market your team’s brain to tommy co-worker

Market Your Team’s Brain to Tommy Co-Worker How to make sure the right info gets to the right people, at the right time

Shannon Wagner, GeekinLaw @ Working Sandbox

Copyright 2014

Market Your Team’s Brain to Tommy CoWorker 1 / 22

Contents

Introducing the Problem

Meet Your Team

Meet Tommy CoWorker

Communication That Fails

Writing Project Plans

Giving Your Status Publicly at the Team Meeting

Sending Email to Multiple People

Sending Email to a Single Person

Calling People on the Phone

Leaving Traces of Useful Information Scattered all Over the Projects

you Work On

Mentoring Tommy CoWorker (or getting mentored by him)

How What you are Doing to Solve the Problem Only Makes it Worse

Two Solutions

Constant Message

Refine and Amplify the Message

Position Yourself as an Expert


What you can do Next to Make a Difference

Talk to Yourself

Talk to Your Boss

Talk to Your Team

Talk to Everyone


Introducing the Problem

This book is for the people who depend on having the right information

available at the right time in order to get useful work done. That includes you,

your manager, your employees, your team, and anyone else who shares or

exchanges information with you during the course of a day. It even includes all

the people who should be or would be sharing information if only they knew

how to do it, or had better skills to help them do it more effectively.

Everyone at your company has a huge amount of useful information in

their brain. But that’s where it stays. Most people don’t know how to share

information effectively, or when they do know how, they still don’t do it for

various reasons. There’s rarely enough brainshare in a typical office, and

employees are rarely very motivated to increase the amount of sharing. Even

when they are motivated, most times the sharing isn’t very effective even

though the information is shared, it’s never properly understood or absorbed by

the rest of the folks who need it.

Sure, the folks around you say lots of things every day, and they write lots

of emails, generate lots of “artifacts” while completing projects. But the majority

of the most useful information doesn’t ever get shared by anyone. And the truly

useful information comes out only in tiny drips, if it ever comes out at all. Worse,

even when the truly useful information is shared, it seems to have a hard time

getting to stick in the heads of everyone around the office. It disappears into the

busy day, forgotten, just as quickly as it appeared.

Haven’t you ever heard someone say something like the following?


“We can’t do the endofmonth report today, we need to wait for Tommy,

and he’s out until next week.”

And then everybody waits until Tommy gets back from vacation because

nobody knows (or trusts that they know) how to run the endofmonth report.

That’s a big problem. Companies stop working, stop completing projects,

stop finishing what should be routine tasks all because the information they

need in order to continue just isn’t readily available at the moment. And that’s a

costly obstacle. It’s an obstacle that affects:

● Employee morale

● Project completion

● Service and product quality

● Customer service

Employees and team members who try to solve this problem are usually

either stymied by frustrating administrative hurdles, or simply don’t know how to

begin more effectively sharing information in order to make any real progress

toward a solution.

To understand how to fix this problem, we have to understand how the

people work together, how teams are formed (both formally and adhoc), and

how teams communicate after they form.


Meet Your Team

At its simplest, your “team” includes the people who are assigned to work

on the same project as you and this is important showup at the same status

meetings that you do.

So, that guy from accounting might be working on the same billing system

upgrade that you are working on, but unless he also shows up at the same weekly

status meeting that you do and (ahem!) fails to share the most useful information

from his brain, then he’s not really “on your team.” He’s just working on the

same project, as a member of whatever team he is on. And he has a very different

perspective, different priorities, and a different understanding of the communal

shared information about the project.

Working across teams with someone who holds a different job role from

you complicates things. A lot. Crossteam communication and information

sharing is much harder to do well than intrateam communication and

information sharing. There never seems to be enough common ground to figure

out a way to get this type of communication going.

And the definition of your team gets more subtle as you start to actually

work on projects. It turns out that most of the people in your weekly status

meeting are actually working on different widgets within the same project (so

they don’t care much about your widget), or they are working primarily under the

guidance of priorities very different from yours. Whatever it is, you find that the

same folks who are supposedly working together in a unified way with you


actually don’t have much in common with the work you are doing, or with the

goals of your own personal understanding of the project.

