For Your Approval

A few notes from the road

I've had a chance to reflect on my recent speaking (and cooking) engagements in Houston and Toronto and thought I'd share some of my observations with FYA readers:

1. IABC members are kind, hospitable, intelligent folks who treat me like a member of their family wherever I go. Which was particularly satisfying in Houston, considering that I staged an unusual barbecue demonstration for a group of TEXANS. Yikes! I'm lucky I made it out of there with my tongs intact. (See the photos here and the local coverage here.)
2. Everybody in our profession is thinking and talking about the exciting and anxiety-inducing world of social media -- and lots are also diving in, too. A show of hands revealed that at least 80 or 90 per cent of the big crowd who turned up to see my IABC Toronto talk are twittering. Which is a good sign, even if twitter may not turn out to be The Next Big Thing, because ...
3. Exactly NONE of the 40 or so very smart HR people I talked to the next morning at a Conference Board of Canada HR conference are trading tweets. That spells opportunity for the more Web 2.0-savvy communicators, who can use their hands-on experience to help bring their HR colleagues and senior executives on board.
4. Or maybe the IABC group's twitter mania is an indication of just how desperate employee communicators are to get on the latest technological bandwagon so they can escape their nightmarish day-to-day existence maintaining outdated, clunky intranets and dealing with skittish, change-averse leaders who drive them crazy with their old-school ideas. Just kidding!
5. Which brings me to a final anecdote.  It's from the last day of my Toronto trip, at a half-day in-house workshop I delivered to the communications team of a big insurance company.  This stinging observation came from the intranet manager: "The kids coming into our workplace today can do more on their cell phones than on our intranet." That statement alone should be a wake-up call for communicators and business leaders everywhere.

[Special thanks to my many generous hosts, and to Toronto's William Smith and Houston's Chris Salvo for the great photos!]

Canadian Barbecue Guru Mixes Business with Brisket

This just came over the wire. If you know any communicators in Houston, please spread the word!

Creative Conversations part three: Push yourself beyond your boundaries

Here's a link to part three of Steve Crescenzo's interview with me on his Creative Conversations podcast, in which I use a dessert - cedar planked pears with ice wine and lavender reduction - to bring it all together and talk about the new world of social media.

Creative conversations part two: are you a chicken or a pork butt?

The second installment of my talk with Steve Crescenzo about barbecue as a metaphor for communications has been posted. Find it here. What fun!

And I'm delighted to report that I've been invited by IABC's Houston chapter to deliver my "Everything I Know about Communication I Learned From Barbecue" talk as a luncheon session on Feb. 26th, followed by an afternoon workshop on best practices in employee communications. This is the fulfillment of two of my biggest career goals: to bring my message of barbecue's healing power to other communicators, and to take in the World's Championship Bar-B-Que Contest, which coincides with my visit.

Needless to say, I am in hog heaven right now.

Barbecue Academy now booking for the fall season

A few years ago I launched Barbecue Academy^ⓒ. It's a day-long corporate teambuilding workshop that teaches participants about championship barbecue in a fun, relaxing atmosphere with plenty of room for socializing.

I think it's the only event of its kind in the world. There are lots of hands-on barbecue workshops for the public, and some of the big barbecue celebrities in the U.S. do corporate cooking demos and catered events. And there are even some corporate team building workshops based on cooking contests. But, as far as I know, this is the only corporate workshop that creates a competitive environment for participants, who divide into teams, prep and cook real barbecued chicken and ribs, and vie for cheap plastic trophies just like the big boys.

I've done three of them so far, for energy companies in Calgary, with positive feedback.

Here's what some of the participants have said:

 “You learn a little about smoking and barbecue, and a whole bunch about some folks that I don’t normally work with. We all had fun!”

“A great teambuilding event. The service was outstanding.”

“Lots of laughter, lots of concentration, great tastes, lots of enthusiasm from everyone.”

“An opportunity to mix in a creative environment.”

“It was a great day and I am full!”

“This was an exceptional workshop. It is filled with the science, the art and the lifestyle of barbecue. Ron is very knowledgeable and entertaining.”

“Ron’s team is terrific! Everyone is friendly, fun and extremely knowledgeable. I thoroughly enjoyed myself!”

