Category: Leadership

Why I deleted the Facebook app from my iPhone

I work in marketing. In fact, I’ve made a great career out of it – helping organizations evangelize their products and services in a honest and transparent manner. Part of my success is predicated on social media, and specifically, Facebook. In prior roles, I was a very large Facebook advertiser, spending millions per year on ads and content to reach potential customers.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like Facebook. Love would be too strong of a word. I love my wife and son, not Facebook.

I’ve spent the majority of many speaking engagements and presentations at conferences helping all types of organizations understand how to best use Facebook, engage with their audiences and succeed on the platform.

So why did I delete the Facebook app from my iPhone?

It’s simple… the time I was spending on Facebook was being wasted. Or rather, it was being misdirected. I found that Facebook was entertaining, but when I dug in to it, I was misdirecting my time… I should have been spending that time with my friends, family or personal enrichment.

Facebook provides a filtered view of the universe. I’m not talking about Russian manipulation of your crazy’s uncle’s political views, either. I’m talking about what most people post to their feeds. They post a filtered view of their life – things they want you to see. Mitch Joel wrote one of my favorite articles on the subject, what you see vs. what is happening. You need to read this article because it makes my point – that what people post on Facebook is not reality. It may be true, but it is a filtered view – it’s only the stuff people want you to see – it’s an airbrushed view of themselves. It’s how they want the world to see them.

The end result is that staring at unrealistic filtered views of peoples lives can make you believe they are {insert whatever you want} than you. They are {better, smarter, prettier thinner, richer, cooler, and so on.} That is just not healthy. You are you and you should strive to be the best you you can be each day. (I know I used “you” five times in the prior sentence, but it helped me make a point.) But, you should not fall to false comparisons of filtered lives. Instead of being inspired, you can become envious or jealous.

Then I became somewhat voyeuristic. Not in a creepy way… in a waste-of-time way. I spent time looking at what happened to people I used to be acquainted with… past classmates and co-workers. I spent time looking at other people’s photos and reading their posts. I got angry when I read their opinions if I disagreed with them, I felt myself being judgmental.

So I gave it up. I deleted the Facebook app and I haven’t really looked back. I still log on to Facebook to catch up with family and friends that I don’t normally get to see, but I spend a lot less time going down those destructive rabbit holes of filtered realities. I now spend my time interacting with people, spending time with my family and friends, having real conversations and working on personal enrichment. I have focused my energy on positive things. Not comparisons.
How to Prioritize Projects and their Tasks
As a leader of a marketing organization, I am in a constant state of juggling competing priorities. My clients each believe their priorities are the most important, and thus should be completed first. In reality, that is almost never the case. In fact, many times their priorities are the least important. It’s my job as an executive to understand the goals of the organization and then translate those into priorities. I must rank the projects in order of how they will help the organization achieve its goals. At the same time, I have to balance those priorities against team retention and my career. These often do not correlate evenly. In other words, if I have a stakeholder in a department request a project that I know adds little if any, value to the organization, I also have to understand the pros and cons of completing the project. If I complete the project as requested (sooner than it really needs to be completed), I might win favor with that leader and department. Doing so could advance my standing and that of my team. Conversely, delaying the project beyond the leader’s timeline (though it might be justified), could hinder my advancement and that of my team.

