and community leaders declare their humanity by tweeting an apology for some misdeed, or publishing a blog post about the passing of a relative. Interestingly, the leaders who do this well often earn respect from the people who hear them out — supporters and critics alike.
Authenticity earns respect.
Perhaps you’re the manager of a team of airline staff who proactively rebook all of the connections for passengers of a flight that is delayed arriving at its destination, or a social media manager who responds to customer service concerns with genuine surprise and apology. In real, human tones.
The important lesson here is to offer something your competition does not. And remember that your competition could just as likely be other leadership candidates within your own organization as it could be a tech titan with a superior product.
Clarity
A human organization is clear. It knows how it serves its communities, how it communicates, and how it runs its business.
Every communication effort can benefit from clarity.
Consider how clarity applies to your communications department. Are you using simple language that reflects the way people really talk in your news releases, or are you relying on old “tried-and-true” phrasing like “ABC Corp is excited to announce blah blah blah”?
Clarity is one of the defining qualities of the Creative Commons.[4] Founders James Boyle, Lawrence Lessig, and Hal Abelson took the process of licensing creative works, which had become complex from years of legal interference, and made it easier for copyright holders. Creative Commons provides tools and plain language which help copyright holders decide how they would like to license their works, and how they will communicate those licences. The licences are written in a way that facilitates a clearer understanding of the conditions under which others can use those works. Parameters include whether or not attribution is required, whether or not users can make money from the use and sale of the work, and whether or not users must enforce the same licensing parameters to downstream users.
Clarity is not hard to measure. One place to start is to conduct a clarity audit on your outward-facing materials. Can people understand what you’re trying to say? Like a bad joke, if it requires too much explanation to be appreciated, your message was probably not received.
End-user licence agreements (EULAs), community, and privacy policies are frequently criticized for being too long and too legal. At roughly fifty-six pages, the iTunes music store licence is unfathomably long for the average user to read, much less understand. Which is probably why so many people who use iTunes have no idea what they’ve agreed to (include us in that group).
The Tim Hortons coffee shop Wi-Fi terms-of-use agreement is 2,268 words long. Since the average person reads roughly 250 words per minute, the nine minutes it would take one of us to read the agreement would be longer than it would take to drink our coffee. That means most of us would be ready to leave before we were in a position to accept the terms and do anything meaningful online.
Privacy policies are another conundrum.
Tod’s website privacy policy is written in clear language. And, because the “personality” of his brand is friendly and even a bit non-traditional, it reads like someone speaking:
Man, I hate nosy browsers. I hate them worse than you do.… Still, there’s that whole “balance” thing — should I strip all good functionality out of my site and make it marginally functional but butt-ugly (I’m looking at you, Craigslist) or make it a more helpful site at the expense of some cookie-collecting?
I’m opting for the second.
What I Know About You: The only information my site collects about you are things that every single other web server in the world collects — your IP address, what web page your browser requested, and some basic info about your computer (your operating system, screen resolution, etc.). All websites collect this info. All of them. In fact, there’s no way to not collect this info. It’s just how the Web was built.
What I Do Not Know About You: Unless you manually fill in a form giving me that info, I have no idea who you are. I don’t know your age, your phone number, your email address, your street address, or why your mom calls you “Bosso.” Nothing you do on my site identifies you without you knowing about it. I mean, I suppose you could be filling in a Contact Me form in your sleep, but if that’s the case, you probably have bigger problems to deal with….
Don’t Blame Me: Also, my site uses some pretty standard third-party services (like Wufoo to make forms, Google to keep track of analytics, AdRoll to present you with reminders about my site in banner ads when you’re elsewhere on the Web, and so on). All these people have their own privacy policies, most likely written by people far more intelligent than I. I don’t have any control of what their sites or cookies do, but I wouldn’t use them if I thought they were evil. You should probably read their own policies if you’re freaked out about this stuff.
Of course, his light tone might not be appropriate for your brand. Still, there’s likely plenty of room for your official documents to be made less, well, officious.
By the way, you can read Tod’s entire privacy policy at http://todmaffin.com/privacy.
Clarity, of course, does not imply complete organizational transparency. You don’t need to publish everyone’s salaries online (though at least one company, BufferApp.com, does exactly that — and outlines the calculation it uses to determine what it pays people).
Clarity is about simplicity in your communications and directness in your phrasing. Legal, human resources (HR), sales, contracting, shipping and receiving … every department in every organization will benefit from clarity
Humanity
Finally, the most important factor. In all your efforts, you should strive to inject humanity into the mix. While many organizations find it difficult to make humanity part of their day-to-day operations, it’s actually easier than you might think — even in the digital age.
Mark has often referred to this as making “digital eye contact.” That is, being able to gain the undivided attention of an audience, no matter how small or large, even for a moment. It is possible to make eye contact online in a way that’s analogous to making eye contact with your lunch companion, the people you’re having a coffee with, or the conference hall you’re addressing. You need to be your human self, speak in a human tone, and use human language and human-relatable experience.
Instinct
Human companies have learned how to trust their “organizational gut feeling,” as articulated by the people in the trenches. If you’ve hired properly, you’ll have a team of smart, sensitive, feeling people. Their first instincts are often the best for your business.
For instance, consider how many organizations end up crippling their own efforts by trusting data over instinct. Suppose you issue a detailed Request for Proposal (RFP) to build a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. You’ll receive vendor proposals, each detailed by the requirements outlined in your RFP. But these data points don’t make up the entire picture. Immeasurable factors like “I just got a funny vibe from the sales guy” are as important (if not more so) than the line items detailed in the vendors’ responses.
While most organizations use the simple response-evaluating equation of Ability + Price = Decision, you should also factor intuitiveness into this