So your actual team becomes the small group of people who are both:

● Working on the same project

● and … doing it in a way that is similar to how you do it (i.e., under the

same set of priorities or within the same job role)

That’s a slight simplification (actual teams morph, ebb, and flow so that

their boundaries constantly change based on a wide variety of changing factors.

Anyway, it’s good to have a clear vision in your brain about who relates to you

and your project, and in what ways they do so. Abstracting the folks around you

in that way will always seem like a simplification of sorts.

But speaking of simplification… Abstracting and simplifying your

coworkers can be the best way to understand the particular challenges that

working with those people create.

Meet Tommy Co-Worker

Who’s “Tommy CoWorker”?

For years, in my technology work I would use the fake name of “Tommy

Test” in order to be a standin for a user when I needed to test a new system.

Tommy Test has given me a lot of valuable feedback during my work as I’ve

debugged systems and tested new configuration.

Tommy CoWorker isn’t quite as helpful. It’s not his fault, but he just

doesn’t have it in him.


The problem with Tommy CoWorker is that even if he is a highly

conscientious employee and a superawesome guy, he doesn’t have the larger

picture that he needs in order to know what information to share with you at the

right time. He can’t possibly know what the right information is if he did, then

he’d be your manager, not your coworker.

And since information is THE most important product of most of our jobs

today, the complete failure of Tommy CoWorker to be able to figure out what he

should be telling you (and when he should be telling it) is a VERY

SIGNIFICANT PROBLEM.

And it’s your problem, because it prevents you from doing your work.

Which leads to bad morale, projects not getting completed, poor product and

service quality, and poor customer service. Tommy CoWorker pretty much ruins

your day and the company’s business, every day.

And the kicker is YOU are Tommy CoWorker too, and you are ruining

someone else’s day even when you think you’re doing an awesome job. Someone

out there, working on a project somehow tied to your work, is not being as

effective as they could be, because of information you have that he needs, but

which you aren’t sharing.

Or maybe you are sharing the info, but he isn’t getting it because you

didn’t know how to market the info you did not get the right info to the right

person at the right time. And now everything’s ruined because of it.

Ha!


One of your primary goals, wherever you work, should be to find all the

Tommy’s you can as quickly as possible, and then figure out how to get them to

crack under the pressure of the work and reveal all of their most valuable secrets.

You can’t make Tommy CoWorker into a great marketer of brainshare, but you

can squeeze the best info out of him when you need it, and bide your time until

either Tommy or someone around him teaches the poor guy how to market his

own brainshare to the rest of the office.

The things that Tommy knows that you should also know could range from

the critical (e.g., running that monthly report), to the useful (e.g., like knowing

how to refill the water in the singleserve coffee machine). Because it’s no good

if you are wasting time on trying to figure out either a monthly report or how to

make coffee when you really should be converting that coffee into cold, hard

information that runs your business, and the running of the critical report should

be so well understood throughout the team and business that anyone could do it in

a pinch even when Tommy’s not around.

These are just examples. But seriously, make sure you know how to make

the coffee.

Communication That Fails

There are six types of communication that happen in an information

business like yours. And five of them fail to do anything useful on a consistent

basis.

● Writing project plans


● Giving your status publicly at the team meeting

● Sending email to multiple people

● Sending email to a single person

● Calling people on the phone

● Leaving traces of useful information scattered all over the projects

you work on

● Mentoring Tommy Coworker (or getting mentored by him)

Of these, all but the last mentoring just doesn’t work well.

Writing Project Plans

Project plans fail because they divide the company into two groups:

● The people who have the skills and patience to write the plans, but

don’t actually need the plans in order to do their daily work.

● And … the people who need plans (because they are doing the

lowlevel technical work) but who don’t have the skills or experience

to effectively write or understand how to apply the project plans that

actually get written.

Giving Your Status Publicly at the Team Meeting

Giving your status publicly at the team meeting fails because most of the

people at the meeting aren’t really working on the same work as you. They all

have different goals, roles, and priorities. So they don’t quite listen as carefully as

they would need to in order to ensure effective communication. Most of what you

say gets lost either immediately during the meeting or soon after.