Take a team of 30 in an organization of about 2,000. There can be many concurrent projects – well over 100 marketing projects. Each project could have one task or hundreds, but usually somewhere in between. In a large recent project, whereby I wanted to overhaul a web property, my team did our standard research, due diligence, collaboration with stakeholders, and cursory brainstorming, to yield about 25 enhancements. Thus we had our project, “Web Refresh” and about 25 sub-projects or tasks. We needed to figure out how to order the 25 tasks so that we could deliver the most value first. We leveraged the 9-Square Prioritization Matrix. If I wanted to be cute, we could call this the Soschin Priority Matrix and each item in the matrix would be given an SPF (Soschin Priority Factor) to determine its ranking on your to-do list. Here’s how it works:
1. Each task is assigned a rating for the level of effort of HIGH, MEDIUM, or LOW. I use two scales (though you can only use one scale at a time, so chose the appropriate one for your project.) The first scale is for large projects. HIGH level of effort (LOE=H) is for tasks that take more than a day but less than a week; LOE=M is for tasks that take about a day; and, LOE=L is for tasks that take less than a day. For tasks that take longer than a week, adopting a concept from the agile method, you need to break the task down into more sub-tasks. There’s an optional scale for very small projects that I rarely use, but it comes in handy sometimes and that is H=more than an hour; M=about an hour; L=less than an hour. It’s very important to craft your ability to estimate task LOE so that over time you can do this accurately, accounting for research, experimentation, iteration, testing, refinement, etc. Underestimating does no one any good.
2. Next, assign each task a value for return on investment (ROI): HIGH, MEDIUM, or LOW. HIGH tasks should be easily measured and translated into significant revenue opportunities or expense reductions; LOW should be assigned to tasks that round the business out, fill in gaps, and are more than wastes of time; and, MEDIUM tasks should be somewhere in between. While my explanation of ROI can seem a bit arbitrary, that’s simply because I do not know your business or your project. In other words, you should be able to figure this out on your own. If you cannot figure out if a task has ROI, perhaps you should not be working on it – stick in the “blue sky” or “rainy day” task list and let it marinate (or fester and die.)
3. Using the table below, score each task according to the assigned LOE and ROI in steps 1 and 2, respectively.
4. At this point, each task should now have a value of 2, 4, 6, 8, or 10. This is the project’s SPF (Soschin Priority Factor). You’re now much closer to a ranked list of tasks, but you’ve also probably noticed that some are colliding with one another, in that a medium LOE with a high ROI (score=8) has the same value as low LOE and medium ROI (also score=8). That’s okay… keep reading.
5. As you start to rank your tasks by score (the highest score is the first task you should complete), when you have a tie, your knowledge of the project and the specifics of the task will be the tie-breaker. If you cannot figure out which one to do first, flip a coin because it doesn’t matter.
6. For those of you who belong to Mensa, and for extra credit, you can add a third dimension called “PCW” which stands for political capital won. It’s a similar scale of 1-3-5, with low PCW being 1 and high being 5. For example, if you have an 8 (LOE=M + ROI=H) and the PCW is high, the task would get 5 more points for a total SPF of 13. Note, that by adding the 3rd dimension, you go from 5 possible scores to rank tasks (2, 4, 6, 8 & 10) to 12 possible scores (the original five, plus 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 and 15). So, on projects with lots of tasks, if you really want to get specific, go with the 3rd dimension. But that can really overcomplicate things. In some of my former roles, there was a lot of PCW at stake, so the 3rd dimension was in play frequently.
The Six Trap

Your first time running tasks through the matrix, you are going to end up with a lot of sixes. This is a common occurrence. It happens because as project planners and managers, we don’t want to over or underestimate tasks. We’re also not sure about a lot at this point in the planning process.

If you end up with mostly sixes… or put a different way, if more than 20% of your tasks are sixes, you have too many… then here is what you should do. First, stop and spend more time on each task. The importance of accurately planning a project now – before you begin – will greatly impact your ability to deliver timely results. Spend some more time discussing, exploring, and evaluating these “sixes” and endeavor to move them in one direction or the other. Make them higher or lower, but get them out of priority purgatory.

