Buzzword Bingo and Acronymitis

by Andy Kaufman on December 6, 2011

Ever hear of Buzzword Bingo?

I used to work with a guy named Bob. If there was a buzzword in our industry, Bob could drop it into a sentence like nobody’s business. What’s the latest way to say something? Bob would know.

During conference calls when Bob was on the other line, we would occasionally play Buzzword Bingo. In short, we created some makeshift grids of buzzwords. As soon as Bob would spout one over the phone, you got to mark it off if it was on your grid.

Get 5 in a row? Bob was always a bit confused when he heard someone exclaim Bingo from a remote office.

It all made for some good fun (at Bob’s expense). But increasingly I feel like I’m intersecting with company cultures that Bob created. Dan Pallotta observes this in his entertaining and insightful article for HBR entitled “I Don’t Understand What Anyone is Saying Anymore”.

In many of our workshops there is some time allocated to introductions. That’s always an opportunity for Acronymitis and an occasional case of Abstractionitis. I have a colleague who has a favorite diagnostic question for clients these days: “What’s your strategy?” He’s been seeing a rash of Meaningless Expressions and Abstractionitis flaring up, with the business version of Valley Girl 2.0 thrown in for good measure.

I’m increasingly seeing the illness spread during status meetings (see my article How to Report the Status of a Problem Project).  Requirements documents become meaningless with the diseased phrasing (“The system must be fail-safe and user-friendly.”). Is there any wonder we struggle to deliver as we attempt to “exceed customer expectations?”

Do you want to stand out from the crowd these days?

  • Take a step back and actually listen to yourself. Have you caught one or more of Pallotta’s communication diseases?
  • Stop replying to questions with the word, “So….”
  • Take your audience into consideration. If they are already inoculated with complete knowledge of your acronyms and lingo, go for it. But if the people you are speaking with are from other parts of the business or otherwise much less exposed to the verbal viruses of your domain, beware. It’s our responsibility to adjust to them if we want the communication to be effective.

It’s when I present to international audiences that I become acutely aware that I use too much slang. How about you? Which strain of Pallotta’s epidemic are you struggling with? Let’s work on this together.

It might take the fun away of playing Buzzword Bingo in meetings but we’ll all have a better understanding of what’s actually being said!

P.S. To create your own Buzzword Bingo grids, check out http://lurkertech.com/buzzword-bingo/. You’ll also find a brief history of the term as well.

 

{ 1 comment }

“Can an introvert become a leader?”

by Andy Kaufman on October 27, 2011

Unquestionably the answer is “Yes!”

Last year CNN published an article entitled “Why introverts can be great leaders.” It offers up some solid research that backs up the article title and is worth the read.

I recently interviewed Jim Kouzes who is the co-author of classic leadership books such as The Leadership Challenge and Credibility (interviews are available for free at http://bit.ly/CredibilityPart1 and http://bit.ly/CredibilityPart2). In both books they present extensive research into what it takes to be an effective leader, including what followers want from their leaders.

So, what do followers want? The top 4 include a leader who is:

  • Honest
  • Forward-thinking
  • Inspiring
  • Competent

(Side note: it struck me that those are four qualities we don’t normally associate with politicians these days! But I digress….)

In that list, Inspiring might be the closest associated with extroversion. I asked Jim about that in the interview and he insisted that it does not require one to be extroverted. Granted, it’s difficult to inspire if you never leave your desk or spend time with people. But thinking that one must be extroverted to be inspiring exposes a myth about what we believe to be true about introverts.

One of my favorite interviews related to introversion was with Devora Zack, author of Networking for People Who Hate Networking (see http://bit.ly/DevoraZackCast for the discussion). I highly recommend the book for anyone who considers themselves an introvert and wants to grow in their ability to build relationships.

I’m currently preparing for an interview with Rob Cross, author of multiple books including The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations. Earlier this year he co-authored a piece for HBR on “A Smarter Way to Network.” There’s an insightful HBR audio interview available at http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2011/07/getting-networking-right.html. Rob’s research over 15 years shows that one’s success doesn’t come down to “She with the most relationships wins!” Rather, a more important factor is “bridging relationships”, those connections that bridge levels up, across, down, and outside the organization. Introverts can certainly build such relationships without worrying about quantity.

