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Brett Rutledge Editorial February 2009
Welcome to 2009 and our first editorial – a new initiative focused firmly on developing effective communication in business. From the desk of Brett Rutledge we will be delivering you informed opinion on the communication issues of the day and invaluable advice to make your communication more effective. Expect it to be funny, informative, ballsy and maybe even a little controversial on occasion. If you have an opinion or a comment of your own about anything you read here we would love to hear from you! Likewise, we would also love to hear about your own experiences with communication in business – good, bad or indifferent!I Who The Hell is Brett Rutledge? Brett won the World Championship of Public Speaking in 1998 and has travelled the world shooting his mouth off ever since. He is only the 5th person outside North America to win the Championship in its history and rumour has it possibly the youngest (28 at the time but very much an old fart now – you do the math). Prior to this he was General Manager of a specialist HR Consultancy which means that he would take the watch off your wrist and charge you to tell you what time it was. So he won a World Championship you never heard of and was one of those dreaded consultants who drive you nuts. Despite all that, Brett is the expert in communication in our part of the world and a gifted communicator without peer. As such he knows a bit about communication and while all his opinions are at least two parts arrogance there is also three parts skill, four parts knowledge and one part inspiration. That’s ten whole parts! Awesome! A Communication Reality Check The traditional approach to developing a mastery of communication in business is to focus on technique and skill. It is an approach that probably describes 90% of the communication courses that you may have attended and it is an approach that is doomed to failure for 90% of people. Why? Because the knowledge of skill and technique is only useful if you are highly skilled and odds are you are not among them (it’s nothing personal – just apply the Bell curve). So let’s stop attending useless 1-2 day courses that focus on teaching you skills and techniques you have next to no chance of applying successfully and instead focus on developing a better understanding of communication in business. Understanding is the one thing that can improve your communication right now regardless of how skilled you are. Specifically you need to understand how information is evaluated and interpreted, what constitutes effective communication, how to measure whether or not you have been effective, how to position your communication and what channels of communication must be used together to have any hope of being successful in the first place! By the way those 1-2 day courses we were talking about usually involve a couple of out-of-work actors who have been taught by another out-of-work actor how to teach the course and now they are teaching you. They are not even good actors otherwise they wouldn’t be out-of-work would they?! If that is your idea of developing effective communication then you probably like to think of George W Bush as one of the great minds of our time! Fonterra and Everything They Didn’t Learn From James Hardie Nice people work for Fonterra and nice people work for James Hardie. Bad things happen to nice people as we all know and the bad thing happening to Fonterra at the moment is the melamine/milk powder scandal in China. I am pretty sure when the news broke that babies had died as a result of ingesting the melamine tainted product of Fonterra’s Chinese subsidiary that many of the nice people at Fonterra would have felt physically sick at the thought. But who would believe that? The communication strategy that Fonterra have employed since the scandal broke is the same one that James Hardie employed a few years back. Remember the bad thing that happened to them? James Hardie discovered to their horror that asbestos is nasty stuff and has a tendency to kill people – specifically it was killing their former employees who had been required to handle the stuff while working for James Hardie in decades gone by. James Hardie worked hard to limit their liability. They tried to be as professional as possible in their communication – calm, logical, reasoned – and wherever possible to be unemotional to take the heat out of the situation. Result? Oh brilliant – a massive billion-dollar liability, a tanking of their share price and a board facing criminal charges in Australian courts. Now Fonterra are doing the same thing – calm, logical, reasoned and not displaying their feelings. Here’s a clue friends and neighbours… when it comes to communication the people you are talking to know that you are a close approximation of a human being. That means they know you have feelings. If you hide those feelings from people then they will attribute emotion to you. What are the chances of them doing so in a positive fashion? Zero! In situations like this if you don’t tell people how you feel then they will assume you are an uncaring bastard and behave accordingly. In other words they will fight you to the death and their dispute will become a crusade. So…from the nice people at James Hardie to the nice people at Fonterra – "Good luck in the courts… you are going to need it!" Seriously… get in touch If anything here has struck a chord let us know and if you want some help in making your communication more effective please get in touch. Thanks for reading and see you next month! For booking details please email: info@brettrutledge.com |