Final Thoughts

So that’s it… that’s how you translate a complicated set of tasks into an organized and methodical plan of attack. It’s a great way to communicate with your project team as well. Over time, by completing this exercise, your team should get more accurate at agreeing on ROI and LOE. I have found that when I introduce this in projects to new team members, folks tend to group tasks into more narrow scores, such as lots of medium LOEs and ROIs and therefore a lot of SPF 6’s. That’s okay, but over time you should be able to spread the tasks out over the matrix. There’s no formula or bell curve for doing so – it just depends on the project. Not everything can be a high priority – you have to pick. Hopefully, this methodology will empower you to do just that.
The 120 Rule
Lately, I’ve been working on a number of projects to help a large employer improve their employee engagement and retention. I could likely write a book about such a topic – and of course there are many books, blogs, and companies devoted to the art and science of employee engagement and retention. Earlier this week I was having a conversation with a fellow senior executive on this topic and how I was able to build a team from 12 marketers to 29 in less than four years while keeping voluntary attrition to about 1.5 headcount per year. Voluntary turnover averages between 10 and 15-percent across all industries with nonprofits typically suffering a bit more. Marketers, especially millennials early in their career, have much shorter job tenure, on average. Jerry Bernhart has published some wonderful research on this topic that shows millennial marketers tend to stay at their jobs for less than two years. Based upon that statistic, and considering the demographics of the 29-person team (early 20s to early 60s), I should be seeing 5-10 employees leaving per year, voluntarily. With the job market fairly strong (low unemployment, lots of open positions), employees with strong marketing skills can be easily poached.

So why is my employee retention higher than any other department?

Well, that’s a bit loaded and self-serving. I could could profess that I’m a great leader and well-liked. And while this may very well be the case, there are other factors at play here – many within my control. Let’s look at 12 factors that can influence employee retention (in no particular order):
- Compensation
- Benefits
- Culture
- Product
- Work load
- Work/life balance
- Leadership/management
- Peers
- Commute
- Outlook/industry
- Job market
- Career path
Sure there are many others, but these 12 stand out to me as significant factors for employee retention.

For the purpose of this discussion, I want to look “work load” and introduce a leadership concept called “The 120 Rule”.

I believe in empowering employees to optimize their workload. To do so, I make it very clear what the priorities are for the organization and how that translates into prioritizing marketing projects. From there, employees should be able to take a high-level view of their projects and then sort them according to these priorities. The result should be a linear list. In a busy in-demand shared services organization, such as the one that I run, there are many competing priorities. I have multiple stakeholder clients that all believe their project is the most important. It is my job as at the head of marketing to interpret and translate these requests based upon research, multiple points of input, and my judgment; and then help stakeholders calibrate their expectations.

Here’s where the 120 Rule comes into play. I coach my team that it is always good to have 120 things to do, but only time for 100. If this is their reality, then essentially, they are always optimizing out 20-percent of the projects that add the least amount of value to the organization. (Okay math nerds, I get it that 20/120 is not 20% but rather 17%, but I don’t want to call this the 17-percent rule.) Giving staff the authority to make those decisions (prioritization of tasks) is important. Marketers really like to own their task list. Providing ownership delegation, so long as it generally aligns with the strategic priorities of the organization, empowers staff to take control of their work. Within a given week, staff can adjust their work-stream to complete the easy projects first, the fun project first, the hard projects first, or any permutation thereof. The point is, so long as deadlines are being met, why should I care as the leader what someone works on first, second, or last? Again, so long as the priorities are being met at the high level, the path that an employee takes to get there doesn’t matter to me. There will be times that as the senior executive, I will have to short circuit the priorities list or require a fire drill. But, if I maintain order and a well-organized strategic plan, then the team will be more receptive and agile for accommodating changes to priorities or fire drills. Good marketers do this well and don’t let these changes interfere with their success.

Additionally, I paint the opposite picture for my staff. What if you only had 80 things to do but time for 100? Being idle for long periods of time shows lack of value/ROI of a marketer. The result is usually a layoff. A marketer should never be idle. And a marketer should always know what they are supposed to be working on and how that adds value to the organization

So, bringing this all together… I can say that one strong factor in the team’s low turnover, is that we have successfully embraced the 120 Rule. Everyone knows what the top priorities are, and the order in which projects should be completed. They know that when they get to a milestone or cross road, to ask for a little bit of additional direction. They also know that they have the authority to set their schedule and task list so long as it meets the clearly identified deliverable dates.

Another by-product of the 120 Rule is that if you consistently see a project sit in the optimized-out 20-percent, and typically that means for longer than a year, then it’s time to reexamine why that project is on the last and whether it should be retired altogether. Clearly it’s not a priority and it won’t add much in the way of value. It it’s valuable, it would be in the bottom 20.

