It is time to revisit your professional signal to noise ratio before you are tsunami’d by it. Over the past five years, I’ve written about its importance in your professional innovation and cross functional leadership success.
Signal to noise ratio is the amount of desirable signal compared to the amount of background noise interfering with the strength and clarity of that signal.
We play daily whack-a-mole with the professional signal to noise ratio.
You and I get bombarded by lots of incoming messaging, verbal and written, audible, visual, tactile, experiential. Realistically, a lot of that incoming messaging makes us tune out and turn off, because it is noise. It is neither factual, relevant nor valuable. You know it. I know it. And we are not quite sure which algorithms directed all that stuff towards us.
As a result, you and I spend a ton of mental and emotional and physical energy each day sorting through all the noise, searching for a meaningful, clear, purposefully strong signal. Consequently, we edit social media and email account settings trying to eliminate all this noise. Over time we become distracted servants of all the noise we subscribe to, intentionally or unintentionally.
Yet we, ourselves, create our own professional signal to noise ratio.
How are colleagues and clients editing yours? Are they tuning in to what your high signal, high relevance, low noise communicates? Or, are they tuning you out because your high noise, low signal, turns them off?
- Do you dominate meetings, so your voice overpowers everyone else’s?
- Can your social media feeds become less of a steady-bombardment reflecting every single one of the memes and groups you subscribe to, and more sensitive to the needs of your friends and followers and subscribers?
- Are you always right about a situation and, thus, stifle dialogue and collaboration?
- Rather, are you always learning about what is new, next and changing because you listen, engage, and defer to the voices of others seated around the table?
- Are you an intellectual elitist or a diverse and inclusive colleague, regardless of job title, pay grade, level of education, generation, and gender?
- Do you prefer to be an order-taker or an innovator? Traditionalist or explorer?
This week, as you once again prune your Inbox in autopilot mode and scroll your social accounts (and streaming media), observe how you are professionally habituated.
Isn’t it time to alter your routine? Why remain a servant to your professional signal to noise habits? And why require colleagues and clients to remain unintentionally subscribed servants to your own habituated professional signal to noise ratio?
If you want to make a professional difference, I strongly recommend refining the strength, relevance and value of your professional signal. All you have to do is cut out all the noise which interferes with your own professional clarity, relevance and value. Check out my keynotes, workshops, and coaching to get started.
I catalyze cross-functional, collaborative, profitable, and sustainable solutions across value silos. | Professional Innovation | Cross Functional Leadership | Complex Problem Solving | Speaker, Consultant, Coach |
- Need to stop spinning your wheels professionally? How about working with a catalyst for what is new, and next, and changing?
- Searching for a speaker focused on doing the smallest things with the biggest impact to get you moving forward instead of continuing to hold yourself back? Then engage me to present a One Millimeter Mindset ™ program! Delivered virtually or in-person.
Babette Ten Haken’s One Millimeter Mindset™ programs catalyze people who solve problems differently to collaborate more successfully. Become more professionally visible, cross-functionally relevant, and strategically valuable as you create and implement innovative and robust business outcomes together. Babette is a business-oriented STEM professional, qualitative Voice of the Customer facilitator, PMI-certified Wicked Problem Solver, Duke Corporate Education licensed Strategic Agility practitioner, and Six Sigma Green Belt (Quality). Babette is a member of the SHRM, PMI, and the National Speakers Association (NSA). Her playbook of cross-functional collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business? is available in soft cover and digital formats on Amazon.com. Contact Babette here. Image source: Adobe Stock.
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