by Caroline Leach | Jun 21, 2015 | Leadership, Learning, Work/Life
“Mom, do I ship to Croatia?”
My teen daughter asked me that last year when she started selling items on Etsy.
She launched a small business from her room in Southern California. All she needed was her laptop, a broadband connection and some starter items to sell.
Questions began. Did she know how to research shipping rates and timelines to Croatia? Did she price her items with enough margin to cover the shipping costs? What about insurance?
Talk about a great learning experience. And it got me thinking about what it means to be a global citizen of the world. And how to work effectively with people across countries and cultures.
Karie Willyerd and Jeanne Meister have a great definition in their book, The 2020 Workplace.
We’ve been fortunate to have Karie speak at DIRECTV’s annual leadership meeting, global HR conference and our Young Professionals Network.
As the world becomes more global, social, digital and diverse, Karie and Jeanne define global citizenship as:
- Understanding how to conduct business in another country
- Developing increased cultural intelligence and a deeper appreciation of the relationship between business and society
- Being able to understand complex policy environments, and
- Knowing how to work in virtual teams with people from all over the world.
The best way to do that is to live and work in another country or region. The next-best alternative is to travel globally for your work or on your vacations.
And there are several other ways you can become a citizen of the world. I’ve been reminded of this recently by some of my colleagues in our DIRECTV Latin America business – Ana Diaz, Pamela Gidi and Sandro Mesquita to name a few.
Observe. Watch how people do things. Take your cues from how people communicate with you. Give as much weight to what is unsaid as to what is said. Pay attention to how people react to things – their words, actions and body language.
Early in my career I bought hardware for satellites. While most of my suppliers were U.S.-based, I also worked with companies in Japan, France and Germany. I learned how to observe people’s behaviors as much greater cultural indicators than only their words. I even wrote a magazine article about international subcontracting, a precursor to my corporate communications career.
Ask. In a respectful and thoughtful way, ask people for their ideas. Their perspectives. Their preferences. Ask why and how. As Stephen Covey said, seek first to understand.
Read. Libraries are a window on the world. So is the internet. Harvard Business Review has great pieces on global business. Nicholas Kristof and Thomas Friedman at the New York Times have fascinating global perspectives. Financial Times and The Economist are other favorites.
When I shared my daily news rituals in LinkedIn, Dan Weidman made a great comment about perspectives in The Guardian and the Daily Mail, so I’ve added them to my list.
Sometimes I’ll toggle my Wall Street Journal app to the Asia or Europe editions.
To fit in this reading, I follow my usual news scanning framework – scan the headlines for a quick sense of the news, and read at least one article.
Think. Make time and space to simply sit and think. This is great advice in Dorie Clark‘s new book, Stand Out, about generating breakthrough ideas and building a following around them.
How does what you’re observing, learning and reading all fit together? What development in one part of the world will likely to affect another? What business opportunities could result? How does that change how you prepare for the future?
Empathize. Put yourself in other people’s shoes. Ask how they’re likely to think about a new development. Ask how they are used to working. Ask what would be most convenient for them.
It can be as simple as scheduling meetings at a time that is convenient in their time zone to trying to write or speak at least a few words in their language.
Network. How diverse is your network? This is a great question that BCG’s Roselinde Torres asks in her TED talk on 21st century leadership.
Are your colleagues, friends and acquaintances of different ages, perspectives and backgrounds? How great is your capacity to develop relationships with people who are very different from you? It’s this diversity, Torres says, that gives you broader ability to see patterns and solutions.
At DIRECTV our seven employee resource groups are a great source of connections and insights. And in keeping with my work/life blend where everything is interconnected, I’ve enjoyed insights into a variety of cultures by getting to know the parents of my son’s soccer team members.
Learn. As in, learn a new language. For me, it’s Spanish. Because I live in Southern California and half DIRECTV’s employees are in Latin America, this makes the most sense.
I’m trying to use my commute time for learning and practicing. In part this is because no one is around to laugh at my pronunciation in the sanctuary of my car.
And if I can scale the significant hurdles of learning a language after the age of 10, there are multiple mental benefits according to a recent New York Times article by William Alexander.
How are you becoming a global citizen of the world?
by Caroline Leach | Jun 13, 2015 | Corporate Communications, Leadership, Learning, Social Media
Speaking at the Intranet Global Forum this week at USC made me reflect on new ways to work.
At Toby Ward‘s invitation, I joined a variety of speakers including digital luminaries Shel Holtz, Dion Hinchcliffe and Aadam Zaidi.
The focus? The future of corporate intranets, spotlighting the design, governance and management of enterprise and social intranets.
My talk was a DIRECTV case study, looking at how we’re changing the way work gets done in our connected enterprise.
Today it’s more collaborative, productive and innovative. And tomorrow it should become even more so, as technologies and cultures evolve.