Sending Email to Multiple People

Sending email to multiple people fails because there’s always one person

on the thread who knows he is the one the email is intended for. And everybody

else knows that, too. So even though everybody else sees the email, the only

person who actually tunesin to the email is the authoritative person who… well,

maybe you should have just sent the email directly to him instead.

Sending Email to a Single Person

But sending an email just to the authoritative person creates another

problem then nobody else even gets a chance to see the email. Group

brainshare just got lost because you shortcircuited the process and left out the

group.

And then there’s the other type of “single person” email the one between

you and Tommy CoWorker, where you are providing some technical or

administrative detail about a next step for a project. This type of communication

fails because the information you are providing is EXACTLY the sort of

information that the rest of the team needs to know about not necessarily right

now, but at some point in the near future. And they won’t have access to it

because it’s buried inside the Sent folder and the Inbox of two otherwise

wellmeaning employees.

Calling People on the Phone

Calling people to exchange information fails for the same reason as the

singleperson email. The information gets stuck in some vaguely defined orbit

between your two brains.


And worse, the orbit really is vaguely defined, and invariably the two

otherwise wellmeaning employees come away from the conversation with two

vastly different understandings of what they just talked about.

Leaving Traces of Useful Information Scattered all Over the Projects you Work On

I’m a big fan of selfdocumenting systems.

These are systems that, literally, describe (in fact, SHOUT OUT) to you

exactly how they work. You can’t help but understand how they work as soon as

you take a casual glance at them. So if you can properly implement a

selfdocumenting system, then that’s awesome.

But nobody does, or at least it is very rare. So you probably can’t.

Instead, Tommy CoWorker leaves scattered bits of what he thinks is

useful information all over the work he does. Maybe he makes a note in a

comment in the source code. Maybe he uses a threeletter abbreviation that is

meant to remind the next person of some red flag when dealing with this piece of

the project.

But the problem is: Nobody understands the correct context for the bits of

information unless Tommy CoWorker is there to explain it. That’s a core

problem with all attempts at information sharing in an information business:

Without the right context, nothing makes sense. And nobody ever has the right

context.


And if you actually did have the right context to understand the obscure

note, then chances are you actually already understood enough about the project

and the work, and you didn’t really need the obscure note anyway.

Mentoring Tommy Co-Worker (or getting mentored by him)

This is where mentoring comes in. Mentoring is more personal, is targeted

on solving specific problems at specific moments in time, and (when done well)

is always highquality. Mentoring is the core foundation of your information

marketing plan for your work at the office, and it complements all the other, less

personal marketing techniques you use to get your message and info out there.

Mentoring gives everybody the right context for the right information at the

right time.

It’s the only effective way to share information that will truly stick, so it

should be the way you eventually followup on any other communication you

have. The more you can do it (or drag its principles into whatever other form of

information sharing you are using at the moment), the better.

And remember just because someone is your boss (or is the Director of

another department), this doesn’t mean they can’t be mentored by you. Mentoring

happens when you lead a Tommy CoWorker through all the intricate details of

understanding a piece of critical information. You can do that with anyone. (And

you should!)

How What you are Doing to Solve the Problem Only Makes it Worse

But even though we’ve all seen the ways that information gets lost and our

attempts to effectively share information go awry, it’s rare to see a workgroup or


a team do it differently. Instead of applying smarts and experience to our

information sharing problems, we make a strong effort to pile more of the same

old bad solutions to the problems on top of the layers of already bad solutions.

Instead of getting the right information to flow more effectively, we create

more streams of information that also don’t flow effectively.

We make the problem… Worse. And we get paid for doing it!

How the Problems Impacts Your Information Business

Organizational problems especially problems of poor communication

have a way of sneaking in relatively unnoticed, settling in for the long haul, and

having a debilitating effect on your business.

You should try to stop that. (Obviously?) But you may not even realize

how deep and broad the negative impact currently is. We briefly talked about

some of the negative impacts earlier.

