“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where –”
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
– Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Having goals in business communications seems one of those “well, duh” kind of ideas. Yet having goals also seems contrary to the Zen idea of living in the moment. The truth is that goals and Zen do coincide; once you have decided your focus and purpose, you need to decide what to do with them. Although just sitting and letting things be, watching the world go by, sounds enticing, it is not one of the steps to Enlightenment.
A great deal of process and thinking is involved in reaching Satori, which is the Zen term for perfect enlightenment about the world around us.
On the other hand, most of us who work in the 21st century American workforce have been inundated with what is known as SMART goals: in other words, goals that are strategic, measureable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. While the intent in the acronym is to help us take our skills to a higher level, we humans usually botch the process. Why? Well, for one, we’ve been goaled to death. Often our performance evaluations and pay are tied to how many times we speak with a client or how many committees we serve on. But using numbers to determine whether we have achieved a rating of “exceeds expectations” or even a mere “meets expectations” is just counting. It’s quantitative, not qualitative. It doesn’t tell how well we did something, only that we did it often.
So we could speak to 10,000 clients and look really good and appear to have blown our target goal out of the water. But if we speak to them all in a really weak manner with poor communication skills, we haven’t done anything productive. We haven’t helped the company. We’ve just done the thing a lot.
Which leads us to another reason humans rarely reach Satori: we scam the goal system. Faced with having to do something many times in order to be considered competent, we don’t think about perfecting even one repetition of the act. Instead, we choose what is easy for us to do, so doing it a lot won’t take much effort.
Or we embrace the moment as a flight of what could be and set impossible goals such as lose 30 pounds, take up racewalking, learn to play the tuba, and climb Mount Kilimanjaro within six months. These goals usually arise from a wish to be someone quite different from who we are. They don’t take into account what changes in us will have to occur in order for us to take the first step toward these goals (what do you mean, I have to give up my three-times-daily caramel latte? And forget walking today; it’s raining.) Such goals usually fail, mainly because we have not considered the scene, the agency, the purpose, or even ourselves in making them. We may not be aware we are scamming the goal system, but we are.
So we react in our human ways. As one shrewd observer pointed out, we are humans being and not humans doing, no matter how we behave. And as Art Markham, University of Texas professor of psychology and marketing, points out in his book Smart Change, our brains are lazy. They are programmed to minimize the amount of time and energy we have to expend on anything (p. 35).1 So what we do is avoid having to change behavior by adding so many abstractions and good intentions that the actual issue becomes clouded—and we can rest easy, knowing that doing anything about that issue is going to be hard. And if it is hard, then we can talk about how hard our goals are—more of the “I” stuff, as in look at me, look at what goals I have set for myself—and avoid the issue altogether.
Unfortunately, this view of goals and goal-setting becomes just more clutter, more stuff that lets us hide from true communication and Satori. Quantity is never quality, and never more so in communication. Remember that concept of getting the I out of your communication? If you’re so focused on the idea that “I have to make six calls today” that the amount becomes more important than the substance, you have not only lost your Zen but also lost the basic idea of why you communicate in the first place.
Take, for example, the story of Jenny, an up-and-coming mid-level manager who was entrusted with managing a group project that was one aspect of a plan that affected the overall company. Jenny welcomed the opportunity with the proverbial open arms. In her initial meetings with her boss, he explained that he wanted her to keep him in the loop as far as what was going on, but that he wouldn’t micromanage; it would be up to her to tell him when he was needed to approve what the group had done. Only then would he give permission for Jenny to decide what the team was to do next.
The project team caught Jenny’s enthusiasm and finished their work ahead of schedule. They especially liked the no-micromanaging part of their task. Proud of them, Jenny spent two hours writing up their work in an Excel and graph format, attaching it to a short email that said, “Hi, Mike, Here’s an analysis of what we have done so far. We welcome your comments.” Two hours later, the boss sent a two-word reply: Good work. Nothing was said about whether he had approved what they had done in its entirety, whether he wanted more detail or development, or even whether he had given permission for them to move on.
Jenny and the team sat puzzled for a few days. Then Jenny added more details to the report and sent it again, attached to another email that said Hi, Mike, I’ve added some more details to the report. Let me know what you think.” A few hours later, the boss replied: Keep up the good work!
Jenny emailed the boss’s assistant to set up a face-to-face meeting, where she asked him if he had read her reports. Yes, he acknowledged, he did. Did he approve of what they had done? Again the answer was yes. Finally, after some more dancing around on Jenny’s part, the boss gently asked her, “What exactly is your goal for this meeting?” When Jenny answered, “to get your permission for us to move on,” the boss said, “You could have asked me that in an email.” Jenny then said that she had thought she had done so with the two emails and attached reports, to which the boss replied, “If your goal was to have me give permission, you should have asked me for that in those exact words in the emails. I thought you were just keeping me in the loop.”
