is a process to get a team ready for an interview in three meetings.  I call this the “Four Stages in Three Meetings Process.”  In this process, marketing professionals can establish clear expectations for pre-meeting preparation and for the outcomes of each meeting.  Before the first meeting, for example, team members receive a “dossier” of information about the project, including the RFP and the submittal.  Each team member is expected to read the material and, if applicable, visit the site prior to the meeting.  In that first meeting, the team starts the development of presentation strategy.  In the second meeting, the team “stumbles through” the presentation content and finalizes visuals.  By the third and final meeting, the team is ready for choreography and rehearsals.

While for a large, high profile project, we may need more time right before the interview, we can establish standard processes to streamline the design and delivery of most interviews.  By having a documented process, marketing professionals – with the support of their leadership – can share the responsibility for interview preparation with their teams.  The process, and the shared responsibility, helps firms compete more successfully with less cost to their teams and organizations.

I also recommend firms use checklists for pre-interview and in fact, pre-proposal, reconnaissance.  This checklist can also be found in the instructional guide and includes basic information that marketing professionals and teams can and should gather.  This includes information about the project, the client, the site, the selectors, the competition, the interview, and the selection process.  For example, every team member should be able to answer why the project is being done and who stands to gain or lose from the project.  And, this information should be integrated into the entire interview.  On the presentation I just finished, my team started our coaching process for a $30 million project with a clear understanding of what we needed to communicate to beat the competition.  We also finished the coaching by checking the list to make sure our messages were clear and unambiguous.

We can’t change the fact that for marketing professionals and our firms, the market has heated up. But, we can work smarter.  Most of us are already working harder.  Now’s the time to put in place some templates and standard processes to be more successful in this chaotic environment.

Customer Service 101

Last week, I received yet another box from Tiffany’s in the mail. In it was a lovely pair of silver earrings. I’m pretty sure my husband thinks I have a boyfriend.  I’m trying my best to reassure him of the truth - that this box, and the three previous ones, actually came from a major airline. And, no I do not have a boyfriend who flies for a major carrier.

To reward my frequent traveling on their flights across the nation, this particular airline has sent me hundreds of dollars in gifts from Tiffany’s in the last six months. In other words, I’ve gotten more little blue boxes this year from the airline than I have in 24 years of marriage. (Yes, Mike; this is a hint.) But, seriously, all this swag makes me think about customer service and what companies really need to do to keep their customer’s happy.  Let me be clear, I love the Tiffany’s swag. It’s really fun. And, anyone would be happy to get silver earrings in the mail no matter who they’re from. However, truthfully, the little blue boxes do not impact in any way my choice of airline.

There was one memorable moment in the St. Louis airport several months ago when I literally thought I’d be willing to give back all the Tiffany’s boxes if only I could get a courteous counter agent to help me with a horrendously delayed flight. I’d have traded the earrings for someone, anyone, to help me navigate my way home. Customer service is about understanding what your customer’s real need is and then finding a way to either meet it or empathize with his or her pain in some meaningful way.

How does this apply to A/ E/ C firms? I think one of the fortunate aspects of doing business in a difficult economy is that we don’t give away as many useless key chains, flashlights or bottles of wine. We have the opportunity to build far more customer loyalty by focusing on the basics of customer service - really listening, and going out of our way to make our clients’ lives easier, and keeping our commitments.  Perhaps the greatest gift we can give our clients is good advice and an open ear when they need us. When we “pull the rabbit out of the hat” or “leap tall buildings in a single bound” to solve a client problem or avoid catastrophe on a project, that’s the real gift.  I’ve gotten more positive client feedback by coming in after a long day to help a client fix a challenging proposal or write a budget paper for Council than I ever did sending even a great bottle of wine.

And, so to my airline friends, I choose my airline partners based on how well you treat me when times are good and by how hard you’ve worked to get me home when things go badly. I don’t expect you to be perfect and I’m really a very understanding business traveler.  My clients certainly know that I’m not perfect, and I don’t expect perfection from you. But I do expect you to try harder to gain my trust and loyalty by being there for me when I need you with kind and courteous service. So, leave the little blue boxes from Tiffany’s to my husband, and stick with your core business – flying planes.

 Oh, and buy the way, that whole charging for baggage thing? Let’s get rid of that too.

Presentation Visuals

I hate PowerPoint. Please forgive my bluntness. No aspersions to our neighbors at Microsoft intended, but, I have to say that the worst thing that ever happened to presentations in the A/E/C industry was the advent of PowerPoint. I have seen many PowerPoint Presentations that constrain creativity, make content boring, and serve only as a crutch that diminishes the quality of a team’s short-list interview. Oftentimes the biggest challenge I have as a coach is convincing a team that they are better than the technology they’ve chosen to communicate their message.

In many cases, the best thing that can happen to the presentation is to have a hard drive malfunction right before they go live. The best presentations I’ve seen in the last 18 months, have been executed seamlessly without the use of PowerPoint.  These teams used beautiful banners, life sized time-lines, and interactive 3D models.  They turned on the lights and looked audience members right in the eyes. They talked right to selectors, not at moving bullets or even beautiful images. The speakers on these teams said something meaningful about the project and they illustrated their points with low tech, but high impact visual aids. They proved the point that illustrating your points is not the same as simply typing your notes into Power Point.

PowerPoint was never intended to make words fly – that’s an unfortunate feature that has been misused by everyone since the program’s creation. In fact, anyone over the age of 13 who uses such distracting PowerPoint transitions as “flying”, “boxing”, or “wiping” should have his/her license to use the MS Office suite permanently revoked.  That said, used correctly, PowerPoint is actually an amazing tool useful to animate a site plan, make an image big enough for people to see or to show a phased site build-out. None of these involve flying, bouncing, or fading words.

While the impact of PowerPoint on your budget may appear small, consider how long it takes for your team to create endless slides while it draws their focus away from creating compelling content. Consider also that the use of PowerPoint no longer differentiates a presentation. And, a bad PowerPoint is worse than using no visuals at all.

If you want to distinguish your presentation in this industry, take a risk. Use images rather than words and more often than not, step away from the visual crutch to look selectors in the eye and really talk to them about their project. That’s what wins. 

There’s no award given in the industry for PowerPoint prowess. As far as I know, the AIA has no special award for Most Beautiful PowerPoint Presentation. But, I’ll bet each of us could personally give an award for the Worst PowerPoint of the Year. It is certainly odd that the best of them isn’t memorable but, that the worst stay with us forever.