“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away,” said the French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
In our age of always-on distractions, being bombarded with messages, it’s often hard to know what to do next. Bumpy journey to the destination of ‘insightful management’ is helped along by realising in-person communication is a lot more than simply words.
Mindfulness, just being present, being able to be clear and simple, and just plain 80/20 productive are skills to continually polish.
Face-to-face communication is much more than the words we say. Imagine you are making a make-or-break presentation to your colleagues. Your future career prospects are in the balance.
Research by Mehrabian and Ferris published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology in 1967 reported that 55 percent of the impact of communication is determined by your body language, 38 percent your tone of voice, and only 7percent by the content, the words you use.
In our age of Zoom, Teams and Google Meet video calls, this helps to explain why you really can’t replace just being there, face-to-face communication.
Much of body language is a person’s facial expression. You can just look into a person’s eyes to see the impact of your presentation. And, with the awareness, the feedback that perhaps you are not getting through, fine-tune the approach.
Two – Free beer tomorrow and the value of being present
In a bar in Nairobi’s Westlands district is a sign that says ‘Free beer tomorrow’. Excitement about the prospect of a cool WhiteCap gratis is misplaced. And, that’s a clue, tomorrow never comes, all we have is the present, yet we often don’t live in the present.
We worry about what we should have done, with our grey cells constantly nervously flitting into the future, trying to predict what will happen next.
Helps to be in the present. “As humans, we live only in the moment, in the here and now. So we must train our mind to be present in this very instant” writes Shunmyo Masuno. The Buddhist monk gives the example of breathing: inhale and exhale.
When we inhale we are in the present, but when we exhale we are already in the past. Looking at it another way, when you read the first word of this article, that was you of the past. And, when you read on, that will be the you of the future.
Is this focus on mindfulness really important, or is it just fluff, a waste of time?
Bain & Company, a firm of management consultants in a survey of 2,000 employees, found that among 33 leadership traits — including creating compelling objectives, expressing ideas clearly, and being receptive to input — the ability to be mindfully present (also called centeredness) is the most essential of all.
“Research also suggests that there’s a direct correlation between leaders’ mindfulness and the well-being and performance of their people. In other words, the more a leader is present with their people, the better they will perform” write Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter.
Dominic Barton, the Canadian former global managing director of McKinsey & Company stresses the importance of just being present.
“When I’m with people during the day, I’m doing my best to be focused, I’m present with them. Part of this is because I get energy from being with people. But the other part is because if you’re not focused, if you’re not present, it’s discouraging to the other people. They lose motivation. If you’re not present, I think you may as well not have the meeting. It can sometimes be difficult to do, but it’s always important” says Barton.
Being mindful, being present is an essential management skill. It takes discipline not to be distracted by the mental chatter in your head. The staff member you are with does not know what you were dealing with an hour ago, or what you are worried about might happen next month.
And, they should not have to. It’s up to you to have the ability to stay focussed, to stay present, just listening, to be aware of what the staff member is communicating. Often people just want to know they have been heard.
Three -- If you can't explain it simply enough
Managers are what they do, not what they say they will do. In this doing -- clear simple communication is essential. ‘Jesus wept’ is thought to be the most evocative verse in the Bible. Ever read something filled with all the ‘flavour of the month’ business jargon and just be more confused?
Simplicity rules. “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough” said Albert Einstein . Cutting through the clutter and getting to the heart of the matter is a skill that is developed with time. Read ‘The Old Man and The Sea’ by Ernest Hemingway.
The Nobel prize winner for literature -- who spent time in Kenya -- was a master of saying a lot in a few words.
Four -- Being productive
Having the ability to focus on the leverage point critical tasks is an art. Why is it that some managers are more productive than others? Some variant of the 80/20 rule likely applies in your workplace. Is the great majority of the work carried on the shoulders of a smaller group?
Donald Trump in his book The Art of the Deal wrote about a property manager who could get more done in a morning than most others would accomplish in a few weeks. Focus is key, select those tasks on your ‘to do’ list that are going make the biggest difference. And, don’t fall prey to ‘things falling through the cracks’. Make sure nothing is forgotten, delegating those other tasks, ensuring they get addressed.
Strange thing is, all we have is the present. Can you ever escape the present moment? The paradox is that being effective may have less to do with adding more ‘bells and whistles’. And, everything to do with creating a business model of elegant simplicity, with nothing left to take away.
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