Tracey Hirsch - Communicating for Change
AD ep 7 - Tracey Hirsch - Communicating for Change -0410AD
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[00:00:00] We're all familiar with Deep Horizon that blew up in the Gulf of Mexico. Spilled 3 million barrels of oil. 11 people lost their lives cost BP about $20 billion with all their suits that happened. Because a poorly worded email wasn't acted on by the person who read it.
The world is changing. For most human beings, change is uncomfortable and challenging to address. Whether you are a startup working on agile processes or a mature organization, navigating change within existing complex structures, the mindset and skills to adapt has never been more vital. The team from the strategy table want to help the wider world understand the need and approach to meaningful and impactful change management, helping organizations navigate disruption and make change accessible to [00:01:00] everyone.
This is Accessible disruption.
Welcome to the Strategy Table and Accessible Disruption podcast. I'm Tahira Endean, co-founder, and I'm here with Ryan Hill. One of our other co-founders missing today, of course, is Anthony Vade. We'll catch him on another episode. And we have a really special guest with us today. Well, really special to me because Tracey Hirsch and I have known each other for a couple of decades actually, since Tracey was in a former lifetime for both of us.
One of my clients, and of course we've evolved in our careers as we've gone on and we, what we've found is that we have a lot of alignment around where we've. Ended up, not surprisingly so Tracey Hirsch, you, your company is amplifying effect. And I'm gonna just say what it says [00:02:00] about you here because I think it's fantastic, which is you teach leaders and teams how to drive organizational success through exceptional communication.
And you also say every company faces losses due to poor communication. It's a universal problem. More technology won't solve learning will. So let's talk about what you are teaching people. Thanks, Tahira and Hello Ryan. So I worked in communications my entire life. I was educated in it. Then I had my career in it.
I was always in the internal space. So that's the communication between a company and its employees. That's that's the place that I played. That's where I put my energy, and I came to learn that the benefits to an organization of exceptional communication are many. The other side of that is if you don't have good communication, things go wrong all the time.
[00:03:00] And I'm not talking here about the big C communication stuff, big C, meaning your internet overall or a big culture change program. I'm talking about day-to-day communication that happens between humans. So in these last few years when I've been thinking about work, I think about I want to teach people in an organization to do what I know how to do.
Which is how to communicate through your fingertips. Because what we have now are organizations that are rife with miscommunication. The the numbers are staggering. The research has borne that out. There's one survey or research piece of Grammarly has been sponsoring for a few years called the State of Business Communication, and the bottom line of that is in the us miscommunication and poor communication within a company.
Is costing US businesses $1.6 trillion every year. So if we wanna take that [00:04:00] into Canadian terms, right? It's a huge number. And so in Canadian terms, we're talking 150 to $200 billion a year being lost because of poor communication. What's disappointing to me and why I say in my bio that technology is not gonna solve this problem is because in the Grammarly research, their solutions for this ongoing problem is more technology.
But the fact is technology is part of what got us into this situation in the first place. So communication is part of everybody's job now. If you're a knowledge worker, if you spend most of your time sitting in front of a computer and you're not doing, say, repetitive tasks or some kind of manual labor, you're a knowledge worker and based on the research that says that you are losing one day a week dealing with the impact of miscommunication.
Woo. So 20%, any business leader I talk to, I say 20% burned every single week. When you say. [00:05:00] Miscommunication. So what, what are some of examples of miscommunication that are endemic to what we're doing? Well, it's things like, I'll send Tracey an email about an event that we're doing, but maybe I'm not that careful about what I'm saying.
I'm not really taking into account Tracey is my, my event manager. She's leading it. I'm, I'm producing it internally. You're my, my external person who's doing that, and I'm only sending you part of the information. Mm, you don't know that, right? I'm only sending you a thing. Oh, I should tell her about this today.
And I'm not thinking about ramifications or ripple effects or I, so then you go down the line and I'll be like, why are you recommending we do this? Mm, you are not taking account A, B, and C and you'll be, well, Tracey, you never told me that stuff. So now we're gonna spend a lot of time fixing that mistake.
