When I was growing up one of the highlights of the school year was the report card time. I was a good student so I looked forward to the time when my teacher “told” my parents that through the grades and comments on the report card.

At work, the closest thing to a report card for an employee is the usually the annual review. If you live in a corporate environment, you know the drill. You show up for the meeting, the manager tells you the bottom (financial) line and then proceeds to list what you have done well or poorly.

This process may or may not be an effective one. The review checklist is often the standard one created by the HR department. Sometimes managers complete the review simply to check it off the list of their duties. At other times, an employee may invest very little into the process and miss the chance to get meaningful feedback. The whole process can be perceived as an optional, perfunctory exercise with little benefit.

There are times when a report card (and all that it implies) is not optional.

A competitive intelligence (CI) report card is such a case. It is an indication of impending failure if a competitive intelligence professional does not get a report regularly on his or her performance. Why? Because a CI function depends on the relationships with and value to senior management. When either the relationship or recognized value is waning, then corrective action must be taken. (Or, you need to look for a new job.)

So how do you get a report card from senior management?

It is probably too much to expect most senior managers to spend time creating a formal report card for you. If you are regularly communicating with them, you will get many signals that express their satisfaction (or lack thereof) with what you doing. A report card is simply one way to stimulate this conversation. And it’s up to you (not them) to get this process started.

You have to create a report card for them to use.

This works well because senior managers are used to evaluating people and their performance according to set guidelines. Since there probably isn’t a competitive intelligence specific set of guidelines you will have to create a template to use.

Keep it simple and focus on value.

The template should be one page or less. It should cover multiple categories. It should be understandable but not too restrictive. Finally, it should be used to highlight exceptional (good and bad) so that meaningful conversations can then happen about those areas. Here is an example. Note that the box to the left of each bullet is the place for a “grade” given by the senior manager.

Use the report card for long term planning and education.

A virtue of a getting a mark is that you can measure your progress over time. I have used “low” marks to help me define my plans for the future. For instance, I initiated regular CI reviews when I received feedback that the organizational communication about CI topics was too infrequent.

Another less obvious use of the report card is that it gives you a vehicle to expand a manager’s perception of CI. Perhaps they never considered that tradeshow intelligence was important. When they see it on your report card they might question what you mean and how it might help them. This is a great time to talk about how CI can be more valuable to them.

The grades that you receive don’t matter.

Well, actually they do. You won’t long survive if you consistently receive poor grades or if you receive good grades only for the less important (as defined by senior management) categories.

However, if the discussion about grades is regular, if your relationship with senior management is deepened and if “low” marks are used for improvement, you will win in the end. Report cards will become your friend and senior management will thank you.

And, by the way, that annual review cycle will also likely be a rewarding time for you as well.

A former colleague at Texas Instruments responded to my “PowerPoint Woke Me Up” blog entry by saying that sometimes the most effective communication is that done on a whiteboard with other people. As I thought about that I realized that he was exactly right (at least it matched my experience).

The vast majority of information is not written down.

It is communicated verbally or nonverbally between individuals. We are conditioned as social animals to use this method most frequently. The advantage is that it is often quick. The disadvantage is the intended message can easily get lost somewhere between the speaker’s words and the listener’s interpretation.

Meanwhile, many businesses are great fans of PowerPoint. Someone somewhere carefully (or sloppily) crafts a message that is presented. Much of the time there is one active presenter and multiple passive listeners. This can work but sadly it often doesn’t because the listeners are not engaged when they accept that the presenter is responsible for the communication.

There is a better way.

Why not draw pictures together?

Pictures are powerful ways to represent information. Much better than phrases on a PowerPoint slide, pictures can show relationships, sequences and other interactions. And when they are created by multiple people together, they can embody the collective wisdom of the group. If this is done appropriately, the resulting picture includes both the understandings and agreements among the people. How powerful is that!