“Fostered good camaraderie while incorporating some healthy competition. Highly recommended!”

I love putting on these workshops, and I want to do more. So far, I've done them only in Calgary, where I've found a great facility, but the concept is portable. I'm now booking sessions into this fall, and I'd like to do at least one in Vancouver.

Here's a promo sheet:

Download BBQ Academy promo

Please pass it on to anyone you know who might be interested.

Back to barbecue

My barbecue team, the Butt Shredders, reunited last weekend after a two-year break to compete in the Canadian National BBQ Championships in Whistler, B.C. It was great fun. We cooked, we trash-talked, we had more than a few drinks, and in the end we took home a couple of ribbons and enough prize money to pay some of our expenses.

It was also a lot of hard work, involving weeks of planning and preparation, a gruelling eight-hour drive to the contest and an intensive bout of heavy-duty cooking and cleaning that saw us turn in entries in seven food categories over two days.

As the contest progressed I couldn't help being reminded of what a great metaphor barbecue is for communication -- and for life in general, for that matter. Here are a couple of things I learned from this contest:

• Old habits die hard. For the last several years we've always turned in ribs that were undercooked. This year we did the same, even though, deep down, we should have known to put them on an hour or two earlier than usual. But we didn't, and we came a disappointing 11th in ribs. It's the same in communications. Sometimes we know what a great product looks like, but we continue to produce a mediocre one because, well, that's what we've done for as long as we can remember and we just can't break out of the old mold. Sometimes the best way to get out of that habit is to change companies so you can start afresh, and your employer can turn around and hire someone fresh. As far as the ribs go, NEXT TIME we're going to put them on sooner. Which, unfortunately, means starting to prep them at 4.30 a.m. Yuck.
• Practice and diligence lead to success. One of my team members, Vince, has been in charge of the chicken category for years and inherited an old recipe that used to win ribbons, but it hadn't for years -- even though we stuck with the exact same procedure to the letter. Vince finally broke with the past and developed his own version of the recipe. He created a new pomegranate juice-based brine and a finishing technique that involved transferring the chicken thighs from the smoker to a charcoal grill to crisp up the skin and add some classic charred flavor. And it worked, with a very strong second place finish. What does that mean for communication? I guess it's pretty simple. Most communicators go through periods where we're plagued by problems and can't seem to find a way out. The mark of a great communicator is to work so hard that the problems end up turning into successes that we're ultimately proud to own. One of my favorite career management gurus, Marilyn Moats Kennedy, says the way to solve the many work-related problems that come with most jobs is not to be overwhelmed by all of them, but to "kill the Bogeys, one at a time, till they're all gone." That's what Vince did, finally, with that chicken recipe, and that's what we can all do in difficult circumstances at work.
• Presentation is as important as content. Our finest moment of the contest was a first place finish in the chef's choice contest, which is kind of an unlimited category. We presented one of my favorite dishes, alder-planked salmon with a glaze made with Jack Daniel's, maple syrup, crushed chiles and butter. It's a great tasting dish, but it also presents extremely well, a beautiful, glistening side of salmon on a big, thick, rustic alder plank that was still crackling and smoking when it got to the judging table. In barbecue contests there's an old saying that goes, "the judges eat first with their eyes." The same goes for any kind of communication. If it's presented in an appealing way, there's a much better chance of it being understood.

Communication Cookout: Links to the entire series

For your convenience, here's a list of links to my recent series of posts under the theme, Communication Cookout, in the order in which they were posted:

Communication Cookout: Woo hoo, let's barbecue!

Communication Cookout (Part I): Simply Asparagus

Communication Cookout (Part II): Consider the Quesadilla

Communication Cookout (Part III): Tending the Fire

Communication Cookout (Part IV): Are You a Chicken or a Pork Butt?

Communication Cookout (Part V): The Science of the Lamb

Communication Cookout (Part VI): Just Dessert

Communication Cookout (Part VI): Just Dessert

As we come to the end of our Communication Cookout, I’m compelled to think about the future of our profession.

The dessert is a dilly: Mission Hill Pears with Rhubarb Compote. Perfectly ripe Anjou pears are grilled until tender on a cedar plank, then treated to drizzles of lavender-icewine reduction, rhubarb compote made with late-harvest Vidal wine, honey-whisky sauce and a dollop of whipped cream flavoured with vanilla bean.

