In the midst of a major transformation initiative, senior managers are frequently surprised by what employees say in response to open-ended survey questions. As a result, we are big fans of making sure senior management hears these comments. We are also big fans of ensuring senior management acts visibly and appropriately in response to what they hear.
A while back, our company was retained by a client in the midst of a reorganization. The 7,000 employee business was moving from a single corporate entity to a divisional structure along product lines. It had been widely stated that the moves would not cut headcount except for a few senior-level positions. The economy was healthy and this company was meeting its objectives when this was underway.
We ran a survey to assess the situation, and here are a few of the comments we received:
Give the big picture. As people become aware of this, then you can start drilling down into levels of detail.
It appears we are doing a lot of explaining without a lot of information being revealed. Rumors, speculation and anxiety grows while we wait. I would have done more “behind the scenes” work and made the changes less visible to the organization until we were ready to make the change.
I would like to see more “personal” meetings with senior levels. Although the communications are effective, they speak to a broad audience. I would like to see members of the executive team go to each site and personally speak to smaller groups of people to explain the rationale and changes.
The communications have improved from senior management. There should be a weekly bulletins.
Be open and honest. The rumor mill is rampant about 20% head count reductions. The change was not communicated this way in the beginning. There is even less communication now than ever. Associates want to know the dates when they will find out about their destiny. The vision about accelerated growth has disappeared. There is next-to-no communication about process changes unless you are directly involved.
Keep up the good work.
Set an exact timetable. We keep hearing conflicting dates.
My manager has done an abysmal job of explaining this to our group, has shown no compassion and seems disinterested in our concerns. The process is too slow and is killing our culture. We hear very little from the executives and they don’t do any “walking around.”
Will these moves really change the company and break down silos? Or is really a financial restructuring that will enable us to sell off parts of the company?
What are the takeaways:
Rumors fill vacuums.
Leaders can’t over-communicate. Be visible. Some people want more detail and some want less. There is no way to make everybody happy.
Have a plan and communicate your plan. Set expectations and then meet them.
It sounds so simple. Determine goals, establish rewards, measure performance, and recognize achievement. These four steps seem almost too basic to merit a blog posting. In reality, however, many organizations forget the basics. WorldatWork’sSales Compensation Practices 2008report, a survey of over 400 compensation and human resources managers, tells the story.
According to the study, 76% of companies change their sales compensation plans every year. This wasn’t a surprise to me. Additionally:
58% of these organizations communicate these changes directly to front line sales managers.
14% communicate directly to the salesforce.
13% take a decentralized approach.
7% do nothing.
The fact that 42% of companies don’t communicate these changes directly to front line sales managers was a shock to me.
I share the following thoughts, not as a change management practitioner, but as a former salesperson and sales manager.
Salespeople are reward-driven. Granted, so are lots of other people, but salespeople live and breathe for their rewards. Do not keep the potential for rewards a secret.
If a salesperson thinks you want dohickeys pushed and widgets are a second priority, you will get it. If you changed your mind, tell their managers that compensation is now tied to widgets and not dohickeys. Don’t let there be any confusion about priorities.
Everybody’s most important point of contact is their manager, but in sales, the point is magnified many times over because of their “remote” nature. Show the manager respect and it trickles on to the salesperson. Leave the manager out of the communication loop, morale will suffer.
I’m a little biased, but many managerial rules of thumb are magnified in sales. Salespeople are willing to achieve great things for your company, but need management basics executed particularly well. Your revenue stream and customers deserve nothing less. Leaving managers out of the communication loop makes no sense.
Novice communications professionals love to write goals along the lines of, “Create 100% awareness of the benefits of Initiative X.”
Don’t do it. Never make the goal 100%. Let me explain with a story.
On February 23, 2007, The Wall Street Journal published a piece on how the Census Bureau is planning for the 2010 census. Question number 3 will be, “What is this person’s sex? (Mark ONE box).”
You would assume that 100% of people should be able to answer this question correctly. This would be a bad assumption. In a 2005 field test, .05% of people asked checked both answers. Extrapolated out, 150,000 people in our country of 300 million would answer this question incorrectly.