Are you optimizing your work stream? Try the 120 Rule to improve employee satisfaction and retention. It’s okay to ignore 20-percent of your work if you’re always working on the most important stuff.
Thinking of quitting? Think again…

Bernard Marr just penned a brief piece on why not to quit your job. He touches on a few solid points, but I believe he misses a very important one that I’ll opine upon here:

Look in the mirror. It’s you, not your boss.

Sure, we’ve all read the articles about bad bosses, signs your manager stinks, and how to deal with annoying co-workers, but if you’re chronically unhappy, maybe it’s you!

Thinking of jumping ship and quitting? Chances are you’ll run into many of the same things that make you unhappy at your new job. And you’re trading in stability (stable, predictable job and environment) for a large amount of risk.

What risk?

You DON’T know how happy you’ll be at your new job. You’re making a false assumption that new and different equals better… and that’s a poor assumption, at best.

Leave your job but taking all your bad habits with you won’t result in the change you’re in search of; the change needs come from within you.

My best advice is to drill into what’s making you unhappy at your current job and work hard at reversing that with patience, persistence and a little sweat. It’s not easy, but it’s generally a more risk-adverse path. Young inexperienced employees fall into this trap all the time. They are too scared and timid to approach their boss/co-workers/management to create meaningful dialogue, so they jump ship, only to be back in the position (emotionally) in another year or so.

Changing jobs comes with enormous amounts of risk. The recruiter is luring you away to the new employer and likely is providing you with a filtered view of reality because they want to fill the role. So, they are “selling” you the role. And when you sell, you tend not to highlight the negative stuff. Think back to how you were lured into your current role? Was it mostly puppy dogs and rainbows? Most likely it was. But the underlying issues you are experiencing aren’t necessarily because they didn’t share with you all the details of your current role – or even the negative elements. Changing jobs replaces something you know a lot about (your current job, role, tasks, employer, industry, etc.) with something you know almost nothing about except a recruiter’s pitch and perhaps some public websites. That’s not apples to apples. It’s apples to dynamite. Are you taking this new job for an increase in pay of 15%? Do you earn $70,000 a year? If so, you’re giving up job security for less than $1,000 a month increase. Is it worth it?

Young employees fail to evaluate risk accurately. Don’t fall into this trap.
Email etiquette tips for the office
How do you handle the following scenarios?
1. Your co-worker is on vacation, and you just started a project that you have a question about, what do you do? Do you craft that quick email message and hit send, knowing that it will sit in your co-worker’s inbox while they are out? Or do you wait until they return?
2. Your co-worker is on vacation, and you have some general information/update about something they are interested, do you forward?
3. Your co-worker is on vacation, and you have an emergency question, do you send them an email?
At my place of work, these are all scenarios we deal with regularly as members of a large team that relies heavily upon email to communicate. But how we handle each of the above can set the tone for our relationships and respect for one another.

In our example (1) above, if the co-worker is the only one who can answer your question, why bother sending the message if it will just sit in the in-box? Respect your fellow team member, and wait to send the message. Simply draft it up, hit save, and hang on to it. You may also find that while they are out, you were able to answer the question by asking someone else, or figuring it out on your own – thus never needing to send the message in the first place. Learn to be resourceful. By sending someone an email (that isn’t too important), while you know they are out, it’s saying to that person that you really don’t care they are on vacation. It also makes it difficult for your co-worker to check their email while they are out, because they have too many messages and don’t know if there are any that are important.

But what about example (2)… your message isn’t important… so don’t send it. Wait. You can craft a message that says, “I wanted to wait to send this to you until you returned, so as to not bother you while you are out.” A message like that goes a long way to earning the mutual respect of your teammate.

But it’s an emergency! Example (3) may be the rare exception… so ask yourself this, “is it such an emergency that it warrants a phone call or text message?” If that’s the case, then it may be suitable for you to send the message after all… but in reality, if it is a true emergency, it may be time to pick up the phone and call your co-worker who’s drinking Peña Coladas on a sandy beach somewhere. Be careful, as you’re crossing into difficult territory, so phrase your inquiry with caution and apologize for the interruption.

