Reframe Your Communication
Mike Ferguson, Fresh Ground Consulting
The other day my daughters were playing with a basketball. My seven year old daughter was trying to teach her five year old sister how to catch the ball. After explaining several times how to reach out and wait for the ball and then capture it between her hands, she finally delivered the following instructions: “Act like you’re petting a cow.”
It’s was a funny, seemingly off-the-wall comment. Perhaps because she is my daughter, I understood immediately what she meant. When I pet our dog, I almost always reach out with two hands to pet and scratch the area stretching from behind her jaw to up behind her ears. Consequently, both of my daughters also pet the dog this way.
If we were to pet a cow in this manner, our arms would have to be further apart, about as wide as a basketball, as we reached out with hands open wide.
Good leaders are good communicators and the best communicators learn to stay on message while sometimes changing their words. A stump speech repeated verbatim from town to town might be fine for a political candidate, but it won’t work inside your company. Your team will stop listening, or worse, resent you for thinking they were not listening the first five times you said it. At the same time, it’s your job to keep everyone focused, on task, and moving forward.
It is your job to remind your team who you are as a company and how you work. I think it is also your job to think of new ways to say it. At FGC, we help clients reframe their messaging and their story all the time. It is just as important to reframe the internal, even casual, messages and training. The most effective reframe in a company can come from a new turn of phrase from a manger who is trying to get a point across for the umpteenth time. And suddenly, his team can hear him again.
You know, now that I think about it, it’s a little like petting a cow…