It started four years ago when my Communications team began working with the I.T. team to explore technologies for social collaboration.
We began with a vision – to make it easy for employees to connect, collaborate, access and share information with each other and partners, leading to greater engagement and productivity, along with better decision-making and increased innovation.
Our work was informed in part by the McKinsey & Company study, The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies.
Across four sectors studied, it reported that social technologies improving productivity could potentially contribute up to $1.3 trillion in value. And two-thirds of this amount lay in improving collaboration and communication within and across enterprises.
Those are hefty numbers. And big potential to achieve.
We embarked on our journey with a group headed by Michael Ambrozewicz on my team, and later joined by Thyda Nhek and Mani Escobar.
We have a great technical partnership with I.T. strategy leader Frank Palase and his team, along with insight from various consulting partners.
Together we could put a social collaboration platform in place, but how could we encourage people to use it? How could we achieve its full value?
We had to make it part of how people did their daily work. Not a separate site that people would visit and engage with when they had time.
It had to be a way to get important work done every day. It had to foster new ways of working, with employees creating content to share in places where teams collaborate in real time.
Senior leader involvement is a key way of doing that. If leaders are active in a social intranet, then employees will join the dialogue and the action.
In our beta phase, I launched a communications leadership blog. My purpose was to encourage the beta participants to experiment and learn. And I’d learn enough about blogging from first-hand experience so I could advise our C-suite leaders on launching and growing their own blogs.
In the next year’s annual leadership meeting, we wove social collaboration into the program.
- Our CEO talked about its importance in the context of our overall business strategy.
- Michael and Thyda manned kiosks and helped leaders set up their profile pages and get started with initial actions, like following colleagues and bookmarking key content.
- Each day I blogged for all employees about what was happening at the meeting. Our CIO jumped in with blog posts and perspectives of his own.
Blogging for me created a “flow state” experience, where time drifts away and I’m completely engaged in the art and craft of thinking and writing. It’s one of the things I wrote about in my very first post.
And it’s one of the reasons I launched this second blog, Leading Communications, earlier this year. I wanted to continue learning, sharing knowledge and engaging in dialogue.
What are we doing with our social intranet today?
First, we’re providing company news and information in real time, that employees can like, share, comment on and add their own perspectives.
Second, key teams are regularly collaborating on projects and keeping their colleagues up to date on emerging industry trends, new technologies and consumer insights.
Third, major work locations and teams use spaces to engage colleagues with relevant information and project-based resources.
And where are we going tomorrow?
First, our social intranet will sustain and build on organizational knowledge. Information is increasingly less likely to be buried in individuals’ email accounts, and more likely to be available for colleagues to access and build upon.
Second, our word-based content is becoming more visual, with photos and videos increasing in importance compared with text. People can process visual information much faster, not to mention that it’s more engaging.
And in our rapidly changing world, that provides tremendous upside. Step by step, we can all make that trillion-dollar value creation a reality.
by Caroline Leach | Jun 4, 2015 | Corporate Communications, Leadership, Learning
Visiting one of DIRECTV’s Denver offices this week, I felt a special energy.
People were upbeat and friendly. A hum of activity filled the halls. Lively conversations spilled out of the elevators.
A lobby sign reminded employees they’ve made the company a Denver Post top workplace for three years in a row.
(Kudos are in order here for Denver-based communications leader Anthony Martini, HR leader Carlos Botero and all of the leaders and employees at our Denver sites.)
It was not unlike the company’s many other locations, where people are highly engaged in entertaining the future by delivering the best video experience in the world.
What makes a top workplace?
While there are many models and methodologies for identifying top workplaces, for me there are three things. They all need to be present for an engaging and energizing employee experience.
Purpose. What is the company’s vision? How is it changing the world? And how are employees part of something much bigger than themselves as individuals?
A compelling and inspiring purpose motivates people to pour their heart and soul into their work. It drives discretionary effort, where employees put in significant amounts of effort above and beyond what their jobs require.
Many companies today report low levels of engaged employees. That’s why I’m especially proud of my colleagues at DIRECTV, whose high engagement and strong financial performance put in the company in Towers Watson‘s high performing companies norm.
Leaders play a critical role. They’re the ones who articulate the purpose and communicate every day in their words and actions how their teams further that purpose. One of their most important roles is also to express a genuine interest in employees and inspire them to deliver their best efforts.
Communication is the catalyst. It gets back to the tree-falling-in-the-forest question in my first post. Without effective communication, a compelling purpose is nearly nonexistent.
“Start with why,” Simon Sinek said in a TED talk with 22 million views, How Great Leaders Inspire Action.
People. We spend most of our days with our work colleagues. Talented and positive people make the workplace come alive.
It starts with having a compelling employer brand, articulating the promise of the employee experience your company offers. That branding brings top talent on board, and ongoing development keeps everyone growing and stretching.
