Leadership Lessons from a Charity Event

I recently organized a charity event, Help-Portrait, in its Fort Lauderdale chapter. Help-Portrait involves taking professional portraits of people in need and giving out the pictures. The idea is pretty simple, but sometimes very touching stories can be heard. I tried to regularly blog about to document the process and I included one about the process of coordinating it. This is an excerpt that reads more like a Leadership workshop, so I thought I would include it here! The principles are simple, and while the rest of the post is Help-Portrait related, it applies to any endeavor.

So, How do you bring together a 30+ motley crew of Photographers, Makeup Artists, Hairdressers, Volunteers with NO PAY, make them show up at countless meetings, pitch in money and resources, have them show up at your location at 8:00 AM on probably the busiest portrait Saturday of the year, have them work their a**es off ALL DAY for you, then WORK MORE editing and proofing the photographs and finally turn them in? Piece of cake. :-)

1.- Engage people. Nobody does nothing alone. You need allies. Start selling the dream to everybody you find in your way and focus on the end result, tell stories about how the outcome of your work can change lives. This will also flex your persuasion muscles and get you ready for when the time comes to sell the idea to sponsors, etc.

2.- Empower people. Remember when I told you you need allies? Well, this is it. Identify key, committed people in your recruits. Assign them specific goals and let them do their thing. The biggest asset that you are gaining when working with other people is that they can make decisions on their own and take initiative. Let it happen and encourage it. Here is another tip: Don't know who to assign which job? ASK. People will be more enthusiast about what they do if it is something that they want to do, let it be their idea.

3.- Delegate. Your function as a leader is to be at the helm. Don't worry, you will have plenty of stuff to do just with that, and you WILL be pitching in a lot. Pay attention to the next two points.

4.- Prioritize. This is absolutely critical to maintain focus. Make it clear that you are not dismissing ideas, you are just indicating what has to happen first and where are the resources going. In this sense (maybe we should have a whole post about this) and for a Help-Portrait event here are some key priorities in order of importance: Find a venue, Find an Audience, Recruit Professional Photographers with Equipment, Recruit Hairdressers/Makeup Artists, Find sponsors for Printing, food, office supplies, etc., plan the logistics of the event and the delivery of the product. As you can see, this is an attempt of putting everything in order starting with the biggest issue first. One way of doing this is to ask yourself at every step, What would absolutely ruin my event?

5.- Celebrate. Who doesn't like a party? Every time you have a breakthrough, announce it and celebrate. Same with people doing a good job. This helps to reinforce the type of work you need and also instills the notion that you are making progress.

6.- Communicate the hell out of everything. Tell everybody over and over again what's the goal, where are you going, what's the priority at hand and don't forget to drive the process home. If everybody knows what you are supposed to do, anybody can fill in a job temporarily if needed and decisions made at "the edge" become better decision, more in-tune with the goal and the process in mind.

7.- Repeat. No, seriously, Engage-Empower-Delegate-Prioritize-Celebrate- Communicate.

Planning stunning events

Part of a marketer's job is to throw a heck of a party every once in a while. Being in Channel Management for many years where the line between Sales and Marketing blurs, usually because of lack of resources, I have been involved in a few of these, some of them as large as 600 people spanning a week in lenght.
Here are some tips to make for an exceptional event:

Mind the audience. Always think on who is the event for. Target EVERYTHING to this audience. Focus on your niche. This is what ultimately going to show the value of the event, a high concentration of interests in one place and at one time.

Cover the basics. Make sure that you are covering your audience expectations. Ask yourself what is what HAS to be there. Make it happen.

Do not underestimate the networking. This is one of the biggest reasons why people attend events, to hook up with clients, suppliers and to pick the brains of their colleagues and competitors. Allow plenty of time for networking and make every time slot conducive for connecting. Provide means of sharing contact info, like an opt-in list to be distributed among attendees. Create activities with smaller groups, this is more conducive for peer-to-peer interaction as well as for Q/A sessions and information gathering.

Plan for the 5-year old. Well, almost. Keep changing the activities every 30-min to 1 hour. This will keep the audience engaged.

Change wardrobe. Or the drapes. Rearrange furniture. Mix it up and change the format of the presentations. Too many powerpoints? Conduct an interview on stage. Bring in a panel of experts. Show a video. Move the audience from one room to the other.

Think Hollywood. With whatever your resources are, think about making an impact. It does not matter if it is somewhat unrelated and not purely business, three months after the event nobody is going to remember the content of slide 5 of your presentation, but they will remember the CEO riding on to the stage with a Harley or the cigar roller at the Cuban-themed party.

Left brain, Right brain, repeat. Plan, plan and then plan some more. Hold meetings with every stakeholder, do a dry run on everything to make sure that it flows correctly. But be prepared and accept chaos, things WILL fall apart and you will have to make changes on the fly.

Keep tabs on the team. Remember to record all the phone numbers. Have a radio system. Hold staff meetings first thing in the morning. This will help you have a backup individual for everything and you will be able to contact them when something goes astray.

Assign shifts. Admit it. You cannot work 24/7. Make it clear who is in charge and when, and give yourself some time to participate and network yourself.

