Welcome all

Posted on August 30, 2010 by The McGhee Team

If you are here, it may be that you are searching for solutions to common challenges that executives and their organizations face: too many e-mails, ineffective meetings, no clear methodology for creating and cascading goals, lack of accountability, reactive culture, difficulty prioritizing, work/life balance issues, etc.

In this blog, our consultants share some of the challenges that they’ve seen clients come up against and offer solutions. The goal of the McGhee blog is to stimulate your thought process and offer you advice for getting what you want, both professionally and personally. 

Each month we’ll dive into the lives of executives and learn strategies of highly-effective leaders with expert advice from Executive Consultant and Partner, John Wittry. We’ll also explore the challenges that independent contributors and senior managers face with advice from Jennifer Wilmonth, Senior Consultant. As our online community begins to grow, we’ll feature other McGhee consultants, clients, industry experts, and thought leaders of today. 

We encourage you to share with us your opinions, best practices, and experiences.

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Do you know where you and/or your organization are going?

Posted on August 30, 2010 by John Wittry

As an introduction to the blog each month, I’ll set up and answer a question or series of questions to address the basic challenges us professionals face every day in reaching our goals and offer solutions for how to overcome them.

Do you know where you and/or your organization are going?

It surprises me how few individuals and/or organizations have a clear understanding of what they want to accomplish in the next one to five years. Don’t get me wrong, most organizations have a goal-setting process, but those goals are often written only to be placed into a file folder and dusted off once or twice a year; typically as part of the Human Resources evaluation process.

In my experience, highly effective people/organizations are very clear about their objectives, and these objectives are highly measurable. Where applicable, the objectives cascade into the organization so that, from the board room to the individual contributor, the Mission Statement is being worked on.

But that isn’t enough.

If it were enough to just determine what you wanted to HAVE, creating a strategic team/individual plan wouldn’t be that complicated. Unfortunately, human behavior often gets in the way of us achieving our stated HAVE.

There is a simple concept that highly effective people continually practice in order to master. It’s difficult to know whom to credit for this concept, which is expressed in myriad of different ways and in different writings/trainings, etc.

BE → DO → HAVE

Establishing a strategic team/individual plan is an exercise in determining what we want to HAVE. Too many times we then move in to identifying what we need to do in order to access what we want to HAVE. The issues arise in how we are BEING, which dictates what we DO and thus what we will HAVE.

Don’t go. Let me explain and provide a simple example of how this plays out.

Let’s use an example of my desire to have a great relationship with my wife.

HAVE – deep meaningful relationship with wife

In this case, if I take the normal approach to this with my wife of 25 years, I move into what I need to DO in order to accomplish this.

DO – buy flowers, take her out to dinner, do the dishes, take out the garbage (umm, not things I really enjoy doing by the way – just being authentic here.)

Without an understanding of this concept, I pay no conscious attention to my way of BEING.

BE – cheap (the flowers are just going to die; what a waste.), resentful (I didn’t make these dirty dishes, I’ve been traveling for work for three weeks straight, she’s just sitting there reading, etc.), spiteful (she better see how much I love her by walking through two feet of snow to get the garbage to the sidewalk; when is she going to get up and help me shovel?)

Because of my thought process and way of BEING, what I actually HAVE might just be a little different than what I had hoped for.

HAVE – a wife who clearly sees that I am trying to manipulate her in order to get what I want and therefore holds back

If I can be conscious of my way of BEING and choose to BE loving, kind, patient and accepting then the things I DO and the way in which I do them generate a more positive result.

I get that this is a very personal example. Here is a recent client example:

A senior executive I worked with was frustrated with the lack of results and timeliness from her team, which created negative patterns of how she worked with those around her.

Old pattern:
BE – agitated, frustrated, impatient
DO – harass her team, send e-mails pushing them to move faster, pull things out of their hands and take over projects and activities, etc.
HAVE – disempowered team (kids) that stopped making decisions and avoided risks, discouraged and unmotivated team, poor results

Once this executive was able to see that her way of BEING was generating her results, she was able to choose how she was going to BE in order to DO different things to HAVE a different outcome. This created a new pattern of working.

New pattern:
BE – accepting (different than resigned), patient, encouraging, empowering
DO – clearly communicate about results and timeframes, hold accountability meetings to review status and course correct, generate empowering conversations to drive sense of urgency and need for results
HAVE – timely and effective results

Play around with the BE → DO → HAVE concept. Think of a professional example and a personal example from your life and see what you come up with. I’d love to hear from you about some of your experiences.

Next month, we will discuss the need for accountability. How are you going to hold yourself and the organization accountable to their objectives?

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Write E-Mails that Get Noticed

Posted on August 30, 2010 by The McGhee Team

We all want people to read and act on the e-mail messages we send them. But the fact is we don’t always send messages that support effective responses.

Two important aspects of e-mail messages that are often overlooked are how they read and how they look. Composition and formatting can make all the difference to how recipients respond to e-mail message.

Easy-to-read, well-written messages help the reader stay focused on the content of the e-mail instead of being distracted by poor structure, grammar, or spelling.

Appropriate formatting draws attention to who needs to do what, highlights critical information, and reduces eyestrain that can result from reading tightly condensed text.

You can make your e-mail messages more useful and easier to read by keeping the following key points in mind.

Keep paragraphs short – Paragraphs should be no more than five or six lines long. If you get right to the point, you’re more likely to keep the reader’s attention and get the results you want.

Watch font size – Avoid fonts that are smaller than 10 points or larger than 12 points (except in headlines or for embeded details). For many readers, small type makes reading difficult. On the other hand, over-sized type increases the reader’s need to scroll in order to read long e-mail messages and can make your message look less professional.

Use “white space” – Asking a reader to wade through line after line of text is a quick way to get your message closed back into the inbox — or worse, deleted. Use white space — empty space on the screen — to separate paragraphs and areas of detail.

Use boldface type or underlining for emphasis – Using differentiated type face will draw the reader’s eye to the most important aspects of the e-mail.

Use bullets and tables – Another way to get the appropriate attention from your readers is to use bullets and tables to call attention to particular elements of the e-mail message, such as key points and action items. This will increase the likelihood of your reader understanding the content and knowing what action to take.

Be concise – No doubt you’ve received e-mail messages that drag on and on, leaving you wondering what the point is. When writing your messages, make your point in as few words as possible, and pay attention to sentence structure to avoide run-on sentences.

Avoid jargon – We are often not aware of how frequently we use jargon and acronyms that are familiar to us but foreign to others. Unless you know that your audience fully understands the verbiage, avoid jargon and acronyms.

Use the spelling checker – While using the spelling checker tool is not a substitute for careful editing, running a spelling checker on all of your correspondence is useful. Correct spelling and grammar help the reader focus on the content rather than on your mistakes. In addition to using the spelling checker, be sure to proofread your correspondence before sending it.

Include a signature line – When a recipient needs to contact you after receiving your e-mail message, the first place they look for your contact information is in the signature line at the end of your message. E-mail message signatures should display complete contact data, including name, title, phone numbers, organization, and website address.

Read one last time – Before sending your message, read it one last time. Take a moment to verify that your message is easy to read and understand. Make sure that your goal has been conveyed concisely and effectively and is likely to prompt the appropriate actions. We’ve all sent e-mail messages that we regretted sending and wished, “Why didn’t I read it one more time?” Make that “one more time” part of your e-mail discipline.

E-mail will continue to be a primary form of communication in our lives. The more attention we give to the simple details of writing e-mail messages, the better our communication with others will be.

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