You inspire me because you put your family and religion first.
You inspire me because you are always 100% positive (or at least appear insanely upbeat and unweathered in the toughest of times).
You inspire me because there’s never been a person that I know of that has met you and not adored you.
You inspire me because you are extremely open to other people’s ideas and opinions.
You inspire me because you hold no grudges.
You inspire me because you put forth amazing effort to lead a balanced life with business, male friends, family, religion, exercise, rest and relaxation etc.
You inspire me because even when you are the big fish in the small business pond, you never gain an ounce of narcissism.
You inspire me because you yearn to learn more about everything and actually read, participate, etc. in new things rather than just talking about doing it.
You inspire me because you are incredibly unselfish and truly want the people around you to be happy and successful in all aspects of life; even if that may clash with your personal views or values.
Of course there’s more, but those are the thoughts that easily came to mind.

Now I have to ask you, who wouldn’t want feedback like this?  Needless to say my friend was speechless.  As he put it, “I have worked with this person for almost seven years.  We have a great working relationship and I respect her a lot as a colleague and person.  And while I believe she respects me and my point of view, I had no idea that she felt the way she did.  I’m very glad that I asked.”

Ask yourself who you find inspirational and even if they’ve not asked for it, send them a list like the one above.  It is a great way to show your gratitude this Thanksgiving.

CONVERSATIONS

Not So Fast

Sending and receiving at breakneck speed can make life queasy; a manifesto for slow communication

By JOHN FREEMAN

The boundlessness of the Internet always runs into the hard fact of our animal nature, our physical limits, the dimensions of our cognitive present, the overheated capac­ity of our minds. “My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband,” writes the poet Don Paterson. “I meet him in the café; he looks terrible—his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot. . . . He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listen­ing to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar. . . . He says it’s like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die.”

We will die, that much is certain; and everyone we have ever loved and cared about will die, too, sometimes—heartbreakingly—before us. Being someone else, traveling the world, making new friends gives us a temporary reprieve from this knowledge, which is spared most of the animal kingdom. Busyness—or the simulated busyness of email addiction—numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down.

Our society does not often tell us this. Progress, since the dawn of the Industrial Age, is supposed to be a linear upward progression; graphs with upward slopes are a good sign. Process­ing speeds are always getting faster; broadband now makes dial-­up seem like traveling by horse and buggy. Growth is eternal. But only two things grow indefinitely or have indefinite growth firmly ensconced at the heart of their being: cancer and the cor­poration. For everything else, especially in nature, the consum­ing fires eventually come and force a starting over.

The ultimate form of progress, however, is learning to decide what is working and what is not; and working at this pace, emailing at this frantic rate, is pleasing very few of us. It is encroaching on parts of our lives that should be separate or sacred, altering our minds and our ability to know our world, encouraging a further distancing from our bodies and our natures and our communities. We can change this; we have to change it. Of course email is good for many things; that has never been in dispute. But we need to learn to use it far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives.

In the past two decades, we have witnessed one of the greatest breakdowns of the barrier between our work and per­sonal lives since the notion of leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain as a result of the Industrial Age. It has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather. It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget.

This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly on causes emotional and physical burnout, work­place meltdowns, and unhappiness. How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen?

If we are to step off this hurtling machine, we must reassert principles that have been lost in the blur. It is time to launch a manifesto for a slow communication movement, a push back against the machines and the forces that encourage us to remain connected to them. Many of the values of the Internet are social improvements—it can be a great platform for solidarity, it rewards curiosity, it enables convenience. This is not the mani­festo of a Luddite, this is a human manifesto. If the technology is to be used for the betterment of human life, we must reassert that the Internet and its virtual information space is not a world unto itself but a supplement to our existing world, where the following three statements are self-evident.

1. Speed matters.

We have numerous technologies that can work with extreme rapidity. But we don’t use these capabilities because they are either dangerous (even the Autobahn has begun applying speed limits, due to severe accidents) or uncomfortable (imagine tur­bulence at 1,200 miles per hour) or would ruin the point of hav­ing the technology at all (played back faster than it was recorded, Led Zeppelin’s syrupy metal sound turns to tinsel).

The speed at which we do something—anything—changes our experience of it. Words and communication are not immune to this fundamental truth. The faster we talk and chat and type over tools such as email and text messages, the more our com­munication will resemble traveling at great speed. Bumped and jostled, queasy from the constant ocular and muscular adjust­ments our body must make to keep up, we will live in a constant state of digital jet lag.

This is a disastrous development on many levels. Brain sci­ence may suggest that some decisions can be made in the blink of an eye, but not all judgments benefit from a short frame of reference. We need to protect the finite well of our attention if we care about our relationships. We need time in order to prop­erly consider the effect of what we say upon others. We need time in order to grasp the political and professional ramifica­tions of our typed correspondence. We need time to shape and design and filter our words so that we say exactly what we mean. Communicating at great haste hones our utterances down to instincts and impulses that until now have been held back or channeled more carefully.

