…who are you actually Compressing in that room?
“…but you always say 3 sentences too many”
“You know Mark, you are brilliant… but you always say 3 sentences too many. And… I know when you are going to do it.”
Good feedback rarely includes the words “you always”… and spouses should note that. But this mentor had standing with me. He had watched me long enough to be right, which did not make it any easier to hear. Then he gave me the mechanism. “When you are about to do it, you start to hit the table with your hand.” Like Nikita Khrushchev? “Yep.”
Your best people stopped telling you the thing everybody else already knows. What would they say your tell is, if you asked today and promised in advance not to argue with the answer?
…managing to not hit the table…
“I do not. I have never hit a table in my life!!!” A wry smile from him, and we walked into a tense meeting.
Back and forth it went, and I started sharing my “wisdom”… and I caught my own hand heading for the table out of the corner of my eye. I froze. My mentor, in the corner, winked at me. I simply stopped. Everyone turned to see what had happened. I said nothing.
That was my Compressor, installed by hand, by somebody who had listened to my “signal” long enough to know exactly where it clipped. He did not tell me to talk less. He told me where I clipped. After that, when I felt twitchy, I stopped talking. It worked. People noticed. I got better at being understood, which was the thing I had wanted in the first place.
… would you like another take?
Compression on a record is a setting, and somebody chooses it. A threshold, above which the signal gets held down, and a ratio, which is how hard. Set it gently and the record breathes. Set it hard and everything arrives at the same volume, which is another way of saying nothing arrives at all.
In May 1991, at Sound City in Van Nuys, Nirvana’s producer Butch Vig spent most of a month on this band’s second record. He asked for multiple takes. He asked for double tracked vocals and overdubbed layers of guitar. Kurt resisted those techniques at first and came round to them later. That is a manager’s job described exactly: not making somebody else’s signal smaller, but holding the loud part down so the rest of it can finally be heard by people standing a long way off.
Who has permission to manage your signal…?
For 20 years I ran mine hard and called it leadership. The only reason I ever found the dial was that a man in the corner of a meeting knew where my hand was going before I did.
The word for what my mentor had is standing. When I work with leaders on gathering feedback, I push them to think hard about who not only knows them but has their best interests at heart. Not harsh, not soft. People who actually want to see you improve. Brene Brown puts it as a list 1 inch by 1 inch, handwritten, family and friends included. If the person handing you advice is not on the list, smile and move on.
I got very good at noticing who was on my list and who was just noise. Some of it was harsh. Some of it was hard to hear on the day. All of it was making me better, and it was the me I actually wanted to be. And the part I did not see at the time is that standing runs both ways… every person you manage is deciding, quietly, whether you are on theirs.
In Bloom is a song about the distance between the people singing along and the people who know what the song says. Every manager inherits that distance on day 1, and most of us never measure it once. We turn the Compression up instead, say it shorter and louder, and mistake the nodding for understanding.
…before you Compress what you really meant
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: Before you clarify anything today, before you explain what you really meant, ask the person closest to you on the org chart… what did you hear me say?
Learning to manage your own signal starts with the 1 person who knows where you clip, and finding that person is a call I love to take. Schedule time with me here.
Nobody ever told you your own tell, and somebody has been waiting years to be asked. That is the difference between a room that nods and a room… In Bloom