The recipe was developed by a friend of mine, Michael Allemeier, who is the winery chef of Mission Hill Family Estate, the leading estate winery in Canada. Unlike me, Michael is a true chef, with incredible instincts, and he has taken some of my ideas and gone quite a ways beyond them in this recipe.

And so the metaphor to go with dessert is about pushing ourselves beyond our normal boundaries and using new technologies to enhance our communciations.

Yes, I’m talking about “social media” — the world of blogs, podcasts, wikis and streaming video. Web 2.0, as some call it. And in this area, my friend Shel Holtz is my Michael Allemeier.

Shel, through his blog, A Shel of My Former Self, and his co-hosted podcast (with Neville Hobson), For Immediate Release, has opened my eyes and ears to this new world. At Shel’s prodding, I launched a blog about employee communication, For Your Approval. And, inspired by For Immediate Release, I created the Barbecue Secrets podcast, an internet radio show that celebrates the many pleasures of outdoor cooking.

Shel and his fellow cyber-libertarians have been preaching the gospel of social media for some time now, talking about the “collision of technology and communication” and positing a glorious future in which organizations engage in a refreshingly open, transparent conversation with their customers, employees and other stakeholders.

The new technology is an enabler, unleashing the hidden power of the individual. By embracing social media and encouraging blogging and podcasting and such, corporations will gain a competitive edge. Their customers will be thrilled with the increased human contact, and their employees will all become enthusiastic brand ambassadors, lifting everyone to new levels of service and innovation.

Obviously we’re not there yet, and some might call the evangelistic zeal of the Shels and Nevilles of the world a bit of wishful thinking mixed with shameless self-promotion.

Not me. I absolutely love it, and I have not been this excited since the advent of desktop publishing over 20 years ago. We are on the edge of a huge and positive change in the way organizations communicate, and every one of us should be paying close attention to the social media phenomenon, even though it has not hit the mainstream yet.

Internal communication in large organizations has gone through a dark age over the past decade, with the blind adoption of Intranet and e-mail and the nearly complete abandonment of print. In the process of embracing the Internet, we have inadvertently disenfranchised millions of front-line employees by throwing away our main link with them — the print publication. Finally, the new social media arrive, and although they still cannot replace print, they do encourage something that does not happen very much in today’s large organzation: a real, honest conversation.

Social media are designed to encourage dialogue, debate, creativity and collaboration. Just as the pears of our dessert are infused with the aromatic flavor of cedar and enhanced with innovative and unusual flavor combinations, let us infuse our organizations with refreshing new ways to communicate, enhanced by new technologies that make it easy, once again, to have a simple conversation.

Communication Cookout (Part V): The Science of the Lamb

The last meat course of the Communciation Cookout is Grilled Rack of Lamb with Balsamic Reduction.

Racks of lamb are marinated overnight in a vinaigrette with Dijon mustard, olive oil, lemon juice, garlic and fresh rosemary. Just before grilling, they’re taken out of the marinade, dusted with granulated garlic and a touch of cayenne pepper, and coated with a mediterranean dried herbed rub. They are then coated with olive oil and placed on a medium-hot grill, where they develop a lovely crust while cooking.

After coming off the grill, they are given a five-minute rest and carved into individual chops. A drizzle of balsamic reduction (balsamic vinegar that’s boiled down to a thick syrup), a little kosher salt, and some chopped fresh mint finish off the dish, which is served as a finger food.

There are two things about communication that this dish illustrates. One is is all about balance, the other about measurement.

First let's talk about balance. The richness of the lamb is counterbalanced by the tangy marinade and the sweet and sour balsamic drizzle. The mildly gamey flavor of the lamb is rounded out with the earthiness of the dried herbs, the mild bite of the cayenne and the charred flavor from the heat of the grill.

In the end, it all works together to deliver a great eating experience. And so it is with communication. To deliver a great experience to whomever we’re communicating with, we need to take a balanced approach. We need to plan whatever we’re doing — to marinate it, if you will, in sound communication principles, to prepare it according to the rules of strategic communication. This means doing our research and analysis, determining the right audiences, developing key messages, delivering those messages through the right channels, and, finally, evaluating the effectiveness of what we have communicated.