Impact on Employee Morale

When Tommy CoWorker can’t get his work done because he doesn’t have

access to the information he needs (or can’t figure out what information he

should be looking for), then he gets demoralized. Employees want to be

productive, and getting work done makes them happy.

You should care about brainsharing and information access problems

because these problems make the team unhappy, and then everything you are

trying to do suffers. This is true whether you are a team member, a manager, or

play some other role in the projects.


Impact on Project Completion

When Tommy CoWorker isn’t happy about his work, then his projects

don’t get done. This happens for a few reasons:

● Loss of motivation due to dissatisfaction with the quality of the output

● Having no clue what it is that’s supposed to be worked on

You should care about communication and knowledgesharing problems

because these problems are going to make every goal of the business suffer, as

projects onebyone stall, go offtrack, or get forgotten about out of melancholy

frustration.

Impact on Service and Product Quality

Handinhand with the employee satisfaction and project quality issues

described above goes the problem of the overall output of your business

beginning to suffer (whether it is a service or product business). You can’t build

great stuff if your process steps are not topnotch. Bad process along the way

results in bad overall results for the business.

You should care about poor internal information practices because they

affect everything that your business produces.

Impact on Customer Service

Finally, once the product or service is out the door, you’ll have customers.

And those customers are going to come to you with questions, requests for new

products or services, and with urgent problems needing to be solved.

You’ll want to interact with those customers in ways that are clear,

satisfying (to the customer!) and which don’t create an enormous drain on your


business. You can’t do that unless Tommy CoWorker has good access to good

information, all the time.

You should care about all of these problems because your customers will

notice, if you don’t care.

A few Solutions

All is not lost. There are many ways to solve these communication

problems effectively. And the lessons for how to do so are not going to come

from the organizational experts, the project wonks, or the toolmongers.

Instead, we’ll take a quiet walk down the hall and have a chat with the one

person in your information business who knows more than anybody else about

how to make sure the right info gets to the right people, at the right time.

It’s this person:

Director of Marketing

The Director of Marketing is an expert. This person provides the following

unique advantages.

● Has been effectively sharing the best information from the brains of teams

since before you even knew you had a problem

● Bases all of his strategies on timetested solutions to the brainsharing

problem

● Knows how to optimize communication and the work put into doing it, and

thereby get the best bang for the buck

● Etc, etc, etc…


The lessons to be learned from the field of information and brain marketing

could fill many books. Here we’ll discuss a few core principles.

Constant Message

Have a constant message:

Everywhere Tommy CoWorker looks, he should see and hear whatever the

Message of the Day is. It should be impossible for him to miss it.

You’ve seen this in politics, in wellbranded TV ads, and in all sorts of

corporate communications that are targeted to the outside consumer. But rarely

do you see this same sort of consistency of communication pointed at the internal

team members. But just as the external consumer needs consistency and

repetition in order to absorb information, so do all the Tommy CoWorkers at

your company.

When you’ve got something to say something you know is important

don’t be afraid to say it twice.

When you’ve got something to say something you know is important

don’t be afraid to say it twice.

Ha!

Refine and Amplify the Message

Keep working on the message and making it better. Every day, the constant

message should become:

● A better, more consistent and substantial message

● More useful, better targeted, and more relevant


● Easier for Tommy CoWorker to grok and use, right now

And the wellharmonized stream of daily messages should be relentlessly

dragging you, your staff, the whole darned organization forward toward

whatever your business goal is. (So it’s good to know, but not absolutely

necessary, what your business goal is.)

If you aren’t sure yet what your business goal is, then the stream and the

constant message should be dragging everyone forward toward a place where

they’ll be able to figure that out. Everything should be in support of getting to a

place where folks have clarity and a stable base from which to work, produce,

further communication, and continually rethink their strategy for continuing to

move forward.

And that place of figuring things out should be inevitable. If even one of

your Tommy CoWorkers can avoid ending up at the place of figuring it all out,

then you’ve failed (and you should dock yourself a day or two of salary!). You

need everyone moving in the same direction and planning to get to the same place

at the end of the journey.