Add to that an inclusive work environment that values everyone’s ideas and insights. This leads to a constant stream of innovation, not to mention better decision making and happier employees who enjoy coming to work each day.
Possibilities. Limitless potential encourages people to keep stretching and growing — to learn and develop themselves as they contribute to the success of their organizations and their teams.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone is on track to climb what used to be known as a corporate ladder. It does mean that people have an opportunity to build valuable skills and experiences, that they’ll put to use at their current organization or another one.
LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and colleagues call these “tours of duty” in The Alliance. In this framework, “Employees invest in the company’s adaptability, and the company invests in employees’ employability.
This creates multiple possibilities for the future, strengthening both people and organizations in the process.
A top workplace isn’t about free food, yoga classes, pet care or a myriad of other perks.
While those are nice and most people wouldn’t refuse them if offered, those are extrinsic rewards. This makes them more ephemeral and less powerful than intrinsic rewards, where the enjoyment of the work itself is the reward.
Enjoyment and inner fulfillment come from a strong purpose, great people and limitless possibilities. These are a lot less expensive than 24/7 meal service. And much more sustainable and satisfying to boot.
by Caroline Leach | May 30, 2015 | Corporate Communications, Social Media
How can you get your message into the first three to five words?
If the recipient read nothing else, would they get the main message in those first few words?
And how you can grab their attention right away?
These are the questions I’m asking when I’m reviewing materials my Comms team or others have drafted.
Is the main message in the subject line? Or the slide headline? Or the blog post title?
It’s in those first few critical words – or increasingly, images – that your audience will decide if they should engage further or move on to the next message.
Your subject line and preview text may be all your reader ever sees of your email, so make ’em count. Check out some great email subject lines to inspire the ones you write.
And make sure you’ve included keywords, “an informative word used in an information retrieval system to indicate the content.”
Even The New York Times, long known for its lyrical headlines, is now including keywords.
And there’s a bigger goal as well.
“What matters more than a story’s ‘searchable’ factor is how ‘shareable’ it is on social media,” the article by Margaret Sullivan goes on to say, “so headlines need to serve that purpose too.”
And what makes something interesting and shareable and interesting echoes the themes in 4 Questions to Transform Your Elevator Pitch.
So how can you say it in a subject line?
by Caroline Leach | May 24, 2015 | Change, Corporate Communications, Social Media
This week, I’m preparing to give a one-minute elevator pitch.
This should be easy. I’ve done personal branding sessions. I’ve defined my unique value proposition. And I’ve drafted a pitch, complete with words like strategy and collaboration and results.
But somehow, those formal statements are things I would never say. They wouldn’t feel natural. They wouldn’t sound believable. They wouldn’t be interesting.
And as Tim David says in his HBR post, Your Elevator Pitch Needs an Elevator Pitch, they wouldn’t be authentic.
So what should I say? What should you say the next time you’re on an elevator or at conference and someone asks you to tell them what you do?
In one minute, you have about 120 words to pique someone’s interest and spark a longer conversation.
Being in the TV business, pivotal scenes or compelling narratives often come to mind. As The Wall Street Journal reported in a tribute to Mad Men, elevators have been described as a neutral zone where “time, physical space and tension get neatly compressed.”
So how can use use that to your advantage?
First, who are you pitching to? As with any communication, consider your audience. Who are they and what’s important to them? What problems are they trying to solve? And how can you help? Answering these questions will help you tailor your pitch.
Second, why are you pitching to them? What do you want to accomplish? Your general objective should be to generate interest in a follow-up conversation, not to close a sale or land a job. Think of your elevator pitch as opening the door to more dialogue.
Third, what do you want them to know about you? If the person were to remember just one thing about you, what would you want it to be? Focus on that area and edit out everything else.
Fourth, how can you say it authentically? Translate corporate jargon into real words that anyone could understand. Could your parents understand it? How about a kindergartner?
Here’s the start of mine for this moment in time:
Hi, I’m Caroline Leach. I help people learn to love change. Whether it’s winning customer loyalty, working in new ways or creating a culture of volunteerism, I use communication to lead change. And involving people makes them more excited about the future.
Best-selling author Daniel Pink has great ideas about creating an elevator pitch for our digital world. One is having a one-word pitch. If, according to Pink, Google equals search and MasterCard equals priceless, what one word defines you?
I chose “transform.” I also considered “change.” But while many people are inspired by the idea of transformation and its possibilities for reinvention and growth, people resist change, as Rosabeth Moss Kanter summarizes so well on ten different levels.
People don’t always like to change. But they would eagerly transform their lives. And communication can connect the two in a powerful way that ultimately leads to sustainable change.
Pink also suggests summing up your pitch in a tweet. In 140 characters or less, what’s your Twitter pitch?
My tweet is I help people learn to love change.
And that’s what I’m exploring right now in my work and in this blog. And as that changes and evolves, so will my elevator pitch.
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