Or you request for someone in your company to send you at least a data point. So that person sends you [00:06:00] a big Excel spreadsheet that's got 30 tabs and hundreds of lines of data, and they say, eh, if you go to tab 16 and you look around F 22, you're gonna find what you need. So, number one, not helpful. And that might not even be the data that I need.
Maybe I needed to have a conversation to see the data because they might interpret what I asked for in a way that actually wasn't what I wanted. Again, more time gets wasted. How many big problems that happen are a result? You know, when they do the postmortem, they go, yeah, that was communication problem.
It's always a communication problem. So Ryan, as we know, he comes at everything with a, you know, a different perspective because he is, he is coming at us from a working in the military perspective. So Ryan, do you see this kind of miscommunication happening in your world as well? Absolutely. And I think one of the things that I'd be curious about, Tracey, is if you could.
Tell me if you're differentiating between miscommunicating [00:07:00] and inefficiently communicating, or if those are kind of one and the same from your perspective. From my perspective, they're one and the same because I, I look at all of this communication from the perspective of I have an objective. There's an audience out there that I have to reach, so my objective gets met.
If I don't meet. My audience's needs to get them to give, you know, to give me the yes I want or the information I want, or to take the action I want them to take. It doesn't matter if I was inefficient or if it was poor, poorly done. The impact is the same. So I, so I don't differentiate, I think from a process perspective, there's probably a conversation to be had around that in efficient versus poor.
But from where I sit in the, the position that I'm taking, I don't differentiate that poor communication is poor communication. Uh, actually, so US military example. I found this yesterday. I can't remember what the topic was, but it, it was some instruction that the military sent to a bunch of their members 'cause they wanted them to do [00:08:00] something and there was a poorly crafted set of instructions.
I. And then there was a well-crafted set of instructions, and the people who received the well-crafted set of instructions were twice, were twice as likely to actually do the thing. That makes sense. Yeah. It goes around How intentional are you being when you are putting this communication out to the world or to your audience?
How much thought have you put into what your audience needs? To do what you want them to do. That is an excellent point to, we're gonna start from there, and we're gonna say at the strategy table, what we're really focused on is change management and how we can support people through change management.
But coming in as an external resource, what ultimately we're doing is we are there to support leadership, taking their team through a change, and understanding that quite often that is going to be more effective when it's done with an external resource. Because sometimes you just need to have different people to [00:09:00] come in and show you different ways of doing things and to help your team find in themselves the tools to carry through on the requirements.
Leadership has for whether it's a process change or a, a change in operational change of some sort, but. That to me now becomes something where communicating becomes very important. I'm sure that you've been through similar situations. What would be some of the most important things for the clients to be thinking about as they start that process of change?
Yeah. Communication and change. They, they go hand in glove. You can have a brilliant change plan, you know, process, map, and understanding about where we wanna get from where we are now to where we wanna get there. And that can all be mapped out brilliantly, but ultimately you need the humans to do the things and how do you get the humans to do the things?
That's [00:10:00] through communication. So, yes, I've been through and I've led the communication for lots of change programs. You know, you know, the negative ones, the hard ones, the layoffs, the industry crises, culture change. But I've, I've got my, my perspective on change communication. I, I have six important guideposts that, that I operate from.
The first two are the most important. So the first one is. As an organization establish trust and confidence when times are good. So you will be heard when times are bad. Mm-hmm. If your company doesn't trust you, you can have a great change plan, but it doesn't matter what you say they want, people will not do it.
The second one, which is my personal favorite treat, grownups like adults. Hmm. So often in change programs, leaders start to suddenly infantalize, I. The people on their [00:11:00] team, because they're not gonna like it. They're gonna whine, they're gonna complain. There's productivity is going to diminish. People are just gonna be chatting amongst themselves, so I don't wanna tell them anything.
So suddenly these people who you have hired, because they have the maturity and the skillset and the sense of responsibility to do the job that you were hired them to do, and they do it. Comp, you know? Mm-hmm. Competently, because you continue to pay them to do it. Suddenly they become children. And I've seen it over and over again where I will come in and say, you have to tell people what's going on.