Your co-workers earned this time off, just as you did. If they are out sick, don’t bother them unless they are simply working remote to quarantine themselves… after all, they are sick and need to recover.

But above all, you need to KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER. By this, I mean that if you are working with someone who genuinely wants to be included on every last thread and expects to be included, even while they are out – then forget about the above – and honor their wishes…

Happy emailing… or not emailing… chose carefully.
Stop using exclamation points (please)

As the head of marketing for a large organization, I have to edit a lot of copy. Press releases, collateral, web pages, blog posts, print ads, emails and so on… In fact, most marketers have to write copy as part of their role. But most marketers are pretty bad at it. I previously discussed Mark Twain’s view on brevity and why your marketing copy probably stinks.

However, just yesterday, a small “pocket reference guide” made it’s why to my inbox for review. The guide, meant to be a quick reference tool for students to identify who to contact in each department, included descriptions of departments and some FAQs. Fairly benign content, in my opinion. There were about four pages of copy. And it was a quick and easy edit.

I found that the copy was a collection of small paragraphs most likely written by multiple individuals, so it took a little finesse to achieve a unified tone and style throughout the piece. What amazed me the most was that nearly every passage used exclamation points.

Over the course of four pages, I found 23 —- TWENTY THREE —- exclamation points.

Needless to say, by the time I completed my edits, we were down to two – one in the title and one in the initial welcome section.

Then it occurred to me, no one knows how to use an exclamation point. Not marketers for sure, but also few people in academics (save for your English major).

An eloquent marketer should be proficient at devising creative ways for emphasizing importance and excitement without adding a superfluous amount of exclamation points. Exclamation points are overused and make copy sound juvenile or informal. So unless that is your goal, please do without, except in rare cases where you are genuinely convening something that is extremely exciting.

Oxford Dictionary explains:

“People tend to use a lot of exclamation marks in informal writing such as emails or text messages, but you should avoid using them in formal writing.”

And that pretty much sums it up.
My top five most compelling posts of 2013
Just what exactly did folks enjoy reading (and sharing) on my site in 2013? Here are the five posts that seemed to resonate the most:
And, if you like Mark Twain as much as me, check out this article on office productivity.

If you’re interested in hearing my thoughts on a particular topic, don’t hesitate to send me a note and perhaps I’ll cover that in 2014.

Happy New Year!
Mark Twain on “brevity” and why your marketing copy probably stinks

Earlier this year I wrote a piece on office productivity, “My 5 tips for success in the office” for OnlineLearningTips.com. The cornerstone to the article was my admiration of Mark Twain’s take on getting the hard stuff done.

This week I want to share another one of Twain’s quotes that I admire greatly:

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

How on point is this quote when applied to today’s agile marketing organizations?

How many times have we ended up creating long winded marketing pieces or blog posts because we’ve struggled to truly and eloquently communicate our points? So we babble on and on with the hope that eventually we’ll get to where we need to go, or we’ll include enough buzz words to cover every possible angle?

Being long winded is a bad habit. Don’t confused that with being chatty or an extrovert though. Being long winded is a result of being unable to effectively communicate in a succinct manner. In other words, marketers often have a hard time of getting to the damn point.

Hopefully you understand my point by now. BREVITY!

The more eloquently and succinctly you can convey your marketing message, the more likely your audience will engage with you and understand your message. But striking the balance between being too succinct and too long is a challenge most marketers have yet to master.

The same goes for presentations, emails and conference calls. Be brief instead of long-winded. It’s more difficult to communicate in this manner and takes a great deal of focus. The end result is that you will come across as more eloquent.

In Ocean’s Eleven (one of my favorite movies), Russ (played by Brad Pitt) is prepping Linus (Matt Damon) for a con. Rus says, “Don’t use seven words when four will do.” in explaining to Linus that he needs to be brief.

I use this modern adaptation of Twain’s quote regularly when working with my marketing group to eloquently communicate how important it is to be brief.

So, next time you find yourself writing marketing copy, a presentation or even conducting a meeting. Think of Mark Twain and focus on delivering your message succinctly. Your audience will thank you.

Category: Leadership

The Six Trap

Final Thoughts