Avoid the intersection of ignorance and arrogance

The rules are simple: Tell the world what is so important to you at this moment in 140 characters or less. That’s it.

Welcome to the vastly growing universe of Twitter.

If you’re like me, you might scoff at this notion and question the relevance of such communication. Why would anyone want to tell the world such things? And, more importantly, who would care what I have to say?

To begin answering these questions, follow me at www.twitter.com/d_j_allen.

Being a part of the Twitter world is not about the way I want to communicate with others. It’s about the way other people want to be communicated with. We must resist the urge to stay ignorant to the way technology has changed communication.

Former NBA player and current UNLV assistant basketball coach Steve Henson tells the story about Arizona State head coach Herb Sendek at a recent workshop. Sendek told the group of coaches that if you are that guy who brags about not knowing how to turn on a computer, you are already way behind in the profession.

We all know someone like that, or, worse off, we might actually be that person. Many of us like to mask our incompetence with something new by devaluing its relevance. Often, we do this without taking the time to actually learn the details.

The intersection of ignorance and arrogance is a dangerous place to dwell. We all must seek to avoid it in the many areas of our lives.

Communicating with others is not about what we say – it’s about what other people hear. Without the ability to communicate with others at a high level, great ideas or institutional knowledge are limited in their usefulness. (In our decade of assisting businesses and organizations, we’ve found that 95% of problems in organizations occur from poor internal communication. And, generally, it begins with a poor communicator at the top.)

It all starts with understanding your audience. In the college basketball world, coaches are looking to reach out to teenage athletes and persuade them to play for their respective programs.

Coaches are kidding themselves if they think these young men are going to sit down and read full-length letters that adequately describe the benefits of attending a particular institution.

And it’s not just the younger generations. In fact, how many of us actually sit down and read all of the full-length letters we get? Give me bullet points. Text me. Shoot me a quick e-mail.

This is not to say it is right. In my perfect world, everyone would love to take three minutes to read columns such as this. And everyone would love to listen to me make 45-60-minute presentations. However, that world is not reality.

We must know our audiences and talk to them. Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari (www.twitter.com/UKCoachCalipari) and USC football coach Pete Carroll (www.twitter.com/PeteCarroll) have mastered this. If you did not know who they were, you might think some of their posts were from teenagers themselves. But this is not about what you and I think, this is about what their potential recruits think. And that is the lifeline of their respective careers.

My co-author of “The Xs & Os of Success” and UNLV head basketball coach Lon Kruger (www.twitter.com/LonKruger) joined the Twitter world just this past week, and this is what he had to say to Steve Guiremand of RebelNation: “It’s the way young people are communicating,” the 56-year-old Kruger said.

Period. It’s that simple. It’s not about him, it’s about his audience.

Twitter, Facebook, texting, e-mails, etc. They are all valuable tools in today’s world of communicating – just like good old fashioned letters, telephone calls and (the granddaddy of them all) the face-to-face conversation. Each one of them is valuable in their own way with different sets of audiences.

When preparing to communicate with others, think about the ways your audience wants to best receive the message. Then proceed.

Make it less about you and more about them. That is how we succeed as communicators – and, ultimately, as people.

One Loss Cannot Lead to Another

Watching the Los Angeles Dodgers without suspended superstar Manny Ramirez is intriguing right now. Despite holding the best record in baseball, the young team is extremely fragile at the moment.

Immediately following news of Manny’s positive drug test – which will sideline him for 50 games – the Dodgers lost four of their next five games and it was evident the team’s confidence had been shaken. However, with two victories over the World Series champion Phillies in Philadelphia this week, the Dodgers captured a key series victory on the road.

The team will struggle at times without Manny – there is no doubt about that. But the series victory over the Phillies may have kept the Dodgers from falling into a deep tailspin caused by the difficult and embarrassing loss of their best player.

As Lesson #29 from The Xs & Os of Success addresses, “One Loss Cannot Lead to Another.” Many of our organizations have suffered losses recently. We have to make sure we are not allowing those losses to have bigger impacts than they should. Here are a few words from this lesson:

We have all had our bad days at work.

Lost a client. Failed to close a deal. Did not meet expectations on a project. Missed sales numbers.

Business is like sports. You will not win every game. The key to being successful, however, is how you react to failure.

As a leader, your responsibility is to help your team and team members recover from failure as quickly as possible and grow from the experience. Many of us tend to spend a great portion of our time after a failure rationalizing why we failed and harping upon variables that were out of our control. While there are times external variables do play major roles in our failure, it does not benefit us to focus on them and it definitely does not help us “play the next play.”

The first step in moving forward from failure is admitting fault and taking ownership of the unsuccessful results. Only from this point will you be able to identify which variables — those you do have control of — led to the negative situation. Once these have been identified, you can then create a plan that will allow you to positively address those areas and make improvement…

The biggest winners in sports and business all lose at times. What separates them from the rest is how quickly and proactively they move on from their losses. They never allow one loss to be the cause of another loss.

Not Always Right

The New Economy has forced many of us to make decisions we never thought we would have to make. And, unfortunately, most of those are decisions we never wanted to make.

There has been a lot of positive feedback from Lesson #23 in the book, The Xs & Os of Success. It’s called “Not Always Right.” The philosophy of “Not always right, but always motivated by the right reasons” is helping many decision-makers during this time. (I know. I am one of them.)

Here's a little taste of the lesson. Hope there is a message in it you can use.

Decisions made by leaders impact numerous people. Many times one decision will impact certain team members positively while that same decision will impact another group of team members negatively.

These are the moments that make or break leaders.

Often times “being right” is subjective. Because of this, making such crucial decisions can be hazardous for leaders. Thus, the decision-making process then becomes the most important factor in this entire situation.

As a leader, you must ask yourself, “What is motivating me to make this decision?” Ultimately, your decision-making process should be consistent and should always come back to what is best for the overall good of the team and its objectives.

If your decision-making process is grounded in this philosophy, you will maintain the trust of your team members, even when a decision may negatively impact them.

Like parents who want the best for their children, successful leaders want what is best for the people they are leading. However, with their team members’ best interests at heart, there is a time to say “no” and there are times to hold team members accountable.

Leaders will always have their decisions questioned. That is part of the job. Effective leaders, however, never give people a reason to question their motives for making such decisions.