Don't stalk your co-worker. Make an appointment or call instead.

When e-mail isn't fast enough and you really need to see a business contact in person, it is a very good idea to make an appointment.

Before you do something you'll regret, pick up the phone. Phone calls can connect the way they always have, just as we hope that, ideally, e-mails do....and will.

Persevere politely.

If you need information, keep trying to take the courteous route.  If you don't, you may fall prey to one of the greatest temptations that happens when we are driven by personal ambitions to obtain answers we need to what we consider very pressing questions. 

(Unfortunately, the questions that most often feel urgent to us may not seem as urgent to others.  Additionally, it has been my experience that people who frequently have urgent questions are really urgently just seeking some kind of reassurance that he or she is liked. Truly.)  This unfortunate need for attention and how it is expressed becomes especially awkward when you decide to follow your colleague into the bathroom and ask your pressing question while he/she is otherwise engaged.  Even when you loiter politely by the towel rack or hot air dryer that stance is not a wise choice or allows for sufficient space to help someone to feel at ease who is shocked and aware that you are waiting, waiting, stalking, stalking.  (That mumbling you hear from the other side of the stall door is that person calling home or the security patrol, and they are calling about you.  Yes, you.)

Second to this choice in bad judgment of following someone into the restroom is what you consider the more polite choice of waiting outside the restroom to waylay the person on his/her way some place else, like a scheduled appointment for which he/she is focusing his/her thoughts in order to be ready for the meeting. 

Now, it's true the person you have stalked to the restroom might greet you cordially upon exiting, but he/she most likely will have grown cold inside after realizing you have been waiting there, and smile only with the coldest of intentions right after he/she has decided that the flight/fight response triggered by the adrenaline rush of being startled and stalked by you has abated, along with her/his powers of concentration about the forthcoming meeting.

To avoid receiving a cold and deadly smile from someone who now sees you not as a person with a problem but who is one, remember that Queen Elizabeth was once accosted inside her toilette and she had the interloper's head chopped off. 

One can't resort to such extremes in the workplace when one is stalked by people who frequently have emergencies that others have to handle for them or urgently need reassurances that he/she is liked.  One can only say, no, to whatever favor you might urgently have wanted to ask and later post on one's blog:  If something bad ever happens to me, go ask this stalker where he/she was when it happened.

The next time you have pressing issues at work, remember to respect the laws of courtesy and you will have a much stronger chance of receiving a favorable response to whatever urgent issue has driven you to become, instead of a co-worker, temporarily, a stalker.

How to Lose a Sale: Give your philosophy of life instead of answering questions about the product

Grading mid-terms I often write the words "non-responsive to the question" in the margin.  It isn't that the student doesn't know the answer; rather, sometimes the student will write something to justify his/her opinion about the noun located inside the question rather than respond to the question as a whole.

Here's an example:  What are the three main concepts that drive the production of all workplace documents?
The correct answer begins with naming these three concepts:  reader, purpose and occasion.

Instead, a student might begin by writing, "I think emails are important because everyone uses them and format is important because everyone needs to know formats, and I believe that proofreading really counts!"

The three nouns inside that response are good choices to mention in a business writing class but not the answer to the question: they exist to prove that you have picked up some words about writing but you have missed the big picture and settled on details that fit in the margins of the discussion.

Why this matters is because most people going into the workplace will eventually have a product to represent, and not knowing how to answer a direct question directly often allows you to maintain a behavior of not answering the questions that a prospective client or customer might ask. 

Here's an example:  A prospective client asks a fledgling company web-page designer for a rate card, time frame for production and simultaneously provides all of the copy that will need to be on the web page. 

The web page designer, who needs to close the sale before proving himself, replies with a form, saying:  "Fill this out." And then offers a philosophy of doing business with the added claim, "We really believe in ourselves."

No sale.
No sale.
No sale.

That response is about justifying one's self rather than meeting a client's needs.  That void of meeting a prospective client's needs is quite similar to not being able to answer a direct question on a mid-term exam.

If you are working your way through college on your way to working in the non-academic world, pay attention to the words "non-responsive to the question."  There's a fair chance that you will continue that behavior in the workplace where the price paid isn't a poor grade on a test but less money in the profit margin.

Have a great day!

Your day, like mine, is flooded with sentences like "Have a good one!"

