#69 - Why your team may not bring problems to you

Plus lifting the energy in the room and the struggle between accurate and memorable

Hello, readers! Welcome to issue #69 of Curiosity > Certainty 👏

This week’s issue is not just about listening well but also talking well enough to be remembered. It is about not being nitpicky about minor wrinkles if it is for the greater good and keeping an open door to allow those who work with you to bring to you what they think is wrong. Enjoy!

Why your team may not bring their problems to you

From every day, every solution, every change, problems emerge in business. 

The best organizations have an in-built alarm system to call for attention. The trigger for such a system is not defined because it is the employees’ intuition and judgment that decide what merits attention.
 
But what if employees didn’t sound the alarm?

Imagine if nurses and pilots didn’t report the first signs of trouble. Lives would be lost. Much the same way, livelihoods are lost when problems don’t get flagged to management.  

Here are some reasons why your team may choose to stay silent:

👉They think they can solve the problem themselves with a little bit more time or thought or both. They don’t want to be seen as incapable or incompetent for bringing up something solvable.

👉They think they should not bring a problem to management if they don’t also have a solution for it.

👉They see the problem in isolation and they don’t recognize the pattern it is a part of. So they may peg the problem as not serious. 

👉They feel you have made up your mind on an issue and bringing up a non-consensus view closer to showtime may cast them as a troublemaker.

👉They have highlighted problems in the past and nothing has come of it. They are desensitized. 

👉They don’t care. 

Not all tripwires are planned and set up in advance. The most effective ones are hazy. Because they emerge from the everyday judgment and sense of safety of employees. 

Lifting the energy in the room

I was chatting with a colleague and in response to a point I made, he said, ‘You’re absolutely right’. The words lifted my mood.

Just like tracking user emotional energy in your product funnel can improve conversions (link in comments), tracking your audience’s emotional energy in a conversation can improve the outcome of the discussion. 

💡Often, in meetings, someone points out a minor flaw in or suggests a marginal improvement to a proposal. The intent behind this may be good–to make oneself useful. The effect is telling. A 5% suggested improvement suddenly brings down motivation of the presenter by 50%. 

Did this person come into the meeting gung-ho about the idea she was going to propose? Of course! It was hers. Pointing out a tiny wrinkle has made her ready to disown. 

And this behavior is contagious because there are more agents than principals in life. Agents need to constantly prove they’re smart, whether they hate themselves for it or not. 

So, stop! But how? Marshall Goldsmith, probably the world’s best known executive coach, has some advice. 

👉Ask ‘Is it worth it?’ before choosing to butt in. We tend to check if what we’re about to say is correct. That’s basic. Go a level deeper than that. 

👉Don’t start a sentence with any of these three words: no, but, or however. Disagree without being disagreeable. 

👉Stop playing the ‘this is who I am’ card. Some of us find it hard to listen. Some find it hard to talk. We explain both (and many more) things with this is who I am. This is only good to settle debates by rank, which is that the highest-ranking person in a discussion gets to play this card.

How do you lift the energy of the room you’re in?

Being memorable beats being accurate

Your ideas are novel. They’re useful. Yet, they fall flat.

The problem may not be their quality but their memorability. 

If it helps, it’s not just you–it’s what many are bemused by. We’re programmed to be accurate (remember school?), not to make our ideas stand out.

The world’s a busy marketplace. Not a classroom where your teachers are paid to correct your answers and are accountable to your questions. If you want to be noticed, make your ideas easy to remember.

The best ideas are not just novel but also great replicators. They copy themselves onto your audience’s brain and get them to share with others. What can you do to make your idea lodge itself in people’s heads? 

🎶Make it catchy. 

‘A stitch in time saves nine’ means nothing literally. Nine what? And why nine, and not more or less? Yet, said any other way, it would not have topped the idiom charts for as long as it has. Alliteration, acronyms, and analogies are other ways to be memorable.

😲😂😱Evoke emotion. 

How about the phrase ‘ozone hole’? Did you know that there’s no actual hole where the ozone has gone missing? It merely refers to an area of depleted ozone in the stratosphere. 

Do you care that it’s not really a hole? Nope. But you know a hole is bad. It must be filled. When you hear hole, your impulse is to do something about it–exactly what the world needed after more than a decade of failed advocacy to reduce chlorofluorocarbons that deplete the ozone layer. 

📛Name something that everyone identifies with but has no name for. 

Shreyas Doshi’s a master at this. These are some of his ideas that I can rattle off the top of my head:

The Antithesis Principle
Certainty Theater
Apple Pie Position (my favorite!)

In the real world, great ideas are only fuel. They go nowhere without an engine. So, get yourself an engine–distribution–to take them far. 

Do you think the fuel-and-engine analogy is mine? Nope. I’m simply using Emily Kramer’s analogy for what makes for a powerful marketing machine.

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Thank you for your time! If you’re intrigued by the Antithesis Principle, you can read it in this previous issue. If you try any of the shared strategies, I would love to know how that works out for you. And finally, let me know how I can make this newsletter more useful for you. Comments are open, so is my inbox (satyajit.07@gmail.com). Stay well!