Just came in: FB replaces all platforms

It goes something like this:

Joe Posted Something on your Wall:

"Honey, we ran out of paper at the downstairs powder room"

Lucia commented on your post:

"Look in the cabinet, there should be more there"

Joe commented on his post:

"Nope"

Lucia commented on your post:

"I will be there in a minute, writing something on fb"

Edward commented on your post:

"We always keep plenty in the cabinet too, seems to work for us"

Joe commented on his post:

"Hurry up honey"

With the widespread adoption of a communication technology -or any technology for that matter- there is always a moment in time when somebody figures out a "original way of using it" or a way of misusing it.

The ping-pong email is a famous one, where people interact by exchanging one-liners through email and expecting immediate answers. The 15-minute voicemail, the two-party conference bridge dial-in are other examples of this.

Exchanges like the opening one, while exaggerated for illustration purposes are becoming more prevalent. The point here is that the parties could just talk to each other, and there is no benefit in having this conversation on fb, where usually the objective is to capitalize on your friends input, enriching the discussion, or simply because there is something worth sharing, either because it sublime or entertaining.

The parties do have a technological alternative that fits better their communication needs, but they are just resorting to fb (or whatever they choose) because of pure laziness.

Horror Gallery of Corporate

Deep in the dungeons of the corporation, some of the most cruel and horrific tortures are inflicted on those that voluntarily accept them. These are nightmares that attack me during my deepest REM sleep. I hesitated to put them out in the open, but here they are. These will be a rolling list that will get more added, but hopefully not that many. Here are the first six:

Death by Ping-Pong email

This horrific procedure is based on the fact that each short, seldom self-contained email drains the energy of the responder. It slowly bleeds away the individual involved in the conversation and warps time. Each three second email consumes about 15-20 minutes of preparation. After five iterations the procedure starts to approach lethal consequences because it slowly erodes hope that anything can be accomplished at all.

Suffocation by back-to-back meetings

Many of us have experienced this. Back to back meetings drain the oxygen around any real work and thinking. It is only lethal in instances where it is also accompanied by starvation, but the risk of permanent brain damage is very high.

The DOS attack

This is a particularly cruel practice that is applied usually to those on solitary confinement. Consists in taking away your resources to do the things you are supposed to do by introducing a resource hog that eats up any trace of surplus resources. Manifestations of this type of attack can be the "Quick question" every 30 minutes, or variations of the Ping-Pong email and the Back-to-Back meeting.

Traction torture

This is a widely utilized technique when achieve resignation or ruining someone's career is an objective. Consists in having the condemned individual report to two different bosses with different agendas. The two bosses eventually end up pulling apart the individual until it is impossible to meet objectives or put his/her body parts together.

The Trojan Tool

This is a technique that is practiced by top executives that are masters in the art of deception. It consists of making mandatory the use of cumbersome tools of questionable value. It is particularly deceptive because it is usually disguised as something useful and as a time-saving tool.

The Suicide Bomber VP

These are a common threat, but they are very hard to spot. It consists in committing to unattainable goals, some times self-proposed as means of gaining visibility in the corporation, bonuses, or just showing off. Then it is just a matter of time. It takes between 2 or 3 Quarters to build enough pressure to detonate, however it becomes very hot around the SBVP; so hot that it is unbearable. At this point it can be more easily detected but usually very few people point it out. Once it detonates, it takes the whole department with it.

Working ourselves out of a job...

This is probably going to give away my age, if I haven't already.

When I started working in the Telecom industry, everything was shiny and new and the future was so bright that we wore our RayBan Wayfarers at night.

With great power, great responsibility came with it, in many cases and particularly with my engagement in developing markets, our work was somewhat heroic, deploying life-changing technologies and greatly impacting the quality of lives of the population at large. From enabling businesses to the levels of first-world countries, putting internet under the fingertips of the kids attending schools accessible only by dirt roads, to the birth of the mobile information society and the freemium long distance services.

While we did this, my colleagues and I were in privileged positions, calling a developed country our residence and working for staple-name corporations. We were the only ones that could do this job.

As the transfer of these technologies further advanced, we saw the world shrink and flatten and our colleagues on the other side of the wire get more empowered. The result now is that in many of the more mature technologies, the ones doing the work we used to do are no longer our neighbors.

When we foresaw these changes, we recognized them as a shift in paradigm and to a certain point, we succeeded in achieving these but somehow in the process, we might have worked ourselves of a job....

Time to grow up, dude...

Corporations many times are compared with real people. They are born, they die, can be sued, they pay taxes, etc. Free speech is a debate. Many of them evolve a quite identifiable persona.

Pretty much as people, we expect them to grow in all aspects and live a full life. That's what this entry is about. Social Responsibility. Very much like a guy who just steps into the picture to take care of some issue, we are OK with new and -specially- small corporations to be focused on task.

They have one thing to do, they do it well and they do nothing else.

Now, once they grow bigger and older, we start to look at them in a different light. We expect them to do all sorts of things. Give back to the community, create jobs, pay well and play nice. Just like we do with older guys. They have been around here, we expect them to pitch in somehow, be nice, don't just talk about the $%^& work, even party a bit and have a beer with us. If they don't, we call them a "Jerk" or in the best case, we declare that they "lack social skills".

So, aren't our Corporation's Social Responsibility expectations just another way of humanizing them?