The Grove Consultants International is a company that teaches graphical facilitation. The concepts are simple to grasp. Significantly, they all are aimed at graphically documenting what is most important. This works for topics like strategy, visions, value propositions, industry overviews and other similar things. The facilitation skills include the use of templates, creatively drawing to represent concepts and coordinating the discussions.

Here is an example where a Grove template was used to create an industry overview.

Pictures sometimes are a means to an end such as a specific decision. I have found that Sam Kaner’s book “Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making” is an excellent resource to help a leader understand how to reach a decision. Kaner’s techniques work well with the graphical facilitation techniques used by Grove.

Another excellent example of the powerful impact of drawing a picture together can come from a project retrospective. Norm Kerth’s book “Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews” is a valuable resource to describe how “looking back to move forward” is critical. His website at http://www.retrospectives.com/ explains the prime directive for retrospectives and more.

One of the exercises in a retrospective is the project timeline. A long piece of butcher block paper is tacked to a wall. Then, all members of the team the document the project by adding their recollections to the timeline. The ups and downs, deliveries, significant meetings, personal events, etc., are all added to the group picture. When everyone is finished, the whole team examines the completed picture to answer four questions.

• What did we do well, that if we don’t discuss we might forget?
• What did we learn?
• What should we do differently next time?
• What still puzzles us?

The actual format of the retrospective timeline is less important than the fact that the team creates it together. Here is an example from http://www.thekua.com/rant/category/retrospective-exercises/.

The impact of this exercise can be profound. Team members can literally see the entire project and what others considered important. They can understand more about what frustrated them, the problems that they faced together and overcame and the things that led to disappointments. Later, when they have digested the personal messages, they can use the picture to extract lessons and explain to others what went on and why. (Esther Derby is a great resource for teaching others how to conduct retrospectives. Esther and Diana Larsen have written “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great” to show how to architect, design and run retrospectives.)

Maybe the pictures we create together aren’t as pretty as the PowerPoint masterpieces. Maybe they cannot be fit into the company template. And maybe they don’t have transitions, animations, embedded videos and other special effects which would impress Hollywood producers.

But what they do have is the powerful message created, owned and understood by a team.

Later, if you feel like it, you can always make a version for PowerPoint (with the approved company template). <g>

I awoke a couple of days ago at 5:30 AM. Usually that means that the dogs want to go outside. This day my thoughts were all about PowerPoint. Strange, I know. But I woke up thinking about all that I have learned about doing and, more importantly, not doing with this tool from Microsoft.

First, a disclaimer is warranted. I have personally created hundreds of PowerPoint presentations for many different purposes. The organizations that I was in expected that information would be delivered this way during meetings. So, I learned all of the ins and outs including all of the fancy animations, colorful templates and so on. I neither hate PowerPoint as some do nor do I consider it the answer to all communication questions.  But I do have some rules that I have evolved that make sense to me for the (mostly) technology oriented audiences that I have served. I have used these rules while doing strategy and competitive intelligence presentations for many levels of management.

When telling a story, it (usually) is best to tell it in a form that is familiar.

If an organization “thinks” in PowerPoint, then be prepared to tell and sell using that tool. I have to add the “usually” caveat because sometimes it is important to be different when the message is fundamentally different. For instance, in one strategy discussion, I used PowerPoint to create the presentation but rather than projecting it one slide at a time, I printed the12 slides and spread them out of the conference room table. Then the managers that attended stood around the table to view the content. At their own pace and in their preferred order, they could view the slides. This helped get all of the information in view at once and facilitated a better discussion of the complex topic.

Leave out the cuteness.

For business audiences, my feeling is that the animations, transitions and other such things are distractions. Of course there will be exceptions but most of the time people can absorb information much faster than some click through sequence controlled by a presenter.

Deliver the appropriate information density.

Few things are worse than 10 point font paragraphs densely displayed on a slide. I wish that I had a dollar for the number of times that I have heard from presenters that “I know you can’t read this but …”. (Embarrassingly, I have said it a few times.) On the other hand, I have also suffered through slides which are 10 words. Both approaches are disrespectful of the audience and show woeful preparation from the presenter.