If you choose to pursue 100% of anything – even the most basic communication goal – you will fail. Just think about the 150,000 confused folks among us.
So what is realistic?
If you don’t have 70% of people prepared to move in a particular direction, the group will take an inordinate amount of time to go. 70% is your awareness tipping point.
The high 80s begin to become problematic. You are spending lots of resources for the last few points of awareness. Perfect will become the enemy of good.
If information is fairly basic, low 80s is a reasonable, yet challenging goal. If the information is more complex, 75% is reasonable.
Don’t forget, new hires, vacations, leaves of absence, travel schedules all get in the way of achieving super-high awareness numbers. It won’t be your efforts that are the issue; it will be the changing nature of your audience.
Remember, the internal communicator’s job is to broadcast messages to everybody, and management’s job is to narrowcast within their area of responsibility. The two efforts need to work together. Practically speaking, managers will be picking up “loose ends” that don’t get addressed during your broadcasting. On the other hand, recognize you must reach that 70% minimum. Without it, management’s initiative will be fighting an uphill battle.
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.
The first Obama-McCain debate hit on one of my favorite topics – the difference between tactics and strategies. Between the two candidates, they managed to say the words “strategy” and “tactic” about 35 times – all in reference to the Iraq troop surge. We even got the perennial zinger, “I’m afraid Senator X doesn’t understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy.” (I’m intentionally avoiding a conversation over who might have been right or wrong. If you want to form your own opinions, a transcript is available at this link. This is post about two words – not two candidates.)
A little Googling shows disagreement over the word “strategy” is not new to our presidential debates. George Bush and John Kerry were debating virtually the same topic in 2004.
BUSH: I listen to our generals. That’s what a president does. A president sets the strategy and relies upon good military people to execute that strategy.
GIBSON: Senator?
KERRY: You rely on good military people to execute the military component of the strategy, but winning the peace is larger than just the military component.
A little more Googling yields some text (claimed by quite a few different authors) on the differences between military strategy and tactics:
Broadly stated, strategy is the planning, coordination, and general direction of military operations to meet overall political and military objectives. Tactics implement strategy by short-term decisions on the movement of troops and employment of weapons on the field of battle. The great military theorist Carl von Clausewitz put it another way: “Tactics is the art of using troops in battle; strategy is the art of using battles to win the war.”
Strategy and tactics, however, have been viewed differently in almost every era of history. The change in the meaning of these terms over time has been basically one of scope as the nature of war and society has changed and as technology has changed. Strategy, for example, literally means “the art of the general” (from the Greek strategos) and originally signified the purely military planning of a campaign. In the 19th and 20th centuries, however, with the rise of mass ideologies, vast conscript armies, global alliances, and rapid technological change, military strategy became difficult to distinguish from national policy or “grand strategy,” that is, the proper planning and utilization of the entire resources of a society–military, technological, economic, and political. Tactics have always been difficult–and have become increasingly difficult–to distinguish in reality from strategy because the two are so interdependent. (Indeed, in the 20th century, tactics have been termed operational strategy.)
Now that nearly everybody has weighed in, let me: One person’s strategy is another person’s tactics. It all depends on the relative position of the people involved and how the objective is being defined. Let me give a personal example.
I have an objective to retire at a reasonable age. To meet my objective, I have a strategy to limit expenses and maximize savings. Within this strategy, I have a tactic, called: “turn off the light when you leave a room.” This tactic is emphasized to my children on a regular basis.
If, however, you ask my children, they will tell you that turning off the lights is clearly a strategy. To them, turning off the lights results in a marked decline in dad’s crankiness. It is a major maneuver – a surge, if you will – in the balance of power and peace within the house. Their objective is different than mine. In short, strategies exist to meet an objective and tactics fit within a strategy.
Bush and Kerry were talking about different things: winning a battle and winning a peace. McCain and Obama were also talking about different things: McCain was answering a question about “the lessons learned in Iraq” and Obama was talking about broader issues.
It will never happen, but I wish I would hear more people say, “You mention ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics.’ Could you define what you mean by those words so we all have the same understanding?” Now that would be unbelievable change!
