Are You Unwittingly Dumping Toxic Waste Into Corporate Waterways?
You may not have soaked your audience in human waste today...but there's a good chance your words & actions have unwittingly made a few of your stakeholders nauseous in the last 24 hours.
So take a moment to dive into this conversation about the "Dave Matthews Band Chicago River incident" of August 8, 2004 and apply 5 tips from today's vomit-inducing anniversary that will help you shift your leadership style from nauseating to energizing:
1) Avoid Toxic Communication Dumps: From late-night, non-urgent email requests to evasive-sounding conversations filled with hollow "corporate-sounding" clichés, the easiest way to mitigate the impact of toxic communication releases is to avoid them in the first place
2) Lay Proper Containment: If you don't stop the ripple effect of toxic rumors among your gossiping front-line leaders, it can cause far more damage than a leaking pipeline or an overflowing tank
3) Filter and Rate Your Communications: Revisit your recent emails, meetings, phone calls, etc. and give them an emoji-based "nausea rating" from 1 to 5, where 1 nauseated face (🤢) represents minimal vomit-inducing language; and 5 nauseated faces (🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢) is on par with dumping 800 pounds of human waste on an unsuspecting group of tourists.
4) Translate Toxic Messages: transform corporate fluff into relevant and actionable messages BEFORE your audience starts coming up with their own (mis-)translations
5) Clean Up Your Messes: Whether it's a band who dumps human waste into a river, an oil and gas company who has an inadvertent release, or a manager who suffers a flare-up of foot-in-mouth disease, owning up to mishaps and rectifying them swiftly gives you a chance to avoid leaving a permanently bad taste in stakeholders' mouths.
More bridge-RELATED energy leadership CONTENT
“Fern Hollow Framework: Demolish & Dispose vs. Preserve & Protect” (The Energy Detox, Episode 76)
“Leadership Implosions and the Benefits of Blowing Up Your Internal Connections” (The Energy Detox, Episode 12)
Transcript
(AI training in progress; please excuse any errors)
Hello and welcome to The Energy Detox coming to you today from underneath the David McCullough Bridge in Pittsburgh. And I chose today's location not to honor David McCullough, who died one year ago yesterday. Although if you don't know David McCullough, he is certainly worthy of such an honor having been a prolific writer of history and his first book, of course, being the Johnstown Flood, but instead today I'm honoring a different David and a different bridge in a different city and a different flood of sorts. And the David that I'm honoring today is David John Matthews, who you might know more colloquially as Dave Matthews, as in the Dave Matthews Band, and the bridge I'm honoring is the Kinsey Street Bridge in Chicago. And the flood I'm honoring you might know as the great Dave Matthews Band bridge incident of 2004. And before I get any extra color on that bridge incident, I do want to warn you, the audience that this is likely to be the most toxic, the most nauseating of all 80 Plus episodes of The Energy Detox. So if you're a little bit squeamish, you may wish to turn this off right now and maybe settle for the next episode. But if you're still with me, then allow me to enlighten you as to the details of the great Dave Matthews Band incident of 2004. And that is when Dave Matthews on this day, 19 years ago had his band in Chicago and one of the five tour buses they had, well, the driver of that bus decided to go out for a drive and unload the contents of the black water tank, the onboard septic tank, basically, through the grate of the Kinzie Street Bridge into the Chicago River below. And as far as from an engineering standpoint, I want to make clear that in Chicago, several of their bridges are great style. So it's not like the bridge above me here where if there is a leak of any sort, I'm not going to be impacted. In Chicago, they have several bridges that have grates, which is great from an engineering standpoint, because if it rains or snows, then the water or the snow goes right through down into the river. And, you know, the city doesn't have to worry about containment or any of that. Well, in this particular case. Again, if you're still with me, there is good news. Because if you happen to be in the environmental world, and perhaps in the water treatment world, or the water management world, and perhaps you're one of the people in town in Pittsburgh tomorrow for the Marcellus water conference. Well, again, you might be a little bit squeamish, thinking about the all the ramifications of dumping human waste directly into the river. But I have good news for you because there was containment under that bridge that day. And very little of the material, in fact, actually made it into the river. Unfortunately, though, the containment that was underneath that bridge happened to be an open air tour boat that just happened to be passing underneath the bridge at the exact moment that the driver of that tour bus decided to discharge all of that waste down below the Kinzie Street Bridge. And on that tour boat were about 120 people who were about 15 minutes into an architecture tour. So