Bad news can be inspiring

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Posterous who I have a (totally unused) blog account with. The email was a very well worded apology that their servers had been hit by Denial of Service attacks and had buckled, and gone down. They came up again an hour or so later, but it seems the Posterous team and users continued to fight major problems for the rest of the week.

Now I don't actually use my Posterous account so I really didn't care, but the email caught my eye because it was such a brilliant use of 15 lines of text. The email came from the CEO and he used the space to apologise to his customers, tell them how hard they worked to fix the problem, and advertise the solutions they have found which make Posterous even stronger and better than before.

So far so smart. But it gets smarter. The CEO finished the missive by saying that he had 'never been prouder' of the Posterous team. He went on to name 3 of the key protagonists (Garry, Vince and Jackson) who had busted their guts, working nights and weekends and pointed out exactly what their contribution had been. Amazing! Remember this is in a letter to customers, not an internal pat-on-the-back email.

Beyond being a nice thing to do, this is such an astute move. Sachin Agarwal has turned what sounds like a hideous and demoralising week for his team, where one thing after another went wrong, into a complete victory. He has made them the heroes of the Posterous story and in doing so further embedded their personal involvement with the company. As a customer of course, I'm nothing but impressed. It sounds like they have a great team, they work together well, they know their stuff etc... In other words, this short, clever piece of communication satisfies every stakeholder.

Do you know of other examples of companies using a bad week at work to inspire their employees? Or companies who name and fame their employees to their customers when they've gone above and beyond? Do you do this in your company? Tell us your stories...

Communication for Inspiration : Give your team Obama skills

Yesterday I read the following irritated tweet from an editor at one of the national newspapers.

‘My desk phone is broken. IT man has taken it away. And a replacement? "Oh, we haven't got any". Marvellous.’

The cause of the frustration humming through this little tweet, isn’t I don’t believe, the lack of a phone. The quotation marks speak volumes. The frustration has come from the way this impediment to his working day was communicated. As an afterthought. A fact - unsoftened.

Its not what you said, its how you said it.

This is the case with so many examples of dissatisfaction in the workplace. All kinds of things happen at work, some good, some bad, some challenging. But the thing that people get emotional about - for better or for worse - is the way they’re communicated.

In some cases people don’t see it as part of their job to manage the experience of those working with them. These people won’t be ultimately successful without realising their mistake and changing their minds about this. It will often take a manager to point it out and might require some coaching to find a new way.

Other times, the will is there, but there’s a barrier which stops people from understanding each other. What works in one department is foreign to another. I remember one halleluja of glorious understanding in a meeting between a production team and a design team, when they suddenly realised that they had two different concepts of what the word deadline meant. Genuinely. Once they each understood the pressures on the other team and why they thought about deadlines differently, they worked out some new language that worked for them. Conversations and relationships improved dramatically.

And it can be even harder for those who find themselves in senior leadership positions. Having got to the top of their particular tree they suddenly find themselves on another steep learning curve. They have new pressures to face, new responsibilities and overwhelming claims on their time. Simultaneously they become very visible, everyone listens to what they say, comments on it, judges it. Engaging communication is a big part of their job and if they get their communication style wrong, the impact on employee motivation can be huge.

So what’s to be done? Well over at One Magnolia we had a think about this little problem and took as our muse, the disarming Barack Obama. What would happen we wondered, if Barack Obama were on our leadership team, or indeed manning an IT service desk. We think the answer is that the people around him would be all fired up, full of energy, and that they’d get an awful lot done! As a result of this pleasing fantasy, we’ve developed Communication for Inspiration. A training course that takes the example of the greatest communicators of our time and makes their brilliance accessible for use by business leaders and managers.

The point isn’t to turn everyone into Barack Obama and Richard Branson of course. It’s to help leaders and managers find their own superpowers when it comes to engaging their staff. We give them the tools and make them easy to use.

The course finishes with a brainstorm on the ways for leaders to create a communication culture throughout their company. One person inspiring others through their communication is great, but a whole company doing it, the whole time, is better.

Call us on 07921 484 385, or email info@onemagnolia.co.uk to get course details of Communication for Inspiration : Give your team Obama skills.