you’re sending a truly trivial message, begin by creating a profile of the person you’re writing to. There’s a really big payoff in doing this for people who are important to you, such as your boss. You emerge with illuminating guidelines on how to improve all your interactions with him or her, as well as knowing what to say and how to say it. This helps you with your face-to-face interaction as well as writing.
When the situation involves someone you don’t deal with often, or don’t know at all, the depth of the profile you create depends on how important the results are to you. If you’re responding to a customer query, you don’t need to know his decision-making style. If you’re writing to the department head with a request, you might want to find out how much information he prefers to have, what his priorities are, and more.
Before you try profile building, it might seem daunting to characterize someone when so much that drives each person is invisible. Trust me, you know much more about your audience than you think. In the case of a person already familiar to you, your observations, experience, and intuition go a long way. It’s a matter of drawing on these resources in a systematic manner, especially your memory of how she reacted to previous interactions.
Try This: Here’s the system I recommend. For now, suppose the person is someone you know. Begin with the usual suspects: demographics. Write down what you already know about the person, or take your best guess:
❯❯ How old?
❯❯ Male or female?
❯❯ Occupation?
❯❯ Married, single, or some other arrangement?
❯❯ Member of an ethnic or religious group?
❯❯ Educated to what degree?
❯❯ Social and economic position?
After demographics, consider psychographics, the kind of factors marketing specialists spend a lot of time studying. Marketers are interested in creating customer profiles to understand and manipulate consumer buying. For your purposes, some psychographic factors that can matter are:
❯❯ Lifestyle
❯❯ Values and beliefs
❯❯ Opinions and attitudes
❯❯ Interests
❯❯ Leisure and volunteer activities
You also need to consider factors that reflect someone’s positioning, personality, and, in truth, entire life history and outlook on the world. Some factors that may directly affect how a person perceives your message include the following:
❯❯ Professional background and experience
❯❯ Position in the organization: What level? Moving up or down? Respected? How ambitious? Happy in the job and with the organization?
❯❯ Degree of authority
❯❯ Leadership style: Team-based? Dictatorial? Collaborative? Indiscernible?
❯❯ Preferred communication style: In-person? Brief or detailed written messages? Telephone? Texting? PowerPoint? Facebook or other social media?
❯❯ Approach to decision-making: Collaborative or top-down? Spontaneous or deliberative? Risk-taker or play-it-safer?
❯❯ Information preferences: Broad vision? In depth? Statistics and numbers? Charts and graphs?
❯❯ Work priorities and pressures
❯❯ Sensitivities and hot buttons: What makes her angry? Happy?
❯❯ Interaction style and preferences: A people person or a numbers, systems, or technology person? Good team member or not?
❯❯ Type of thinking: Logical or intuitive? Statistics-based or ideas-based? Big picture or micro-oriented? Looking for long-range or immediate results?
❯❯ Weaknesses (perceived by the person or not): Lack of tech savvy? Poor people skills? Lack of education and training? No experience?
❯❯ Type of people the person likes, feels comfortable with, and respects, and the reverse: Who likes and gets along with him?
❯❯ Sense of humor, personal passions, hobbies
And of course, your precise relationship to the person matters, as well as your relative positioning and the degree of mutual liking, respect, and trust – the simpatico factor.
For example, say you want authorization to produce a video explaining your department’s work to show at an employee event. Perhaps your boss is someone who’s enthusiastic about video. Or you may report to someone who values relationships and wants to cultivate a positive environment. This boss would probably welcome a way to show staff members they are valued. Or she may be a person who likes innovation and the chance to be first in the neighborhood. To gain approval, it’s best to frame the story differently for the specific decision-maker. I’m not saying you should distort the facts or omit any: The story you tell must be true and fair. But the focus and emphasis can be adapted.
GENERATION GAPS: UNDERSTANDING AND LEVERAGING THEM
In almost every workplace employing more than a few people, generational differences present some major challenges. Sweeping generalizations based on when people were born may seem suspect, but we are all shaped by the culture and time period we grow up in. Our beliefs, communication and decision-making styles, interaction patterns, and expectations of each other can be at odds. Misunderstandings flourish. In response, consultants are at work explaining the groups to each other, marketers are researching the young people they must market to, and human resource specialists try to smooth cross-generational conflicts so their companies can function better.
Whatever age group you belong to, you will benefit from some empathy for the other cohorts. Supplement the following ideas with your own observations and you’ll discover ways to make subordinates and higher-ups happy without the risk of compromising