Oh. But we're afraid to tell people what's going on. Plus no one wants to be the bearer or bad news, right? So let's just not tell them. But when you tell people, of course people are going to stop if it's a negative kind of change. They're not gonna just take it in stride. They're gonna have feelings about it.
They're gonna need to process it. They're gonna need to talk about it. But ultimately, the vast [00:12:00] majority, I don't know the number, but the vast majority of people, they, they absorb, they connect, they, they get their questions answered and then they carry on. So let's treat adults like grownups. I could talk about that all day.
Number three, lead with empathy. You must invite conversation and dialogue. That's how people process it. Use the right channel for the right message. You know, you're not gonna lay off everybody by a text message. Know how you use your channels and, and use them appropriately. You know, the time to get a lot of good dialogue is not when the CEO is in front of a hundred people.
You know, smaller groups, trusted groups, and then establish boundaries and deadlines also important when, when companies leaders are feeling nervous about. Imposing a change, then sometimes they will not be as firm around deadlines and boundaries, but those are allowed 'cause you are ultimately running some kind of business.
So those are my six. So I got sidetracked with treat grownups [00:13:00] like adults, but established trust and confidence when times are good. So you'll. Be heard when things are tough. Yeah. Treat grownups like adults, lead with empathy. Invite conversation and dialogue. Use the right channel for the right message.
Establish boundaries and deadlines and stick to them. So we're saying that when we're gonna communicate change, we need to communicate it clearly with concise deadlines and that we need to stick to those deadlines to keep this trust that has been established. Does that seem fair? Yes. Could you? Well, and the other side of that coin is when leadership says, you know, we've got this big burning platform, this big problem, this is how we're gonna solve it.
These are our deadlines. These are what's all, what are your obligations, your various teams and functions and business lines. And everybody hunker's down and everybody, you know, works really hard to meet these deadlines. And then the deadlines come and go. Mm. And leadership is like. Yeah, we've decided to push that off six months.
That is a very [00:14:00] disheartening experience for, for employees that builds a lot of mistrust. Or if the deadlines change, tell people, right. Don't, don't keep stringing people along and go, well, you know, we really wanna get this work done anyway, so let's just not tell people that the deadline has changed. So let's not tell people that we've kicked this down the road to our next, next fiscal year.
And again, you build mistrust in that way and. Implementing any kind of change is just going to get harder because then people will say, well, I'm not doing that. Last time we did that, it ended up amounting to nothing. So I'm not gonna work my weekends and I'm not gonna put this other work aside to do this.
And I think it's not even working extra time. Sometimes you do have to make choices and prioritize things and when those priorities. Particularly in a change management management situation become fuzzy, unclear, and end up feeling a bit mis misrepresented than your ability to get that change actually transitioned is gonna become almost impossible.
[00:15:00] So something to be avoided. And I think what you said about treating them like grownups, you know, there's often a feeling of, oh, they won't understand that priorities have shifted well. It's a job, so, mm-hmm. But there is nothing worse than doing a job when there's not a certain level of transparency in the process.
Especially because these days change is constant. You know, it's the reading I've been done. I'll be interested in what you guys have to say on this because I've not, not been certified in any, you know, Prosci or ad car or those change management methodologies. I. But the reading I have been doing on them lately has suggested, and that change management as a function that what did work no longer works because the, the parameters around these methodologies was we have business as usual, BAU, then we have this finite period of change, and then we [00:16:00] return to BAU.
Mm, but that's no longer. Talk about that for just a moment then. Yes. Because I think that's something that, it's something that I think sets us apart and that's kind of, you're hitting on the, one of the core issues that we identified and we decided that we wanted to create the strategy table, and it's this idea that these large scale consultancies that conduct change management, facilitation or or consultation, they.
Come up with their methodology or their recipe, and then they try to apply it to everybody the same. And that can be effective for a small initiative or a very deliberate change. But more often than not, when we're confronted with a change, it's, it's a disruption. It's not something that we necessarily set out to do.
