In an interesting piece in USA Today by Paul Davidson, the subheading reads āNew Fed chair sees what power her words carry.ā
It isnāt just true for the Fed. Itās true for all of us.
Iām often amazed what a server at a restaurant will share about her day. While I understand the desire to tell me about your horrible existence is powerful, itās even more powerful to remember that Iām paying for an experience, not for the story about how your alternator blew out on the way to work and you had to walk three blocks, and you still arenāt sure how youāre going to get a tow truck to the spot.
Does that make me sound unreasonable? Maybe.
Great business, though, is unreasonable. Thereās a timetable and a direction. The job gets done no matter what the reasons. Also, giving your customers piece of mind, at least for the short while you’re serving them, creates repeat customers (check out this article: Peace of mind is the most important financial asset at the ThirtySixMonths blog).
Weāve become attached to excuses, and public relations people know it. They counsel celebrity clients to come clean publicly. Guilt sells. So does a bad childhood. Parents were alcoholics? Fantastic. Thatāll bring āem runninā in! (Think bad public relations can’t be a disaster? This piece on BP’s PR nightmare at Forbes should be enough evidence….)
While I love a good story, my favorite experiences are the ones that work hard to create and maintain an illusion. Maybe thatās why I like Amazon so much. I order something and without an additional feeā¦.and I receive the stuff at my front door a day or two later.
No excuses about how Iāll have to pay extra for that bag. No extra charge because I have a pet.
Smooth and seamless.
Back to the Fed
Ben Bernake decided that the Fed wasnāt transparent enough, so he decided to have more open, regular communication with the press.
Did it work? I know this: it didnāt hurt.
By showing what they were trying to achieve it did two things: it forces the organization to perform, something thatās always good, and it also gave clear expectations to the media about what to expect in the future.
Itās the same for us. By clearly expressing a message to your clientā¦.whomever it may beā¦.your actual client, or your boss, your teacher or your significant other, youāre setting expectations that youāre going to follow through.
ā¦and, because youāre transparent, you usually do.
Let’s work on actionable communication.
So How Is This Actionable?
Let’s use this lesson to make some changes:
1)Ā Ā Tell people what youāre going to do and do it. Youāre going to begin running three days a week? Tell someone. Then take it upon yourself to tell them that you followed through.
2)Ā Ā Open lines of communication. Is there someone youāre having trouble communicating with? Write them more often. Youāll be surprised how quickly theyāll respond.
I used this approach with clients that I knew Iād not communicated with enough. Not only would I fix the problem with our system that created the lack of communicationā¦.Iād over communicate to reopen the channel.Ā
3)Ā Ā Try this system. My sister-in-law used to call us every Sunday. While we didnāt always take the call (invariably weād be engrossed in something), I loved her system of reaching out to say hello. She may still think I didnāt notice. Hopefully sheās reading my blog!
When I was managing money for people, communication was crucial to my role. Not only did I need to make decisions, I had to show my client I was making good decisions on their behalf. Hereās what I did: I took all of my clients and looked at how much communication I could reasonably accomplish in a week. Then I assigned each client a number. If I was calling or emailing the āsixā group this week, Iād just pull it up on the computer and walk down the list.Ā It wasnāt rocket science, but it worked.
I love the lesson that the Fed is teaching about communication. By looking at this and other examples of great communication, you can change the way people think about you, giving you more money, more savings, and then a quicker pathway to your goals.
Yee-haw!
Want more? I loved reading Pitch Perfect: How to Say It Right the First Time, Every Time. We can all communicate better, and this really cleaned up my personal communication strategies.
Photo: Tim Evanson
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