Further, Rob presents an intriguing finding. Success was even more impacted by the degree to which a person tends to energize those around them. This doesn’t have to be energizing in an extroversion sense, as in being a high-key cheerleader. Bob Sutton says it this way in his book Good Boss, Bad Boss. A key difference between a good boss and a bad boss is how you feel after you interact with them. Did they energize you or drain you? I can think of extroverts and introverts who land on both side of Sutton’s assertion.

Interestingly, Rob has found that “energizers” tend to pull (or attract): opportunities, talent, information for decisions, etc. De-energizers tend to repel those same things, which ultimately impacts one’s ability to lead and succeed.

As with most things in life, our ability to successfully lead isn’t as simple as one factor such as personality type (though how we’re wired can both give us a head start as well as hinder us). If I had to personally boil it down to one factor based on my experience coaching hundreds of executives it comes down to what Justin Menkes mentions in his book, Better Under Pressure: an individual’s sense of agency. In other words, if someone has a teachable spirit, a hunger and willingness to learn, and a sense that they have the ability to take action (as opposed to being a victim), they have great potential to lead others.

That has nothing to do with introversion or extroversion and much more about how they see themselves and their world.

Indeed, introverts can make great leaders.

{ 0 comments }

How to Report the Status of a Problem Project

by Andy Kaufman on October 3, 2011

“The project status is…. white.”

I sat with a former coaching client this morning to catch up with what’s going on his world. He told me about a major project at his company that is about a year behind schedule. Yet when the top-level leader in his part of the organization reported up to the CEO on the status of the project, he didn’t say the status was red. To the leader’s credit he didn’t say it was green. But he also didn’t say yellow. The project status is white.

For the record, that company doesn’t have an official project status of white.  So, I asked my former coaching client, what did white mean?

He didn’t hear the intended meaning but the joke internally was “White Hot! Hotter than Red!”

Though I don’t know in this situation, I’ve seen it all too often on struggling projects…. There is likely all kinds of project spin going on. I can imagine the leader saying, “The project is white because we’re looking into some factors and cannot accurately assess the status. We’ll get back to you.”  Interpretation: “This project is so screwed up that if we really told you the truth we would all get fired so we’re busy figuring out who to blame and when we have that information, we’ll get back to you.”

Later today I’m interviewing Justin Menkes, author of Better Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out The Best in Themselves and Others. Justin found in his research that the best leaders–those who thrived under pressure and were able to maximize the potential of themselves and those around them–exhibited the attribute of realistic optimism. That is similar to Sir John Templeton’s first rule of creating wealth: “To achieve success, be neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but a realist with a hopeful nature.”

We can pretend a project is going OK, even though it’s not. We can slather lipstick on that pig, put some pearls around its neck and proclaim it a beauty. But it’s a pig nonetheless. Games get played with project status all the time (such as, “schedule chicken“). But as Colin Powell observes, “Bad news is not like fine wine–it doesn’t get better over time.”

Rick Morris told me over lunch last week that he instructed once by a boss that he could not show red for a project status. The problem is that the project was in trouble. How did Rick handle this? Did he go along with the game and just say green, hoping that it will all work out? Or did he whip out a new status of white?

Rick told me, “I didn’t show up for the meeting.”

Once we know what reality is, we can come up with ways to manage it. A key responsibility of a leader is to understand reality and then marshal the best minds around them to develop a plan to create a vision and path to a new reality. That can certainly be easy to talk about and much more challenging to execute. Let’s face it: political waters are full of sharks and shipwrecks.

But painting the ship white and calling it seaworthy when the hull is breached, hoping that enough bailing will keep us afloat, is a recipe for project disaster.

P.S. Our keynote Lipstick on a Pig: How Illusion Leads to Crisis goes into these ideas more fully can help you and your organization improve your ability to deliver projects successfully.

{ 1 comment }

← Previous Entries