I gave blood last week. I like to do my part, maybe save some lives, even though with my low heart rate it’s not easy for them.
The venue for this blood drive was an old school that had been repurposed as town offices. You see this a lot in New England. The old schools were built, beautiful brick edifices, in the centers of towns during the boom times of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Instead of tearing them down, we repurpose them.
The room I was in was the old school gym. Lying on the table I was looking up at old composite tiles with the blackened blotches of dusty basketballs of exuberant youth long past.
Lying there, waiting to be tapped for my sanguinity and tethered to a bag, I tuned into the voices in the room. The nurse at a nearby table was talking a patient through the procedure. She was wonderful. She narrated everything she was doing. She communicated.
I think we underestimate the value of this communication. We forget how comforting it is, especially in a strange, potentially uncomfortable situation, to know what is happening. It allows people to relax, to be in the moment and to trust.
The best health practitioners do this. This communication practice cuts across domains. The best pilots and gate agents follow this methodology as well. Let people know what to expect. It eases the tension. Great sales people and customer support professionals practice this. Now that I pointed it out I’m sure you’ll see it everywhere.
You don’t have to be a movie star or politician to be a great communicator.
Why does this narration or free dispensation of information add so much value to the recipients? As usual, it’s because of our good old big brains. It’s all about our hard-wired pattern matching machines and the need to fill in the blanks, to complete the puzzle.
When that nurse narrated the process she filled in the blanks. She was letting that client know what was going to happen. That allows the big brain to stop worrying and work on something else. That’s important, because your big brain, like a border collie, needs something to work on.
What happens when you don’t know what is going to happen? Your big pattern matching machine starts to make stuff up. Guess what? When it makes stuff up it’s usually not good stuff. Because of the risk-adverse way humans evolved to survive your brain will default to looking for all the bad things that can happen. Even if it is entirely irrational.
This is the ‘dead in a ditch’ scenario. When the teenager comes home an hour late what does the mom say? “You didn’t call! I didn’t know where you were! I thought you might be dead in a ditch! I was going to start calling hospitals!” Seldom does she say; “I figured you were having an enthralling conversation with your friends about music and just lost track of time.”
At one point in my work life I inherited a couple employees who were in a remote office in another country. Every time we scheduled a trip to go see them they thought they were going to get fired. Why else would we be making the trip?
I got into the habit of coaching the executives to make sure people know what is going on (as much as possible), because if you don’t tell them, they will make stuff up to fill in the blanks, and it’s never good stuff. It’s most always a litany of worst case scenarios.
I’ll give you another example. I have sat in on and coached hundreds, probably thousands, of sales cycles. I routinely help people with the tactics and strategy of what to in a particular deal. A common situation is where the sales person has been working with a prospect and they go silent. Everything was going great and the prospect stopped returning emails and calls.
What happened? What do you think the sales people come up with as the cause for this? They immediately think they have lost the deal and the competition is in there and the price is too high and yadda, yadda, yadda.
Then I ask them; “What do you know? What do you really know?”
Because all they really know is that the prospect didn’t respond. All these other scenarios are just made up in their minds. You don’t really know anything. My success here is to talk them down off the ledge before they do something stupid.
Many times, the silence on the other end is something totally benign. The prospect is on vacation or had a life event or got pulled into an emergency. They come back apologetic and everything continues as before.
The lesson for you, if you’re still with me, is to communicate with the people you serve. Narrate what you think is going to or should happen. It’s great advice, but difficult in practice. Why?
We are hesitant to share our narration with others because it feels like sharing puts us at risk. It’s a form of fear. Fear of getting told that you are wrong. Fear of push back. So instead of having that valuable conversation around the pushback we opt to hide our intent under the covers and this leaves a void that is filled by irrationalities.
It requires a certain amount of trust to put your narrative out there. You have to trust that the other side of the deal or the communication won’t use it against you. Some people believe information is power and will actively hold back. But, that doesn’t mean you should too.
I know for myself I tend to not share this future narrative because I don’t want anyone slowing me down. I have this egotistical belief that I can do everything better and faster by myself. Of course that is not true, but it has been my success strategy in the past. This is a behavior that I have to actively resist.
Here’s the thing. If you let people know where the bus is going it helps them. It adds value to them. This is a leadership trait. If you are clear and positive in your communications people will follow and trust you.
If they have a different idea then you want to have that hard conversation early in the process. If you don’t you will be operating in a misaligned team and eventually it will blow up anyhow. If you have to take a moment and explain your why so that they can follow this is time well invested early on. If you can’t explain your why, you have an opportunity to rethink your narrative.
Be like that cheery and helpful nurse in the blood drive. Let everyone know what’s going on an what to expect. It will ease your pathway to success, whatever that success means to you, and make the lives of those you serve better.