Lesson Learned #11
In some ways this lesson was learned similarly to the second one we wrote about, when we inexplicably chose a national trucking convention to criticize the trucking industry. When you are talking to a group of people it is very important to understand and appreciate their sensitivity to what you are saying, because what you mean, and what people hear can be very different things.
Each summer we have a company event held over a couple of days. It’s a good way to get all our frequent flyers together and we use the occasion to hold a three hour company update meeting sometime on the first day. One particular company meeting we spent the full three hours going through tremendous detail about our positioning, performance and people strategies. Despite three long hours of presentation, all that was remembered (and is in fact still remembered to this day) is when the president of the company said, “The core of our people strategy this year is to improve our recruiting.”
What he meant was that people are of course critical to a consulting firm and it is a good idea to try to improve how you can attract the best candidates. What people heard was, we need to improve the quality of our people (meaning find better staff than all of you here).
It was a fairly innocent comment but it caused a surprising amount of internal turmoil. It also caused any other key points from the meeting to be lost. The lesson we learned was to think through carefully what you say to a group and try to understand how the words will be interpreted. This also reinforced the importance of rehearsing your presentations in advance. Sometimes you need others to listen to your words because it is not easy to hear or interpret your own words other than the way you intended. When your job is to communicate ideas, which is a key responsibility of all managers, it’s important that what you say and what people hear are the same thing.