Position Yourself as an Expert

Any marketing guru will tell you that becoming a true influencer in the

information economy requires first gaining the trust and respect of your potential

audience. You do that by convincing folks (for good reasons) that you are truly

the expert the one best able to carry whatever message it is your are trying to

promote.


Don’t expect people to listen to you (even within your own team) simply

because your ideas are good. You need to take it many steps further. You need to

consistently create and distribute...

Highquality, easily consumable information bites

… that are…

always onpoint and supportive of the longrange, wellestablished goals

and priorities of your information business.

You need to do that every time. Over and over. Until people trust you as

the guy who gets them good information the right information, when they need

it.

What you can do Next to Make a Difference

The great thing about the strategy of marketing your team’s brain to

Tommy CoWorker is that it involves everyone. It’s not the job of your manager,

your coworker, your administrative support department (pick your favorite

admin group where you normally rely too heavily on stuff you should be doing

yourself), or even your marketing team. It’s your job either as a team member or

as a leader within a team to be constantly understanding what information is

most important to be communicating, right now, and to who.

That’s a tough job!

Talk to Yourself

Nobody can tell you which thing that you learned today is going to be the

most useful to Tommy CoWorker. Ask yourself:


If I were doing this work right now, as a new employee of this information

business, then would I have questions about how to get something done?

If yes, what are those questions?

The good thing is, since you’re the expert in your job, you’re the best one

to answer exactly the questions that you realize the new guy would be asking.

That’s an advantage you have that nobody else has anyone can claim that

producing suchandsuch a document is the most important next step in

completing a project, but you can actually decide, based on experience, whether

that is true.

You can decide which information is the most important to be marketing,

right now, to Tommy CoWorker.

And then you can act accordingly. That’s efficiency, coming from every

employee, manager, or director who is helping to run the company!

Talk to Your Boss

In the real world of corporate and cubicle life (i.e., where most information

businesses grow and thrive), you do need buyin from the higherups. And

everybody in the organization has a higherup. Even your boss who always seems

to be barking orders at you as if he is in charge of the universe. (We know he’s

not really like that, but sometimes it seems that way, no?)

While it’s true that you are uniquely qualified and empowered to both

decide about and to implement the best information distribution process related to

your own work and projects, part of your goal, really, is to use those market your

best brain strategies in order to get support for the projects you want to work on,


and further support for the projects that you are struggling to push through the

administrative maze of your information business.

So, target your boss. Get him on your side. Give him exactly the

information he needs, when he needs it, and do that every time.

Soon, he’ll be thinking just like you do.

Ha!

Talk to Your Team

Likewise, your projects won’t go anywhere unless your team all the

Tommy CoWorkers around you are willing and able to boldly run forth while

carrying the consistent message of the day toward the end goals of the project.

Learn what your team needs, what they want. Learn how they

communicate. Learn how to package your information in exactly the right format

for them to consume easily. Make it easy. Nobody should have to struggle to

understand the brainshare you are trying to promote. Your team has enough

struggles in each day understanding the information you are passing their way

should not be an additional challenge. It’s your job to make everyone else’s job

easier, regarding information flow and brainsharing.

Talk to Everyone

Likewise for the larger organization make it easy, and make the

understanding inevitable.

Once you start moving out of the realm of your insular team, the challenges

will become more complex. This might be new ground for you. If you’re a tech


guy, you might need to learn how to talk to the sales folks. If you’re a sales guy,

you probably already know how to talk to everybody, but chances are you aren’t

really doing it effectively. Likely, you are talking to everyone as a sales team

member or from a sales pointofview, but most of the people you need to work

with are not going to respond very well to either. Even if they like you and chat

with you at the water cooler, you need to additionally make sure they have

brainshare with you, and that you are properly marketing your ideas, projects,

goals, and priorities to them so that they can work alongside with you, not just

run along behind trying to catchup (assuming they care enough to run after you).

The list of target audiences and complications goes on. But once you learn

how to talk to everyone, you’ll be on the path to starting to really make some

progress (and you’ll become a far more valuable member of whatever

information business you work for!).

Go find Tommy CoWorker. Give him some information he needs, right

now. He’s been waiting for it, and he will thank you for it.


market your team’s brain to tommy co-worker

Documents