no doubt they were looking up gazing and amazement at all the architecture of Chicago when, again, much to their surprise, they were covered, or at least two thirds of them were covered, were soaked with, again, 800 pounds of human waste. And again, if you're still with me, you're still probably wondering why I'm honoring this anniversary today. While it's because you quite likely every single day are unwittingly releasing, dumping some amount of toxicity, some amount of waste out into your audience, if you will. Maybe it's not as dramatic as the 800 pounds of human waste that were dumped on those sites Sears that day. But no doubt, whether it's to an audience of one or to an audience of 10s of 1000s, you are injecting some nausea, some toxicity, some things that are going to make some people's stomachs really turn whether you realize it or not. So today, we're going to help you be more alert and aware of those times. And more importantly, we're going to help you mitigate those times where there is a nauseating release of sorts and you need to figure out the best path forward to rectify it, to remediate it and to move on. And so without further ado, I'm gonna list of five tips, five tricks, five mindsets that you can use that I've seen in practice when it comes to toxic and in particular, nauseating communication. And the first of those tips is to simply avoid communication dumps, avoid communication dumps that are in particular, a surprise to your audience. And again, nothing is going to be as surprising as those 120 passengers on that boat that day, but how often does an email go out in the middle of the night with very little context, and certainly no explanation for whether that request is urgent or not. That is a toxic dump of sorts that can leave your audience nauseous, or on a much grander scale. How often is some large corporate communication go out that doesn't have an explanation that doesn't explain in detail some of the questions that you might expect your audience to ask. And what does that do that induces toxicity and might make people stomach turn a little bit whether it's out of nausea, or whether they simply roll their eyes because of the the relatively cliche or say nothing NISS of an email that may have been really, really long, but again, didn't necessarily convey anything of value. All of those are examples of toxic communication dumps that lead to your audience becoming nauseous. So the first tip here is avoid them. Whenever possible, ask yourself if it's necessary. Again, the most basic, if not cliche example is if you don't need to send an email out in the middle of the night, don't send it out later. Or if you're sending out an email, or you're making a phone call, you're in a meeting, you're talking about a task. And you can give a little bit of color or context instead of just shouting out different facts or requests. Take that time, so that again, your audience isn't caught off guard or isn't left feeling nauseous. The second tip is related to containment. So we just joked a little bit ago that fortunately, there was some good containment underneath the Kinzie Street Bridge that day, 19 years ago, today, I'll be it again in the form of a tour boat. But what kind of containment did you have in place to ensure that when there is some sort of release of information that could be potentially toxic, that it's contained, that it doesn't move forward. And again, a perfect example of this, that I see all the time in my coaching and saw in my former life, is when there's rumors and hearsay about acquisitions, or about layoffs are about budget cuts or about shifts in a development program. Those rumors and hearsay, of course, you know, have the ability to proliferate. But unfortunately, many leaders don't have the guts to stomp it out quickly to content. And, you know, a lot of those leaders, they'll fully acknowledge it to me, they'll say, Yeah, I know, it's out there. Well, what are you doing about it? And typically, the best thing you could do from a frontline leader standpoint, is to basically arm your frontline leaders and tell their people to cut it out. Stop it, they're not going to stand for the proliferation of rumors and hearsay. And certainly, if they're the ones proliferating this rumor and and causing this toxicity, if not nervousness and adda and nausea. Well, again, there's going to be severe ramifications. But it's amazing how long those things continue to trickle and flow without being contained. And again, part of that sometimes is that perhaps the leaders at the top aren't aware of those rumors and hearsay. But again, by and large, when faced with the question of whether they suspected there may have been some rumors or hearsay that needed to be contained by and large leaders will admit that yeah, they they suspected as much, but they failed when it came to containment. Moving on. The third tip, trick piece of advice is to put in some filtration of sorts to identify the language and the actions that you're taking that might be viewed as nausea inducing as toxic. And again, with as I said earlier, the Marcellus Shale water meeting conference in town about six blocks away from where I'm standing right now, it's a good time to talk about filtration, cuz there's plenty of water management