We mean it.  But, sentences flung over our shoulders or used as an exiting strategy because saying good-bye when you are leaving feels so final, can also lose their significance.  Further, they can camouflage sentences that look like them in structure but still have real, intentional power.

In short, there are many sentences that look and even sound alike, but they have a different purpose and different levels of powers.

Parting shots:  Have a good day.  Take care!   These are breezy sentences that aid us in transitioning from one place or person to the next.  They don't mean very much in the scheme of human relationships.  And, they have no intrinsic wisdom.

Slogans:  Eat more chikin.  You can do it, we can help.  Have it your way. 
Companies try to sell the spirit of their identity in slogans that they hope we will repeat and associate with them.  They are memory builders.  Oddly, because they sound and look like other types of sentences, cliches, for example, they rarely have power, except for a short while when they exist as buzz phrases or tongue twisters. 

Mantras:  I can do it.  I can do it.  Just do it.  Nike's slogan is also a mantra.  These sentences are meant to be motivational, and for people who believe in the power of talking yourself into a more successful way of life, they have meaning for the people speaking.  But one person's mantra cannot be another person's mantra in the same way that your personal epiphanic moments can't translate into other people's places of catalytic change.

Cliches:  The early bird gets the worm.  A stitch in time saves nine.  Watch your p's and q's.
Often cliches are practical portions of wisdom reduced to a memorable nugget. They are meant to help keep you on the straight and narrow, working for success, while keeping your hands clean and your nose to the grindstone.  Get the idea?  They resemble the kind of advice your mother gave you:  Always say thank you, obey the speed limit and if you don't have anything good to say about someone else, don't say anything.
Cliches help us to feel safe because they are so familiar, but they don't necessarily have motivational power in them.

Proverbs:  Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit.

Here you have one of many proverbs from the Bible that alerts you to the power of language and how to use it.  The meaning is not readily clear, and you have to live with the idea for a while before the fruit of its meaning blossoms in you,  which is the pace of wisdom growing, not the pace of technology or how fast you can type or read.

That's the primary difference between proverbs and other types of sentences that look like them.

I invite you to read through the book of Proverbs and post your own favorite words of wisdom in a comment for others to see.  Chances are they won't know it, and you will be doing them a favor.  It's always a good idea to share wisdom, and sharing proverbs is as simple an act as telling someone to have a good day. The difference is that proverbs can actually help a person to do that.

D is for Deduction

In a culture that thrives on exploring emotion and confessing deep personal needs and believing that lots of appetite for worldly goods justified the consumption of them, we often forget that there is a different way to approach solving problems in the workplace--and beyond.

That approach is called deductive reasoning, and some people do not even know what it is. The reason that word seems foreign is because there is such an emphasis on feelings and personal experience that the discipline of assessing dispassionately is a skill oft forgotten.  For some it doesn't exist.

But whether one uses it regularly or intentionally, deductive reasoning exists anyway.

Deductive reasoning is the ability to place your personal preferences in the background while you assess the pieces of a puzzle you need to solve.

While there is much to be said about trusting your hunches and your intuition like betting on a horse or not getting on an elevator with a shady character who makes the hairs on your neck stand up, when solving workplace issues, deductive reasoning will more likely serve your cause, and consequently, your career best.

The temptation is to believe that inductive reasoning works everywhere all the time.

But it doesn't.

When people at work don't pay for their own coffee and they're supposed to, having a hunch that you know who the secret sippers are won't be worth much if  you accuse someone who is innocent and you're wrong, and you could be wrong.  Even if you're right, if you don't have proof, there's not much else to do after the accusation is made.  Better to install a nanny cam if monitoring the coffee fund matters that much.

And while trespasses against the coffee fund might not be worth the price of a nanny cam, the emphasis on evidence here is worth it.

If you have a point to prove or a case to make, get the evidence. Free the argument from personal bias, hunches and intuition, because when it comes to arguing your position, you can't assume that other people's hunches, biases and intuition will parallel your own.

But others might view the evidence if you present it.

The next time you have a problem to solve at work (or anywhere), check to see if you are operating on instinct or relying upon analysis of the evidence.  If you have the pieces of the puzzle to solve the puzzle with, use them.

They are much more reliable than the hairs on the back of your neck--or that famous gut instinct.

Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

When was the last time you apologized for making a mistake or for being selfish to the point that someone else bore some unpleasant consequences for your thoughtlessness?

It happens all the time in daily life and in the workplace.

The measure of a professional is how well and how truly he/she apologizes for making a mistake or for causing someone else an inconvenience.

The good news is that we all make mistakes and must, sooner or later, apologize to someone.

In this way, we all share the same burden to know how to apologize well--and what it looks and sounds like when someone doesn't mean what the word "Sorry" says.

I read this apology quite often.  It is an all-purpose word that supposedly covers a multitude of infractions.

It means:  I'm sorry I asked you urgently for help, but when you gave it at midnight, I didn't see your response for a week because I forgot to check my e-mail.

It means:  I forgot to do my job and this caused a ripple effect down the hierarchical ladder, a domino effect that created more work and confusion for more than just you:  Sorry.

When there is no definite explanation for what you are apologizing for, chances are you are only paying lip service to what is expected of you.  People know that.  People take note of that.  No one will tell you that people are drawing conclusions about you from the way that you run over them with your personal ambitions, calling over you shoulder "Sorry" that feels to you like enough--but it's not enough for other people to excuse your action, or ideally, to forgive that misdeed.  And that needs to happen.  It needs to happen because people in a workplace environment need to get along with one another, and they can only do that when the scales of justice are in accord:  all the apologies that need to be said have been said.

Reconsider how you feel about apologizing and what you hope to accomplish.  If you are just getting the apology out of the way by saying one word or even a sentence fragment like "sorry about that" know that people who understand what an apology is supposed to accomplish and what a sincere one means also know what a casual, insincere one represents.

It means you aren't sorry at all.

Navigation is not about the writer; it's about the reader.

The successful construction of workplace documents rests upon fulfilling the purpose with regard and respect for the reader and the occasion when the reader will encounter the document.

But once the document is ready, another event must happen:  the reader must be able to navigate the document--that is, use it easily.

For this to happen, there should have always been a "reader first" attitude at work in the writer or builder of the document so that not only will the logic move in concert with the reader's mind but the eyes of the reader will easily interpret the visual cues set up by the writer.

These cues or signals include every symbol on the page--from the words chosen to planting of the art work that leads the eye to the headings and subheadings that keep pointing like arrows:  this way next.

Here you go.

Turn here.

Stop.

Think.

Now, let's move on.

For providing navigational cues for the reader is a step not unlike providing directions to a destination.

Some people are better map followers--better readers--than others.  For those who are word and symbol challenged, respect for design that results in greater ease of use by readers is key to leaving that reader with the impression:  That was not only well written, it was easy to use.

Think about all elements of design when you are planning your next workplace document.  Make sure your ideas are clear. But also make sure that your reader doesn't have to figure out your lay-out design strategy.

The more you develop a "you first" attitude toward the reader, the more successful your workplace document will be. 

Ethical Writing

Persuasive writing often gains its power to move others because of a moral imperative that we loosely associate with positive moral values.

Because language has this potential power, people who use it well have a responsibility to work from an ethical system.

There are many.

Using language authentically is part of each one.

Using facts honorably is another aspect of ethical writing.

But there are times when you must argue a position, and will rely upon a strategy of presenting your argument that falls into three broad-based categories:   rules-based writing, rights-based writing and utility-based writing.

You probably already know each one represents, but in case the ideas are foggy, here's a quick rundown:

1. Rules-based writing uses a document with rules to justify the logic of the argument.  A company's handbook with the policies in it is an example.  But lawyers rely upon the law and religious folk rely upon their respective holy texts to argue their positions.  Any system of rules that is codified somewhere and is used to justify the position of the writer is considered rules-based ethics.

2.  Rights-based ethics.  In this position, the writer will need to establish a common understanding of what the rights of people are.  These may be referred to in general terms or even assumed. They could even tie-in to different types of rule books where the rights of people are characterized, but the ethics of the position will reflect a respect for human rights.

3.  Utility-based ethics.  Here, the end result, when achieved, justifies the means one takes to reach it.  The profit is the bottom line, and the ethical concern is that you achieved your profit.

Often you are the best judge for whether you are writing ethically or not.  Becoming more aware of your own motivations for writing will help you to judge more accurately if you are arguing ethically.  Respecting your reader will also keep you on the straight and narrow of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.