Right off the bat, we are encountering new variables, new, new changes to our environment, to our system. Right? I mean, a great example. I mean, we can look at just how volatile the [00:17:00] political climate can be and what that can do to an industry. I. If, if the political climate shifts and the economy follows suit, it can throw an entire wrench into what was otherwise a very well executed five year plan.
And you're at year two and a half, and now everything that you had taken for granted or assumed was fact is is lost. So how do you move forward through a change that you don't have that kind of control over? You're not initiating the change, but you have to get through it and you have to be effective.
How do you apply a recipe on something that. Is unpredictable. Mm-hmm. And that's what we wanna get to is the idea that you can go through these changes and you can regain control and you can make lemonade out of lemons. But if you're gonna enter it with one fixed recipe, you're probably not gonna be as successful as you could be.
And that gets to the communication issue. How do we communicate with clients, with, with our organizations, not only what the vision is, but also what are the, what are the obstacles, what. What is the driver, [00:18:00] you know? And I think that's gonna be very different every time. Yeah, I totally agree. Because the driver in lots of cases, most cases, has to do with what is your organization's goals?
What's your vision? Why are you there? What are you doing? You know, why do you exist at all? Why do people like working for you? What, what are those goals? What is, what's your reason for existing and what's your reason for doing the work you're doing? Right now versus a year from now, and there are pillars or vision statements or mission statements, or, you know, strategic objectives that are guiding those things.
Mm-hmm. So like you say, so something shows up. You know, economically or politically or, you know, whatever that might be, and you go, oh, well, our pillar of innovation, because of these changes, our funding model has now changed, or our ability to access certain resources has now changed. So if we look at the, through the, [00:19:00] through the lens of that pillar around innovation.
So our innovation in our organization is going to be impacted because of things that we didn't foresee and didn't expect. And so then that can be become the basis of the conversation, uh, and it relates it directly back to that company. But you're right, Ryan, that's not gonna be the same thing in another company.
You know, the, the economic conditions that have suddenly changed, those are the same, but how they affect an individual company and how a company responds to that is unique to that company based on what are their driving forces to today. Let's take this opportunity to take a short break now and hear from some of our sponsors.
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Our world is changing. For most human beings, change is uncomfortable and challenging to address. Uh, keeping up in a competitive business environment requires confidence in your team's. Adaptability. Leaders are expected to lead adoption initiatives, evolve team member skills, and build resilience with intentional change management strategies.
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Can you kind of talk about your perspective as a professional who consults on communication and effective communication? How we can go about communicating the why to people that maybe are not on board or do not see the need for the change? Because I agree with what you said, like if we're not transparent and we're not treating people like adults.
We're not gonna foster the buying that we need. We're gonna build resistance up. But one of the things that holds true across most change initiatives is that there's always gonna be those that don't feel like they need to. You know, whether they take the approach of, if it's not broken, don't fix it. Or they take the approach of like, maybe it's fear, you know, if we change, then am I still gonna be relevant?
You know? Mm-hmm. Uh, how do we best [00:22:00] communicate the why so that we. Build that collective buy-in and that collective understanding. There's tons of books on it, but like about the importance of it. But how do you recommend we go about communicating that across different stakeholders? Well, I think you nailed it when you talked about the the impact on me.
'cause I'm not gonna be resistant to change if I don't think I'm going to be negatively impacted. And so the question becomes, am I losing autonomy? Am I losing responsibility? Am I losing influence? Do I have an opportunity to influence this decision? Who can I talk to about this? And so the why for the company, we need to do this because our revenue has suddenly been cut in half because these things happened.
We're going to have to lay off 20% of our staff and then we're reorganizing those people who remain. And I'm going, I like my job. I've been doing my [00:23:00] job for 10 years. I know my job's not going away. They wanna reorganize me to something else. I'm not interested. I don't wanna do that, even though I recognize like, sure.
A bunch of my colleagues have lost their job companies making less money. But how many times have we seen that where people, the individuals working there kind of don't care? I. They don't care about that big picture stuff. They care about how they are personally impacted. One of the ways that we can give people an opportunity to have that conversation and have that dialogue, that's, that's a really, really important piece.