Shamefaced at having wasted the team’s and her boss’s time, Jenny returned to her team to tell them that they had received permission to move on. But stalled by the long delay, the team never regained its initial enthusiasm and finished the next step of the project behind schedule, kissing its effectiveness—and Jenny’s possible promotion—good-bye.
This story has two morals:
1. Data isn’t communication. You can distribute all the graphs and spreadsheets you want, but unless you tell the recipients what you want them to do with the information, most likely they will take a quick look at the numbers and data, nod their heads, retain a small fraction of the information, and forget most of it, moving on with their own lives and projects. You have to tell the readers why you are showing them data or giving them information; just because it makes sense to you, and helps you check off an item on your yearly SMART goal list, doesn’t mean that the information is of value to anyone else. That is, unless you have told them how it can be and what you want them to do with it.
2. The email isn’t the afterthought to the attachment. The attachment is the afterthought to the email. This is especially true when the attachment contains a lot of data. Ever get one of those emails that have no words in them at all, just an attachment? How irritated do you become when you get one of those? The empty message means having to stop your train of thought, open the attachment, scan the attachment, try to make sense of what it is supposed to tell you, and then spend more time trying to figure out what the sender wanted you to do with the information.
Senders of empty emails and the ones with the cryptic one or two sentences that merely announce the attachment exhibit the opposite of the Zen concept of removing the self. The senders may be unaware that their emails are self-centered, but they are: in their hurry to get out the email and demonstrate the sender’s productivity, they wind up stealing time and energy from the readers, which is usually the last thing they should wish to do.
What Jenny could have achieved is better communication by using a Zen approach in both the emails and the face-to-face meeting. To do so, first take a deep breath, a move that sounds cheesy but in actuality allows your focus to widen. Now look at your overall surroundings, noting the other players in the environment.
Too often we get so caught up in our own stuff, intent in charging at our own need to knock down the obstacles and clutter we see in front of us, that we fail to see that a widened focus reveals a much easier and simpler way to progress along our paths.
Now ask yourself, What do I want to happen as a result of this communication? Sometimes that’s a hard question, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the answer is a simple sentence; had Jenny asked herself, What do I want to happen as a result of my sending Mike this report? She could have answered I want him to grant permission to move on to the next stage. If the answer is one simple sentence, then you move on to the next step in basic Zen goal setting: setting the intention. Now ask yourself Have I asked clearly and simply for what I want? Here’s where most of us go wrong. We think we have asked, but imply our request, just as Jenny did. We expect that the receiver knows what we are talking about. We don’t ask.
And here’s where the whole SMART goal thing is misconstrued and can go wrong. We focus so finely on ourselves that we don’t see how we are getting in our own way. We put so much importance on the action that we don’t think about how the action can be perceived and whether it truly will advance us to our goal. SMART goals have their place. But considered in a Zen manner, they aren’t enough. Coupling them with two Zen questions can help improve not only these goals but what they can attain for you and the organization you work for:
“Have I clarified the final intent of this goal to myself as well as to others?”
“Have I considered the environment in which I intend this goal to take place?”
Asking yourself these two questions can lead you to far better results every time.
Let’s explore these ideas a bit further. Asking yourself “Have I clarified the final intent of this goal to myself as well as to others?” has four main parts to it. The best place to start in addressing the parts is in the middle. In Zen, one always starts with what is in front of you, and then moves out to consider what is on the periphery. Look at the word final intent. You have to use that word final. You might think that your goal—your intent—is to send off the report. But it isn’t. If hitting the send button was a goal, we would all be extra-high performers. Sending off the report is an action toward the goal, but it doesn’t address the final intent of the goal. What we have to do is think about the whole process of each action until there isn’t an action left.
How? Imagine each step after you hit Send. What will then happen? The email will arrive in someone’s inbox—or not, because there’s always a chance of things being lost in cyberspace. But let’s say that it does. Then what?
A July 2012 McKinsey Global Institute report found that the average knowledge worker spent 14 hours a week, or 28 percent of his work week, on email.2 Think about that. We are inundated with email. People send us everything from notices that cake is in the breakroom to interoffice newsletters that mainly tell us who’s having a birthday. This average worker, however, has to be on top of these frequent messages. He has to scan through them all, prioritize which ones he wants to read when, and then again quickly scan the message to see what is required of him. (And then realize that the cake email came from a different company location and the cake is only in the office in Pittsburgh.)
Now imagine the result you want; if you are Jenny, you want the boss to approve the project. But is that all you want? And is it in the form that you want it? Imagine how this approval could happen: he could say to himself, OK, time to move on, and then go to the next email, meaning to reply later—and possibly forgetting to do so or doing so much later than you desired. Do you need only verbal approval, or would written approval make taking the next steps easier down the road?
