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• How lawyers can improve -- and stress less about -- their oral arguments, trials and speeches
• Court: Voicing disagreement with pay practices on Facebook isn't enough to constitute protected FLSA activity
• Multiple communications help managers get tasks done

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How lawyers can improve -- and stress less about -- their oral arguments, trials and speeches	Top
Getting ready to give a talk? Working on a presentation? Here is what your reptile brain tells you: Focus on your fears, because that is how you will survive. But you need not be hostage to your fears, according to an interesting new book, "As We Speak: How to Make Your Point and Have It Stick" from Peter Meyers and Shann Nix. They write that our fears drive us to ask the wrong questions: "What is missing from my talk?" and "Will I forget what to say?" and "Will the audience find out I'm not as smart as they think I am?" Instead, they suggest you ask yourself different questions that are embedded with positive presuppositions, such as: "What is the best part of this presentation?  or "What am I most passionate about in this material? or "How can I make a difference?" They caution this is not positive thinking, which they write "is trying to hypnotize yourself into a different mind-set." By contrast, a presupposition question "forces you to think of new possibilities." Not "Will I succeed?" but "How will I succeed?" Their final advice is to wire your brain with the right questions weeks before the event. They have an interesting take, and I plan to use their tips. Here is one from me. I speak around the country and try cases. There is one thing I say to myself before I go on:"Michael, there is no Plan B." Be prepared, be in the moment.
Court: Voicing disagreement with pay practices on Facebook isn't enough to constitute protected FLSA activity	Top
I love employment law and social media, so I read with interest Morse v. JP Morgan Chase & Co. , an opinion from the Middle District of Florida. Plaintiff claims the defendant terminated her from employment for voicing disagreement with its pay practices. But where did she voice this disagreement? Her Facebook page. The court granted the defendant's motion to dismiss, quoting the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in Kasten v. Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corp. ( see my blog on that case ) that protected activity for purposes of the Fair Labor Standards Act's anti-retaliation provision requires an employee complaint to have "some degree of formality, certainly to the point where the recipient has been given fair notice that a grievance has been lodged and does, or should, reasonably understand the matter as part of its business concerns." Facebook did not meet this standard.
Multiple communications help managers get tasks done	Top
The May 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review features a short article, "Defend Your Research: Effective Managers Say the Same Thing Twice (or More)" featuring research by Tsedal Neeley and Paul Leonardi. The issue is organization-chart authority v. moral authority and how each impacts communication. The research demonstrated that those with org-chart authority would make a request of a subordinate only once — no follow-up. They simply assumed that their order was holy writ and that their authority motivated others. Know what? Once was not enough. It took longer for the org-chart managers to get a task done. By contrast, managers without org-chart authority communicated multiple times regarding the same task. They got the task completed in a shorter period of time, without engaging in damage control and crisis management. According to Leonardi, "Managers without it [power] need to get buy-in, so their first message is for motivation. The follow-up is to document something, remind people they've made a commitment so that it doesn't fall off their radar." Don't multiple communications irritate people? Not according to the research. Redundancy helps the message cut through all the messages employees receive, much of them useless noise. Because employees held the managers with moral authority in higher esteem than the org-chart managers, the employees welcomed the multiple messages, according to the research.

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