The “right” information density is best described through Ed Tufte’s teachings. Far from eliminating detail, he advocates large amounts of information be delivered. The key is the presentation technique. For example, Tufte has described many useful depictions of trends and data sets that allow someone to make meaningful interpretations of data. One example is the use of Sparklines which highlights trends and outliers very well. Bissantz is a commercial vendor of this tool.

Tufte explains (and sells) the iconic diagram which traces Napoleon’s march to Moscow and back. It is a masterpiece of appropriate information density which allows that viewer to extract multiple important meanings about the event,

Tell a story.

Novelists and other writers have an advantage over many people in business. They understand that a typical book has a plot with characters, twists and turns and at the end a conclusion. In contrast, many business presentations rather than having any discernable story are a somewhat disjoint collection of facts. The impact of this approach is that there is little impact. It wastes time and distracts an organization from doing meaningful work.

It’s only a tool. Make sure you communicate.

I know people that love certain software. Some of them love PowerPoint and consider it important to their life. Okay. The rest of us need to remember that it is only one tool for communicating with our audiences. If we master PowerPoint and create the most beautiful presentations known to man but don’t connect with our audiences, what have we gained. Nothing. In strategy and competitive intelligence, communication usually has a purpose which could be to inform, to persuade or to educate. The tool used to convey information should be obviously subordinate to the purpose.

I enjoy creating presentations. Anyone that has worked with me on a presentation will agree that I am a stickler for what I present (i.e., it has to look good, it has to make sense, it has to spur discussion). I am proud of slides that I have created that allowed people to see something that they had not seen before and, because of that awareness, they can contemplate changes to what they previously knew. Nevertheless, I know that when PowerPoint becomes synonymous with communication we all risk diminishing what is vital to an organization. That is, the vigorous discourse among smart, committed people who are grappling with the most difficult issues in business.

Maybe I will sleep better tonight.

Consultants and managers like to talk about grand strategies to win in business. They spend time and money to meet together to craft the best possible expressions of the purpose of the business, the vision for the future and the major steps along the way toward that future. They gather in retreats to make advancements.

Meanwhile, in the rest of organization, people come and go to work each day. They often know little of what has been decided. Or, if they have received the pronouncements from on high, they selectively integrate what they consider important into their work plans.

So, how can you tell that the business strategy is working?

There are usual external measures of revenue, profit, market share and so on that are typically used to measure the effectiveness of strategy. These are critical measures, of course, but they are lagging indicators when a new strategy is introduced. Often the first measures of strategy effectiveness come from the internal organization.

What should a manager look for to understand if the strategy is working within the organization? Here are my five success indicators to monitor.

1. Managers are modeling the changes. At all levels, a new strategy implies change (otherwise it isn’t new). If management expects change to occur only because of announcements, then the strategy is unlikely to be effective. People are sensitive to strategy fads which come and go. However, they are similarly alert to real change in people.

2. Success measures are being understood. It is not enough to have a bright idea. At some point in time, the performance of the strategy must be measured and the measurement must be understood (and accepted) in the organization. People that understand the external measures begin to adapt the internal reward system accordingly.

3. Competing strategies are retired. The temptation for management and organizations is to retain the familiar. If a significant new strategy is introduced, a significant old strategy must be retired. Not only does this make sense to the larger organization (sensible behavior is important), it establishes the credibility of leaders to focus the organization.

4. Increasing focus on the future. A temperature reading of the organization will reveal that people are talking more about the future than the past. It should be no surprise that a backward focus is a drain on the organization’s energy. Befuddled leadership, ineffective strategies and risk aversion prevent an organization from solving tomorrow’s problems. A strategy starts to work when an organization is energized about what is possible to achieve.

5. It is becoming personal. The best leaders create bridges between their organization and the vision. People then make conscious decisions to move toward or away from the vision. A strategy’s effectiveness can be measured by the extent to which employees own it. Increasing ownership means increasing alignment with the vision, greater problem solving and broader participation. Simply put, people commit themselves by crossing the bridges.