So let’s say that what you really want is to have the boss immediately respond with You have permission to move to the next stage of the project. If that’s your final intent, that’s what you focus on. You have set the final intention of the goal. And you have clarified to yourself that is what you want. Often we also think that because we have clarified the goal to ourselves, naturally we have clarified the goals to others. Because that isn’t often the case, we need to move on to the second question: “Have I considered the environment in which I intend this goal to take place?”
Computers are marvelous inventions. But they are also the ultimate narcissistic tool; we stare at their screens so much that we lose awareness of those around us. They trick us into believing that we are all that is important and that our words are clear because we said so. Think about it; the computer screen always loves us. It never frowns at us, never interrupts, never questions. It will occasionally shut down, but when it starts back up, it doesn’t yell at us. It offers much to distract us, so that when we go back to what we need to be doing, we may not take into account a lapse in continuity of thought. In fact, as Adam Gopnik implies in his clever novel The King in the Window, if we’re not careful, these little devils can steal our souls.3
So as we set out goals, we need to revisit that good old Zen practice of removing ourselves from the picture for a moment. Let’s get that self-centered solipsism out of the way for second. We’ve envisioned what we want to happen when we hit Send—but have we envisioned what may happen when the other person gets that familiar ping announcing a new message?
This consideration of the larger environment may be as simple as taking three seconds to remember that the person you need information from ASAP may be out of town in training. If so, you’re not likely to get that information any time soon. It may be a little more complicated, as in realizing that the person you’re contacting may be under a deadline to finish a huge report, which means that either she won’t be looking at her inbox at all or will be irritated that you had the gall to ask her to take a minute out of her already tight timeline to attend to your needs.
Or maybe something is going on in the department or company that may make your goal come across as inconsiderate or even crass. Asking for permission to take your team to the next step of a project may not be exactly wise when your boss is considering budget cuts, for instance. You may still need his permission, but being aware of his situation and his operating environment may convince you to alter your goal a bit. You might, for instance, more effectively craft your message by acknowledging your boss’s current situation and explaining why you are bothering him. This blithe wording likely will not achieve your purpose:
Hi, Mike, we think we’ve knocked stage one out of the park and would love for you to tell us to start stage two ASAP.
Instead, you could craft your goal to fit within the needs of the organization:
Hi, Mike, I realize this isn’t the best time to ask you anything, but the team and I are wondering if we should start planning stage 2. I’ve attached a report that breaks down all that we have done as well as our analysis of those actions. If you have time to read it in the next 48 hours and can give me the go-ahead or at least some direction, that would be wonderful. That way the team can keep their momentum if we are indeed going forward. Let me know if you need anything or any help that I can offer.
With such a reworded message, you’re not coming across as just me-centered. You’ll also note that in this reworded email, you’ve actually communicated two goals: (1) you need his permission, and (2) in this environment, you and the team want to know if the project—and your team—is still part of the company’s plan.
This leads to another important aspect of goal setting: you can have several layers of goals in one message. Your main goal, known as the primary goal, is always present. But you can also have a secondary goal, as the situation above illustrates. You could also have a tertiary goal, which is usually a minor goal that is embedded in the previous two. Here again taking those few seconds to evaluate the environment you’re communicating in will help you recognize what you should do. Maybe you’re the boss, and you need to send Jenny and her crew the go-ahead for stage two, but you also need to send the message that while the company may be making huge cuts in operating expenses you are relying on their enthusiasm and professionalism to continue. In this manner, the go-ahead is the primary goal while the motivational message is the secondary goal. By acknowledging the offer of help—and perhaps delegating a task that would help you—you also meet a tertiary goal of reassuring Jenny that her job at least is not in jeopardy.
All This Sounds Like Strategy
It is. Part of a Zen approach is thinking about the best way to proceed on your path. Taking the path of least resistance is usually the smarter way to travel. Note that as you read the preceding sentence, read it in the Zen manner: not about you. We’re not necessarily talking about you resisting less; perhaps what you need here is the receiver taking the path of least resistance. Setting up a situation of acknowledging the reader and his working environment lowers emotional walls, which in turn increases your chances of a favorable outcome. Be aware, however, that you can overthink the choice, which leads to indecision.
Stay true to your purpose and your sense of identity, recognizing the scene and the agency, and the way will become clear.
As Yogi Berra said, when you come to a fork in the road, take it. The elements we’ve considered in this chapter, plus an understanding of your audience, will help you achieve your goals.
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1See Markham (2014).
2See McKinsey Global Institute (2012).
3See Gopnik (2005).