Sound Advice

Sometimes you just gotta hit 'em over the head.

Twenty-five or so years ago, an area I managed had several people in positions based on a modified version of matrix management. These people were in place to coordinate and report on large projects within the corporation. The formal reports occurred monthly and were made to the president and senior staff. Those people comprised "steering committee" sorts of bodies and the senior staff members varied from project to project, signing off on plans and through these reports monitoring progress. I attended these reporting sessions.

To qualify for this process a project had to have a budget of a million dollars or more and had to cross vice-presidential lines.

It was the responsibility of my managers in this process to be lightning rods, among other things identifying slippage or new problems in projects to these governing bodies. One result of this responsibility was that they could not actually "manage" these projects, as they were to have no parochial interest in not reporting problems in any aspect of the effort. Another result was that they simply *had* to report honestly, fingering different areas with project performance problems. This was done as tactfully as possible, of course, but still the reporter was sometimes intensely disliked, at least briefly, for having done this.

All that is the long way, I suppose, of saying that they had very important responsibilities and reported to people who were very important, at least within the company.

One of the managers (who were all women, by the way) was Taylor, who was thirtyish, and who had responsibility for a twenty million dollar project, then the largest ongoing such effort in the company. She was more than competent - good at coordinating, good at mediating conflicts between areas, and good at reporting to the president and senior staff.

Until . . . overnight she acquired the bad habit of interjecting "ah" between sentences and even between phrases in her presentations. "So the . . . ah . . . this process was . . . ah . . . moved back a week to . . . ah . . . accommodate the new requirement."

Taylor's boss was a director, Kim, who reported to me, and after the first "ah" session I spoke with her and we agreed that she would talk to Taylor about it.

In her next report, Taylor did much better, but the report after that was a disaster. I kept count on a sheet of paper, and if my memory is correct there were something on the order of seventy "ahs" in an hour.

After the report I went back to my office to drop off some papers, and before I could head for Kim's office she entered mine. She said, "I know, I know. How do you feel about sending her to some kind of course on public speaking?"

We agreed on that and off went Taylor to a five day seminar. When she returned the "ahs" had disappeared completely.

For a few months.

One day they reappeared mysteriously, but were held to a reasonable minimum. I went to Kim's office and she wasn't there. A few minutes later she popped into my office and said "I've spoken to Taylor and she's calling the instructor of the course she attended. I'll keep you posted."

A few minutes later she returned and said, "I'm going to check in on Taylor and see what the instructor said. Want to come along?"

We went to Taylor's office. She had had to wait for a return call and was just beginning her conversation with the instructor. She waved us in and we sat down in front of her desk and listened to half the conversation.

Taylor: "Hi. This is Taylor and I attended your course on speaking several months ago."

Silence on our end.

Taylor: "Well, you may remember that I had the problem of saying 'ah' a lot. When I finished your course that had disappeared, but now it has started to happen again. What can I do about it?"

Longer silence.

Taylor: "I see. I'll keep that in mind. Thank you."

We subsequently got the other half from Taylor, and the whole thing went something like this:

Taylor: "Hi. This is Taylor and I attended your course on speaking several months ago."

Instructor: "I know who you are, Taylor."

Taylor: "Well, you may remember that I had the problem of saying 'ah' a lot. When I finished your course that had disappeared, but now it has started to happen again. What can I do about it?"

Here there was a pause of perhaps ten seconds, followed by

Instructor: "Well, Taylor, you just have to realize that it makes you sound like an asshole."

The instructor had read his student well and during my remaining time at the company, perhaps two years, she never said "ah" again.