So here's, here's a little data point that I've discovered recently. It was pretty surprising. The Gallup survey that came out recently. It talked about who people trust the most. The people they trust the most are family. That makes sense. Next down the list, now it's pretty far down the list in terms far in terms of a number, but number two on [00:24:00] that list.
Direct manager second only to their family. And I think that that goes back to, you know when they say that people don't leave companies, they leave their leaders. Exactly. Exactly. And so when there's some kind of a change going on. You as a, as leaders, you need to get to those frontline managers because the role they play is incredibly important and it's incredibly complicated.
So if I'm a frontline manager, and so I'm now privy to the fact that there are these changes coming, maybe my team's gonna be impacted, maybe they're not, but I need to hear the information that's coming to me from. My leadership, then I have a really important role to play in sharing that information with my team and creating that environment where they can ask questions and feel heard and have a dialogue, and maybe I can run that back up the chain, maybe I can't.
But it's more important that you give people that opportunity to speak, and you need to do that for your [00:25:00] frontline managers as well, when it's not a matter of these are your orders. Go go forth and do it. Because again, these are, these are human beings. They have different types of motivations, so you need to give those managers.
You can't just say, this is happening. It's happening on Tuesday. Be prepared to talk to your, your team on Wednesday. You need to give those managers an opportunity to have the conversation to air their fears, their frustrations, their their personal concerns, because most people don't want to go and lay off people, so they would pretty much prefer to avoid it if they could.
But if you give people an opportunity in a safe space, as we say, to say, this really sucks. I really, really hate this. I don't wanna do this, I don't wanna talk to my team. 'cause I don't even think that this should be happening except that it is. And so often the opportunity just to give people a chance to talk about it and process it.
People will feel better about accepting a change that they don't wanna have happen. [00:26:00] But I would say when it comes to change, one of the very, very, very most important audiences to focus on are those frontline managers. 'cause they will make you or break you. They are your secret sauce or your biggest detriment for all the reasons you just said, you know, it's the people closest to them, it's the people they trust, it's the people that you expect to have the answers.
Yeah. And there are ways, and there are ways to, to arm those frontline managers. So as a communications person, if I was, you know, brought in to do the communication planning for a change, a big part of. The work I would do is number one, talking to frontline managers. Find out how, what they think, how this might land for their team.
That can sometimes be surprising. These people know a lot, they know a lot about their teams. They know a lot what about what matters to them. So you can get their input on how do we think this is gonna land? But you also need to, you know, arm them, whether it be with key messages or scripting. Or PowerPoint, whatever you think [00:27:00] might work for, for the task at hand.
Arm these managers with the knowledge and the framework so they can have those conversations with their people and that will help bring about change. That is, it's difficult, you know, difficult change will never be easy. We just need to help people. Go through that change process as easily as we can.
Recognizing that it's typically not easy and it's, it is also inevitable and it is also disruptive, and it is also, whether we like it or not, things will change. That's mm-hmm. The nature of the world that we live in, it's the nature of of most kind of work that's going to happen. So I really appreciate the things that you are doing with people.
And one of the things we've been talking about is values over generations, and we do not disagree with that, but we do have a generational reality in the workplace that [00:28:00] is. Tied to communication in so many ways. One of them being that we have a next and a future generation coming up that are being taught English in a vastly different way than an older generation was taught English or whatever your home language is.
But our home language is English, so we're gonna say English. Mm-hmm. Uh, and how are you seeing that play out with communication? It's such an interesting time. It's such an interesting time. So this generation that is the youngest generation in the workforce, again, there's, there's research around this.
They communicate all the time as part of their job. They're constantly communicating and they have been constantly communicating since the first time they put their fat little baby fingers on a keyboard. They've always been communicating in a way that we never did. As, as part of our day to day, there's less structure around communicating, written communication.