As we are preparing and serving up our communications, we need to balance our planned approach with the flexibility to react effectively if the situation changes. We must balance our desire to use creative, innovative tactics with the need to keep things as simple and direct as possible. And we need to balance the desire of executives to water down and sugar-coat information with the powerful craving all employees have with the unvarnished truth.

Without that cayenne pepper, the lamb is missing an edge. And without honest, transparent internal communication that addresses important issues in a frank and open way, our messages are as dull and bland as fast food, and just as nutritious.

A last word here about measurement. In barbecue contests we use a remote digital thermoter to accurately measure the internat temperature of our meat. We also use a chamber thermometer to measure the temperature of the inside of our cooker. These measures are important, but just as important (and sometimes more useful) is the simple touch of a finger or a look at the colour of the crust to determine the doneness of the meat.

We need to measure the impact of our communication using the latest technological tools, but there's something to be said for good old instinct and editorial judgement.

Communciation Cookout (Part IV): Are You A Chicken or a Pork Butt?

Now we come to the main event: the Classic Barbecued Pulled Pork Sandwich with Tidewater Coleslaw.

This is the way they eat barbecue on the eastern seaboard of the United States — in Georgia, and the Carolinas. A pork shoulder is cooked over a charcoal and/or hardwood fire at a low temperature for a long time (as much as 18 hours) until it becomes so tender that it’s almost falling apart. Then it’s pulled or shredded (hence the name of my barbecue team, the Butt Shredders), sauced, and piled onto a fluffy white bun and topped with sweet, tangy coleslaw.

One doesn’t usually associate pork with the word fluffy, but a great pulled pork sandwich has a soft, fluffy texture and an incredible sweet, savory, tangy, spicy, smoky, rich flavor that you don’t just eat it — you inhale it!

Pork shoulder is one of the four official categories of barbecue competitions sanctioned by the leading governing body of barbecue, the Kansas City Barbecue Society. The other categories are chicken, pork ribs, and beef brisket. To become a Grand Champion, one must compete in all four categories and the winner is decided on the cumulative point score. In 2004 at the Jack Daniel’s Invitational World Championship Barbecue, our pork butt came second on the planet. Not bad for a bunch of hosers from Canada, eh?

On to the metaphor. Just as there are four official categories in a barbecue competition, there are four basic personality types in the workplace, and communicators have to understand this as we design and build our employee communications.

This is my version of the Myers-Briggs or True Colors models of personality types. Here goes:

• Chicken-types are sensitive, romantic, artistic people who define themselves based on their relationships with others and tend to see the big picture. Like their namesake meat, they are relatively neutral in flavour and see both sides of an issue. They are the peacemaker when arguments break out, and they appreciate it when their efforts are recognized.
• Rib-types are extorverted and approachable but tend to get bored when they aren’t the center of attention. They are never satisfied with the status quo, and they often don’t feel a part of mainstream society. Like their namesake meat, they can be dry and tempermental and are easily overdone/misunderstood.
• Pork Butt-types are solid, logical, analytical, introverted and independent. They don’t jump to conclusions but would rather think things through in a systematic way. They’re perfectionistic, steady, cautious and like to abide by tradition. They’re money-conscious and risk-averse and they don’t take well to instruction.
• Finally, the Brisket-type person is a natural leader, a dominating force. They like to be in control and they are motivated by the achievement of power and domination. They crave adventure and they are not happy unless they are constantly producing, whatever that product may be. They are driven by instinct and common sense rather than analysis and they can be quite insensitive to the feelings of others — even ruthless at times.

As communicators, what can we learn from these four meats?

First, that we should not ever consider our audience in a monolithic way. That is, we need to understand that the employee population of any organization is made up of many different types of people, with different characteristics, different ways of looking at things, and different motivations. Not everyone is motivated by money, but some are. Not everyone craves stability, but some do. Understanding and respect for the diversity of people in today’s workplace is perhaps the first rule of effective communication.

Another thing. Most communicators are chickens. With maybe some ribs thrown in. We have a love-hate relationship with brisket people and pork butts. We need them because they have important qualities that we don’t, but we also have trouble understanding them and are easily hurt and manipulated by them.