Continuing in this strobe-lit techno-rave communication environment as it stands will be destructive for businesses. Employees communicating at breakneck speed make mistakes. They forget, cross boundaries that exist for a reason, make sloppy errors, offend clients, spread rumors and gossip that would never travel through offline channels, work well past the point where their contributions are helpful, burn out and break down and then have trouble shutting down and recuperating. The churn produced by this communication lifestyle cannot be sustained. “To perfect things, speed is a unifying force,” the race-car driver Michael Schumacher has said. “To imperfect things, speed is a destructive force.” No company is perfect, nor is any individual.

It is hard not to blame us for believing otherwise, because the Internet and the global markets it facilitates have bought into a fundamental warping of the actual meaning of speed. Speed used to convey urgency; now we somehow think it means efficiency. One can even see this in the etymology of the word. The earliest recorded use of it as a verb—”to go fast”— dates back to 1300, when horses were the primary mode of moving in haste. By 1569, as the printing press was beginning to remake society, speed was being used to mean “to send forth with quickness.” By 1856, in the thick of the Industrial Revo­lution, when machines and mechanized production and train travel were remaking society yet again, “speed” took on another meaning. It was being used to “increase the work rate of,” as in speed up.

There is a paradox here, though. The Internet has provided us with an almost unlimited amount of information, but the speed at which it works—and we work through it—has deprived us of its benefits. We might work at a higher rate, but this is not work­ing. We can store a limited amount of information in our brains and have it at our disposal at any one time. Making decisions in this communication brownout, though without complete infor­mation, we go to war hastily, go to meetings unprepared, and build relationships on the slippery gravel of false impressions. Attention is one of the most valuable modern resources. If we waste it on frivolous communication, we will have nothing left when we really need it.

Everything we say needn’t travel at the fastest rate possible. The difference between typing an email and writing a letter or memo out by hand is akin to walking on concrete versus stroll­ing on grass. You forget how natural it feels until you do it again. Our time on this earth is limited, the world is vast, and the people we care about or need for our business life to operate will not always live and work nearby; we will always have to com­municate over distance. We might as well enjoy it and preserve the space and time to do it in a way that matches the rhythms of our bodies. Continuing to work and type and write at speed, however, will make our communication environment resemble our cities. There will be concrete as far as the eye can see.

2. The Physical World matters.

A large part of electronic commu­nication leads us away from the physical world. Our cafes, post offices, parks, cinemas, town centers, main streets and commu­nity meeting halls have suffered as a result of this development. They are beginning to resemble the tidy and lonely bedroom commuter towns created by the expansion of the American interstate system. Sitting in the modern coffee shop, you don’t hear the murmur or rise and fall of conversation but the con­tinuous, insect-like patter of typing. The disuse of real-world commons drives people back into the virtual world, causing a feedback cycle that leads to an ever-deepening isolation and neglect of the tangible commons.

This is a terrible loss. We may rely heavily on the Internet, but we cannot touch it, taste it or experience the indescribable feeling of togetherness that one gleans from face-to-face interac­tion, from the reassuring sensation of being among a crowd of one’s neighbors. Seeing one another in these situations reinforces the importance of sharing resources, of working together, of bal­ancing our own needs with those of others. Online, these values become notions that are much more easily suspended to further our own self-interest. Not surprisingly, political movements that begin online must have a real-world component; otherwise they evaporate and dissolve into the blur of other activities.

It is almost impossible to navigate the Web without having to stutter-step around ads and blinking messages from sponsors. In using this tool so heavily, consumers aren’t just frying their attention spans, they’re forfeiting one of the large sources of information that comes from face-to-face interaction and business. A butcher can tell you which cuts of meat are the freshest; an online grocer may not. That same butcher, if he is good, might not just remember your preferences—which an online retailer can do frighteningly well—but ask you how your mother has been doing, whether you caught the latest football game. These interactions remind us that we are more than con­sumers; they remind us that we are part of the world in a way no amount of online shopping ever will.

If we spend our eve­ning online trading short messages over Facebook with friends thousands of miles away rather than going to our local pub or park with a friend, we are effectively withdrawing from the peo­ple we could turn to for solace, humor and friendship, not to mention the places we could go to do this. We trade the com­plicated reality of friendship for its vacuum-packed idea.

3. Context matters

We need context in order to live, and if the environment of electronic communication has stopped providing it, we shouldn’t search online for a solution but turn back to the real world and slow down. To do this, we need to uncouple our idea of progress from speed, separate the idea of speed from effi­ciency, pause and step back enough to realize that efficiency may be good for business and governments but does not always lead to mindfulness and sustainable, rewarding relationships. We are here for a short time on this planet, and reacting to demands on our time by simply speeding up has canceled out many of the benefits of the Internet, which is one of the most fabulous technological inventions ever conceived. We are connected, yes, but we were before, only by gossamer threads that worked more slowly. Slow communication will preserve these threads and our ability to sensibly choose to use faster modes when necessary. It will also preserve our sanity, our families, our relationships and our ability to find happiness in a world where, in spite of the Internet, saying what we mean is as hard as it ever was. It starts with a simple instruction: Don’t send.