There's [00:29:00] also more opportunity with written communication. It's in this research that I'm thinking of where, and I agree with David Allison around values. I'm learning, reading more about his stuff, and I think he's absolutely spot on. But she says in, again, this, the latest research from Grammarly. When they asked, they divided how many hours do you spend communicating as part of your job?
And they, they cut it by generation. Hmm. So oldest generation baby boomers, 30 hours. So based on a 40 hour work week. Okay. Baby boomers, 25 hours a week. Gen Xers, 30 Gen Y, I think 35, and then the new at the millennials 40. So millennials reported in this research that they communicate constantly as part of their job where, you know, a vast difference in the 25 hours a week.
Just a little over half the time that that baby boomers say the same thing. And I think I, I mean, I don't know this, I'm not an expert, so don't quote me on this. [00:30:00] I think it has to do with how they've come up in the world. If you're used to communicating all the time and being able to connect with people through your technology that you hold in your hand, that doesn't stop just 'cause you started working.
And that's part of why communication is, can be such a, a garbled mess in organizations right now. Too many channels, too much communication, all all coming down the pike. And to me, that's why the kind of teaching that I'm doing, I think is so important because. With all these channels, with the onslaught of communication, people don't understand 'cause they've never been taught that to get anywhere with your written communication requires intention and it requires critical thinking.
It's not just throwing words at each other and the younger generation hasn't learned that, but the older generation hasn't either. That's what I've discovered. Nobody's been taught this and neither have their managers, only people like me who are communication people [00:31:00] who did the, the, you know, we went to school for that.
We learned the stuff and then we practiced it every day for however long we did our profession. That's why I focus my business on teaching people who are not communicators how to do what communicators do, because to try and find some clear error in this very crowded communication environment that we all work in is difficult.
So it takes intention and it takes critical thinking and, and that's what I'm teaching people. It's, you know, it's about how to write, but it's also the thought process that goes into how you write and how you can get what you want out of the situation. So. So if the current response to being a better communicator is, well, you have, pick an AI tool so you can just, you know, run that, you know, yet email that you're not sure about the tone of, you know, through this handy dandy little button and it's going to change the world.
What's happening there?
I'm not gonna rant. I'm not gonna rant. I'm not gonna, so AI is. [00:32:00] Fantastic. For some things, tone is one of them. So if I write something and I'm like, I think I need it to sound a bit more formal, maybe a bit more casual, maybe, whatever, I can run it through eye and it can, it can help with that. If I've written something and it feels too wordy, I want it to be more concise, it can do that for me.
It can tell me what information is important. It can't tell me what context is important. It can't tell me what's important to my audience. It doesn't tell me what the preferred. Way of communicating with this particular audience is, there's so many things it doesn't know that it is, and maybe one day it will, but right now it doesn't.
So if I just say write an email to a prospect, 'cause I wanna, I wanna get a sale, you know, I wanna get the phone call so I can make this sale. And you'll get something super generic that probably won't even sound like you, 'cause it'll sound like generic AI voice and it's not gonna get you where you wanna go 'cause you're gonna sound like everybody else who is [00:33:00] also doing the same thing.
And so, ai, it's, it is not entirely unhelpful, but it, it doesn't have your voice, it doesn't know the information, context and tone that your audience needs. That's the thinking that you have to do. So it might be better as a process tool versus a communication tool. Agree. Yeah, that's a good way to describe it.
Yeah, I think I would agree with that. It's certainly something that we're seeing everywhere that we go. I started teaching again this term, and I had two students who kept using AI in their learning journals, and I was like, excellent. These are so incredibly boring. They both say exactly the same thing with slightly different bullet points, and they think, I don't know.
And yes, the information is correct, but you've learned nothing. Whereas the people who were taking the time to intentionally think about. What they had learned in the last week and processed it into the learning journal, which was the purpose of using a learning journal was their, their learning was much more valuable.
And I think that the same can be said for the [00:34:00] context within anything. The other last thing I wanna really ask you about email communication is the chatty email. Hey, Therese. So hope you had a great weekend. Just wondering about. Don't do that. Don't do that. It's not why? Tell us why we shouldn't be doing that.