personnel that use filtration as a way to again, remove the stuff that you don't want flowing elsewhere. But what can you do as an individual, whether or not you're a leader, or you're just you know, again, a an employee who has to communicate with others? What kind of filters can you put in place to make sure that that nausea that that toxicity doesn't flow? Well, here's one look at your outbox right now. Take a look at all the messages that you've sent in the last 24 hours and go through with a filter of sorts give it a rating system from say, one to five, where five is the most nausea inducing think again, the Dave Matthews Band river incident of 2004 and one is maybe the low end of the spectrum. But again, I don't think any corporate email any corporate communication is going to come without any nausea, right? That's sort of the nature of the beast. So we're going to say that you can't really achieve a zero there's always going to be some some necessary pleasantries that again, might turn some people off, you're always going to turn some people off, off but again, rank it one to five whether it's emails again, text communications, get out of a meeting, how nausea inducing where you take a look at this podcast, instead of leaving a review and rating in one to five stars go ahead and add in the comments are on LinkedIn or YouTube or wherever you happen to be watching this. Go ahead and take that vomit emoji and and give this from a scale of one to five you know, how nausea inducing Am I right now? Is
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it a five or am I on the lower end of the spectrum? I love your your feedback, albeit even if it's in a vomit emoji form. So again, that is something that you can employ every single day a filter ideally before the fact but worst case scenario after the fact to analyze how nausea inducing your communications are The fourth tip flowing from there is when you identify communications that may potentially induce nausea. Ask yourself how you can translate it. And again, this is something that plays at every level of an organization. If you're a CEO, and you see some proposed communication, stop for a second and ask whether it actually communicates the message. Or if it's, again, a bunch of fluff, you have that authority. But so too, if you report up through the chain, and you see some proposed communication or communication that comes through, and you want to, again, rectify it, you want to address it, you know, it's gonna be a problem for you. Ask yourself how you can translate that corporate speak that consultant speak into something that's actually going to resonate and make a difference and stick with people instead of causing them to regurgitate. And then not so pleasant way, the corporate messaging and the nice sounding pleasantries, that company may have spent a lot of time and energy and money having people write, even if those messages don't actually convey clear, bottom line, actionable messages. And the fifth and final tip, if you will, today is if you make a mess, clean it up. Again, in the oil and gas industry, we know full well that if there is a spill, if there is a release of some sort, we are going to take ownership, there's going to be ramifications, we're going to clean it up. And sometimes that's financial, it's always going to involve some sort of action, but we take ownership. Clearly, it should be no different. When and again, it's not a question of if it's a question of when you consciously or unconsciously share some sort of communication or some action. That is nausea inducing. And again, this doesn't just have to pertain to company emails or text messages or town halls. This can pertain to your LinkedIn messaging, right? Whether it's corporate messaging, or your own private LinkedIn account, use those tips from above, look at that filter, ask how you can translate it. And occasionally, if something gets out there, that doesn't make a lot of sense, act quickly, act with authority and ownership and confidence and clean it up. Dave Matthews Band eventually when they conceded that yes, it was one of their tour buses, obviously, they took action, they made some donations to some river protection, folks, obviously, the bus driver who made a very bad decision, he faced ramifications, it should be no different in your own world when it comes to potentially toxic or at least nausea inducing communications. So with that, hopefully this episode, as queasy as it may have made you feel at the beginning, inspired you to go back through to better filter to be on better guard against potentially toxic and nausea inducing conversations. And hopefully, again, even if the actions you take and the communications you have aren't as bad as 800 pounds of human waste falling immediately and suddenly on an open air tour boat, at least do what you can to avoid leaving a bad taste in the mouth of your stakeholders. So with that, thank you as always for tuning in to the energy detox again, perhaps the most toxic of all 80 Plus episodes of the energy detox. And with that, I hope that you have a wonderful day a great day and that nothing even close to what fell from the sky on that August eighth 2004 Day in Chicago. happens to you today. So with that again, thanks again and bye bye.