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Nov 26 2008

What Employees Are Saying About Their Leaders During The Economic Crisis

Posted by: Stephen Rock in Communication, Leadership, Uncategorized, tags: , , , ,

Monday’s post on the need for leaders to communicate during the economic crisis has been buttressed by some recent research. An October survey of over 500 working Americans by Weber Shandwick showed that:

  • 62% were expecting difficulties in meeting corporate goals.
  • 71% believe their company’s leadership should be communicating more about the economic situation.
  • 54% had not heard from their company leaders on the impact of the crisis on their company.

Now is the time for leaders to be most visible. Visible leadership enables stability, stability turns into productivity, and productivity turns into dollars. Abdication to the company rumor mill is a wasted opportunity.

Disclosure statement: Monday’s post quoted from the CEO of Weber Shandwick. Today, I quote from one of their research documents. I have no affiliation with the company, but find it interesting that they got the same message to me through two different channels. Kudos to the public relations company – you seem to know something about executing PR.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 7:33 am and is filed under Communication, Leadership, Uncategorized.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “What Employees Are Saying About Their Leaders During The Economic Crisis”
  1. Bennet Simonton says: November 27th, 2008 at 2:12 am

    This is a case of bosses ignoring their employees, of not being willing to support them with what they need to do a better job. In this case it is answering their questions. It is not a case of not communicating, but much more than that. It is a case of not showing basic respect for employees by allowing them ample opportunities to complain, suggest and question and to respond respectfully to those. This error is very common in top-down managed companies.

    The solution is to shift to bottom-up and the reward for doing so is the unleashing of each employee’s full potential of creativity, innovation, productivity, motivation, and commitment. This will allow the company to beat its competitors and employees to love to come to work.

    I know because in 30+ years of managing people, I learned that top-down creates the very problems it claims to solve while bottom-up creates managerial nirvana. Every executive can choose nirvana. To learn more read my articles.

    Best regards, Ben

  2. Links for Nov 30 2008 | Aligning Technology, Strategy, People & Projects says: November 29th, 2008 at 9:01 pm

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