Tell you why. Well, I, I have a really bad example. No, it's a good example of a terrible, terrible situation. We're, we're all familiar with Deep Horizon. That blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, spilled 3 million barrels of oil. 11 people lost their lives cost BP about $20 billion with all their suits. That happened because a poorly worded email wasn't acted on by the person who read it and the email that came from one of the engineers on the, on the platform, and he was in a panic.
There was something going on and he needed this person on the mainland to weigh in on what should happen. But the nature of the problem was kind of buried in the email. Apparently. There was [00:35:00] just a lot of upfront of kind of personal stuff. Things are really tough right now, blah, blah. I'm a panic, you know, whatever it might be.
It wasn't, you know, emergency need this now. It was buried a little bit, and so the person on the mainland said, I'm out for dinner right now. I'll get back to you tomorrow. I have personally struggled with at times, and I'm sure a lot of folks that have been at different levels of leadership throughout their careers have struggled with, and that's striking the balance between clarity and brevity.
Uh, you know, you wanna be direct and clear, but you also wanna make sure that you're not writing a rambling email or adding too many details. And I think that's, that that can be something that's pretty difficult to navigate, at least in my own experience. Does that factor into this at all? Yeah, absolutely.
There's a, a graphic I use when I'm teaching and it's this upside down triangle and it's, you know, the, the truth is we all get too many emails, [00:36:00] so we all want to read as little as possible and no another data point. People spend an average of nine seconds reading an email. Nine, you've got nine seconds, probably five seconds to get people's attention.
So if it's like, Hey Ryan, how's it going? I hope you had a great weekend. The kind of thing that would happen if we were working in the same office and we were, you know, had a face to face you can spend. You know, a minute talking about stuff, but an email is completely different and we shouldn't mistake an email for a conversation.
My favorite way to start an email, and it can feel awkward, but it's my favorite way now to start an email, is, you know, hi Ryan. I'm writing to you today because I need your input on this thing. I'm hoping we can have a meeting, whatever it might be. So right away, Ryan opens the email and you go, oh. Tracey is emailing me today because X and then it's my job [00:37:00] to to decide what information and context do you need, Ryan, so that you can meet my objective for a phone call or a meeting or information or whatever my objective was.
And that onus is on me because I'm the one writing it. It's all I, it's all I can control. But there's a big difference between what you need and what I wanna say. And that's the thing where people get caught up. I. Oh, I wanna tell him this, and I wanna tell him this, and I wanna tell him this. I wanna give Ryan all the background about why I want the meeting.
I want to tell him what I will do with the information that I get from the meeting. I wanna tell him all this stuff in the email. So then he's got full information. But the fact is you've probably stopped reading at that point. So I would say, you know, hi Ryan, I'm writing to you today because I wanna get a meeting around X, y, z one liner.
When can we get together? So you have to remember that you have to front load your emails all the time, say the most important [00:38:00] stuff in those first two sentences, and then ask yourself if the other information I'm providing is it need to know, does my audience need to know this, this context and this information?
Or is it relevant but maybe not necessary for them to make the decision? To give me whatever my objective is, and that's the conversation you have to have with themsel yourself. Is it, if it's vitally important information context, include it if it's relevant, but not vitally important. Ask yourself if you should include it at all.
That often goes to the audience. Some people like the added information, some people don't. So get to know your audience and then you'll know, and you know, the nice to know stuff shouldn't be there at all. The, Hey, I, I heard your son, you know, how does he like his new skateboard? You know, don't put that there.
That's, that's for face-to-face, that's not for business emails. So that's that critical thinking. That's the burden of the person writing. Perfect. Yeah, that makes total sense. Well, Tracey, thank you so much. This has [00:39:00] been fantastic to have you on our Accessible Disruption podcast and we are so grateful for what you've shared with our audience today.
We are. Excited that you are available for people who need help in working with their teams to craft the best communication for internal and external use. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation to be here and I, I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you, Tracey. Thanks, Ryan. Accessible Disruption is written and spoken by Taira and Dean, Ryan Hill and Anthony.
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