Communicate or perish

If there’s one thing that seems to get people offside in a workplace, it’s communication. You’ve probably heard of the expression ‘being treated like a mushroom.’ If you’re not familiar with the phrase, think about how you grow these fungi; you put them in the dark, and feed them manure. Workers relate - being kept out of the communication loop can make it seem like you’re a mushroom in the organisation, privy only to the leftover crumbs of information. This has two significant impacts on the workforce; it undermines a sense of contribution, and it reinforces status barriers. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The best thing about living in the twenty-first century has got to be the ubiquitous access to communication. In fact, many organisations now struggle with communicating; there are too many ways to pass information. Email, Slack, IM, direct meetings - the list goes on. Despite this, there’s often no real passage of information. People make decisions and don’t communicate their intentions down the chain, expecting it to instead get passed from one level to the next like a game of pass the message. Sometimes, we overlook the tools that could help us the most.

Correcting this issue can be fairly simple - although with all things leadership, nothing is truly simple; after all, there are humans involved, with all their variety and nuance. But there are certain actions that can lessen the friction.

Initially, decide on the medium. Your organisation likely has a normal means for passing information, and in many cases, it’s probably email. Sometimes, there are better options; engagement can be increased by using YouTube videos, information can be accessed easily through Slack or you might prefer to go old school and gather the team for a meeting. Making this decision though, remember one thing; it’s about the audience. Who are you communicating to, and how will they access the information? And don’t forget that the medium sends a message in itself; if you’re passing on bad news, it’s always best to do this in person.

Next, consider the breadth of the message. How far into the organisation do you want the message to get? Is this something you can send to the entire workforce, or is this relevant only to a small section? For those that might consider themselves mushrooms, how do you open a window and make sure they get the information they crave - the information that they need to do a better job? Most communication mediums now make it easy to share information widely, which empowers people to make decisions and act quickly. If in doubt, share widely.

Don’t forget to add context. Passing on a decision without explaining why a decision was made leaves people with information, but no way to use it. Effectively, this is the manure you feed mushrooms; it sustains operations, but it doesn’t grow oak trees. Without context, people can’t add their own knowledge and experience to the information and in doing so, use it to the organisation’s best advantage. Conversely, if people understand the rationale behind decisions, it’s much easier to anticipate what happens next, and to move in the right direction. By explaining the why, it gives a sense of purpose, and empowers people to do more. Knowledge is not power until you share it.

Information empowers people. It’s entirely natural to want to contribute. By ensuring that information flows smoothly through an organisation, leaders can enable their workforce to see opportunities and act on fleeting circumstances. This translates to speed in reaction, which puts the organisation at an advantage. Knowing what’s happening also provides a sense of belonging, empowering people to contribute and reinforcing their sense of status.

The best solution to communication issues, as it often is to organisational issues, is simply to seek feedback. Engage with the team to find out if they know enough, and if they understand why certain decisions are made. Often, there’s a sense that bad decisions need to be held closely in case people are unhappy with the news, but this undersells the ability for well-informed workers to understand context and appreciate being kept in the loop. Ask the team what’s working and what isn’t - then use the feedback to improve.

The Industrial Age was marked by a sense that managers only passed on the information that workers needed to do their jobs. As a result, improvements - if any - were iterative and slow. In the twenty-first century, any organisation that operates in such a backward way will go the same way as the steam train and the telegram. Don’t be a steam train, and don’t let your organisation create mushrooms.

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Death by PowerPoint

‘Death by PowerPoint.’ It’s a phrase so common it has become a cliché. But, despite knowing how painful PowerPoint use can be, we don’t appear to learn. Every time we need to give a presentation, we seem to go straight to our computers and build slides. Why do we default to this, even when we know that we are risking boring our audience to, if not death, at least the point where our message is completely ignored? As leaders, we need to be communicators. As communicators, we need to better employ PowerPoint in order to influence our teams. 

It is often a case of not knowing better – this is the way it’s always been done. Far too many people have endured education where lessons are based on PowerPoint, before entering workplaces where PowerPoint is the default means for passing on information. PowerPoint can be a great tool. But, like any tool, it needs to be used properly. And like any other tool, it works best when wielded by someone who knows how, and when, to use it. Have you ever looked at the range of hammers available? You could choose a ball peen, sledge, claw, mallet; and these are just a few. But, you have to pick the right hammer for the job you are doing – just because it’s the biggest and heaviest (and the most fun to use), doesn’t mean a sledgehammer is always the best way to solve a problem. So too with PowerPoint; it’s simply one tool that can be used, and there are times it isn’t the appropriate choice. 