—John Freeman is the acting editor of Granta magazine. This essay was adapted from his book “The Tyranny of E-Mail,” forthcoming from Scribner. Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W3

Everywhere you look these days the focus in Human Resources and Employee Communication is managing change within organizations. But most of these programs fail to achieve their objectives. During bad economic times the focus is usually on providing coaching on understanding the emotions people go through during change, helping employees deal with the complex emotions of watching colleagues leave, communication strategies that utilise management hierarchies to communicate face to face with their teams on what is happening next in organizational restructures and so on.

The reason why this approach does not work is because the focus is on managing fear, not change. And this is why managers don’t follow through with the key messages and face to face discussions with their teams that you have so cleverly crafted. I realise that some “studies” show that employees trust their immediate manager or supervisor more than anyone in the organization. Therefore it must follow that if you are designing a communication and change strategy focused on organizational restructures and downsizing the smart thing to do would be to utilize them as a key part of your face to face strategy.

Actually this is not the case and there are many reasons why this is not the way to approach change during these times. Think about it. Here you have an entire organization paralysed with fear. Budget cuts all around, negative media speculation, no one is secure. And the only person who really knows what is being planned is the CEO. Is it any wonder, when you give a script for managers and supervisors to communicate to staff, their teams ask what’s going to happen with our jobs, and the manager or supervisor in the spirit of trust and honesty says, “I don’t know, I don’t even know what is going happen to me.” So this is why you need to take a different approach to face to face communication during these times.

So here is an example of how you can still give accountability for specific messages to managers and supervisors and at the same time utilize your CEO as a key communicator during times of change .

During another “bad” economic time, during which the organization had 9 new competitors during one year I implemented the following strategy.

1. Firstly I had arranged for the CEO to meet with each of the state managers of the business divisions in each state individually. The win for the CEO was to hear first hand how business was in each business division in each state and to meet with key clients at the same time.

2. He explained honestly to each State Manager the reality of the situation with the business and why he had to rely on them.

3. He gave them specific actions of what he wanted from them and they in return delivered and stepped up and managed in some instances the total closure of state offices in true leadership style.

4. We then held “Business Reality” workshops for one day in each state which all managers and supervisors attended. The CEO was present at each and shared with them real business data and the issues facing the organization and asked for their input in coming up with options and innovative ideas to grow the business.

5. These ideas were then considered by the Executive team and the best were implemented in each business division and state.

6. The supervisors and managers now had something to share with their teams – specific action plans for their division. And more importantly the key issues that the CEO had asked them to focus on.

The outcome was that despite going through extensive downsizing, restructures and everyone having to reapply for new roles, we grew the business by 25% in that year. Obviously the strategy was much more detailed than outlined above, but the purpose of this article is share why I think managers and supervisors are not the best face to face communicators during times of change.

source: www.leadershiparticles.net

Leadership and Communication: The Broken Connection

Much has been written and said about the connection between leadership and communication, but sadly this connection has not always found its way into the practicalities of the workplace.

Arguably, the primary purpose of the CEO is to set and articulate the company’s vision and mission.  In collaboration with his or her executive team, heady goals and exciting plans often emerge at the start of each year: new directions, new markets, innovative ways of doing things or even new things to do.  Quite often these ideas are announced with great fanfare to the employees, and sometimes to shareholders and customers.   In the minds of the executive, this constitutes communication.

Why, then, do so many of these great plans not come to fruition?

One reason is that those who must implement the plans and ideas – the front line employees and more junior levels of management – never really buy into the excitement, and that’s because the visionaries at the top don’t take the time or make the effort to communicate them effectively.

If you are a CEO with a vision or a great plan, ask yourself these questions:

• Do the employees share my vision?
• Do they even understand it?
• Have I provided a means for all employees to see where they and their jobs fit into my grand vision?
• Have we, as an organization, made it easy to even possible for those on the front lines of the company to implement the company’s strategy?

Answering the questions will be enlightening, but also difficult unless you actually enter into a dialogue with employees.  But how do you do that?  How can you have a truly meaningful communication with employees at all levels about these subjects?

One highly effective tool is the World Cafe.  This is a variation on the tried and true small group discussion methodology, but conducted in an environment that’s set up to create the easygoing, comfortable atmosphere of a cafe.  Certain questions are posed to the entire group, and then discussed at individual tables.  They move to another table for another discussion.  Give each group a copy of your mission statement or strategic plan summary, and then ask questions such as:

• What do I understand this to mean?
• How does my work affect the implementation of this plan?
• What can I, or my team, do on a practical level to contribute to implementation?

Other question along these lines can be added, depending on what you want to discover.

The World Cafe process provides an opportunity and creates a need for people to discuss topics they normally don’t even think about.  What makes it so exciting is the unexpected insights that come out of the discussions.

Senior executives who enter into such a dialogue with their employees will come to understand the true connection between leadership and communication, with results that can have a direct, positive impact on the bottom line.

Article Source: www.leadershiparticles.net