Leaders are influencers. To influence a group, the leader needs to communicate effectively, which often means making presentations. It is for this reason that leaders must know how to better employ PowerPoint and use it as a tool for influence. Ultimately though, no audience will be swayed by slides. They will listen to an authentic leader who knows how to engage and evoke emotion. Leadership is not a trait, nor is it a discreet skill. Leadership is the effect that leaders have and is based on many various skills sets. One of these, potentially the most important, is communication. 

Pause now for a moment, and think about the last time someone presented information to you with PowerPoint. Was it a lecture? A meeting? A pitch? What do you remember about it? As you cast your mind back, expand your recollection to remember a period in your life when you were constantly inundated with PowerPoint. Maybe at university, or school, or as the default backdrop at your workplace’s daily update. How many slides were you shown every day? And how many of them can you now remember?

If my own experience is anything to go by, you probably remember little of any PowerPoint presentation you’ve ever been shown. This is because PowerPoint is not a good way to pass on a powerful message that people will remember. The human brain is amazing in its capacity to learn and retain information, but even the universes’ most complex network has limits. A PowerPoint slide cannot save a boring presentation – even with clever animations. 

Humans need to be encouraged to remember things. Fortunately, we are blessed through the miracle of evolution with the ability to encode information and recall it. This ability hinges on one thing – emotion. When we feel something, our brains tag the situation and store the experience in a series of connections across the network of cells that make up the organ between our ears. The felt emotion is critical to the process of storing a memory. 

This can be shown through a simple experiment. Try now to recall any memory you can, anything at all that comes to mind. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. 

It is a safe bet that you did not recall your breakfast from three Mondays ago. Unless there was an unusual set of circumstances that made that specific meal stand out, it was probably just an ordinary event and you had no reason to retain that memory after your hunger was sated. I’ll bet the event you remembered (instead of a random breakfast) had an emotional attachment that led to its being stored as a memory. The emotion is the key to the memory. To get a message across and create the trigger for your audience to store the information you are trying to communicate in their memory, it can’t be another boring PowerPoint that people have sat through too many times. These events get filed with our routine events that aren’t worth recalling, and the information is lost. 

To communicate effectively, you need to engage the emotions of the audience. As humans, we respond to emotion and tend to better remember those events that involve an emotional response. This is the key to using PowerPoint - don’t base your presentation around the slides, base the slides around your presentation. You, as the presenter, are the bard who crafts the story and evokes the emotion through the same means that humans have done through the ages; use stories, vary your rhythm, volume, tone and pitch, emphasise non-verbal communication. This means not using PowerPoint as the crutch for the presentation – that is, letting the slides carry the information and simply reading back what the audience can see is written already. We’ve all had the unfortunate experience of sitting through presentations where this has occurred. It’s no surprise then that this is the surest way to ensure an audience never connects to the content of the presentation and recalls exactly 0% of the information being conveyed. 

If you decide to use PowerPoint, there are a couple of techniques that will ensure it is employed effectively. Firstly, go big, go bold, and keep it basic. Long lists or slides full of words are useless. In fact, they are worse than useless – they detract from the presentation and distract the audience. If you can’t take in the information on a slide in a matter of seconds, you’ve got too much on there. Secondly, think like a marketer. Advertisements are a great corollary for PowerPoint slides. Marketers need to get an audience to remember their information and recall it later – that’s the same effect good presenters desire. The best ads are simple, they tell a story, they evoke an emotion and they pass on information quickly. Your PowerPoint should achieve the same effect in a similar time as someone perusing a magazine ad. A useful analogy is to consider the presentation as the product you are selling, and the slide is the ad supporting the sale. To sell your information, tell a story and evoke an emotion like a marketing genius. 

Leaders set the example and the tone for their teams. When team members see how presentations can be done well, and how PowerPoint can complement a presentation instead of driving it, they will be better placed to do so themselves. When team members use PowerPoint as a crutch, leaders can engage and demonstrate a better way. In this way, team members will understand what good looks like, and can increase their own ability to communicate. Leaders teach their teams to be leaders in many different ways, and this is another where a team can grow under a leader’s guidance and example. 

PowerPoint is a tool for leaders to communicate, and as with the other skills that underpin leadership, it is a tool that can be wielded well, or poorly – only the leader can decide whether to improve their use of the tool. Leaders who use the tool well will increase their influence and improve their outcome. Those that do not risk seeing their audiences shuffle from this mortal coil, victims of a crime that may one day be criminal; death by PowerPoint.  

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