I’ve put up the posters, posted the articles, blasted out the emails, stuffed the envelopes and hosted the lunches, but some messages don’t seem to reach the right people. I’m not the only one who is having the difficulty.
As you are no doubt aware, analog TV is being unplugged nationwide in February 2009. You’ve probably seen the public service announcements. What you might not know is that Wilmington, NC has been a test market for the cutover to digital. The city television stations unplugged their analog signals earlier this month. The result? Even with saturated media, some people will miss the message.
On the first day of cutover, almost 800 people called the government helpline. Over 400 called on the second day. (An FCC document on the subject is available here.) Granted, this call rate represents less than one-half of 1%, but with over 100 million households in the country, the FCC needs to be able to answer about 500,000 calls on cutover day in February 2009.
So what is the takeaway? If you can carpet bomb an audience and still miss 1% (adding the two days together) and you are impacting their television, imagine the effort required to convince 100% of your employees to participate in yet another major change initiative.
Communication will only get you part of the way there. It raises awareness – but participation will only come when the leaders in the business actively engage their teams in the process.
This post is not intended to be an analytical review of demographic differences. The sample size is essentially one, my daughter – and a few of her friends. Today’s high school seniors are different than those in the past, and their behavior will seem mighty strange when they hit the business world in five years.
E-mail is so yesterday – The only reason to look at an e-mail account is to communicate with somebody older than 35. There are no e-mails to peers.
The cellphone is primarily for texting – If I text her, I get an immediate response. My calls go unanswered however. It isn’t just my calls, she isn’t attuned to the sound of her own ringer.
Facebook changes the rules – She has “friends” she doesn’t and won’t talk to. Let me explain: A neighbor’s 18 year-old daughter was led away in handcuffs. The handcuffed girl attends a different school than my daughter and they are far from friendly. Here are the surprises…
They were Facebook friends. Not only were these two “friends,” but I found my daughter had many other “friends” she never spoke to. The biggest shock was she was “friends” with the captain of the archrival school’s basketball team. They elbow each other all night, never speak, and “friend” each other.
The girl shared things on Facebook my generation would have definitely kept quiet. Our scandals were definitely hushed up.
At a minimum, businesses will need to change how to communicate with employees. Definitions of acceptable behavior will be challenged as well.
By the way, she already knows demographics are on her side. She knows baby boomers are retiring and will be looking for as many young workers as they can get. She has also been studying Chinese for the last four years. Assuming past performance is an indicator of future success, she will be highly marketable. She thinks my generation will change – not hers.
Young and cocky is not a new combination. Fundamentally changing the “what” and “how” of communication is.
A large part of this year’s summer vacation involved college visits with my high school senior. I had plenty of time to reflect on all the things that have happened in her lifetime as I drove through cornfield after cornfield, and she slept soundly with her iPod blaring. One of those thoughts was a wake-up call for me.
About the time my daughter was born, I gave a speech at the annual meeting of the National Food Broker Association about technology changes and business. I can remember showing a mockup of an e-mail message and talking about how e-mail would change how business would operate. I remember the following line in particular:
“I estimate the average age in this room is about 40 years old. My guess is that many of you have never used a personal computer. There is now this thing called e-mail and many of you will think that your secretary will take care of your e-mail just as she has always typed your memos. The reality is – most of you have 25 or more years in the workforce. If you think you can avoid using a personal computer for the next 25 years – good luck. There will be plenty of 20- and 30-somethings who will be happy to compete for your job.”
Guess what? I am now the guy in the audience. I’m the one who is at risk of falling behind. The scary part is, I’m an early adopter of technology and I struggle to keep up with the pace of change.
So like e-mail from the early 1990s, what is the technology innovation with the most potential to disrupt how businesses operate in the 2010s? I won’t claim it is No. 1, but Web feeds or syndication is good choice. It is those little buttons:
If you don’t know what they are, you need to. The 3:44 video explains it better than any text could:
Think about some of the changes that are enabled in a business environment:
Collaboration and Innovation – Technology becomes another glue to connect knowledge – relationships are no longer the sole connector. An engineer working in a widget factory in Poland can easily be aware of developments in the widget factories in South Korea and Tennessee. New communities develop throughout the organization, and traditional boundaries blur.
Productivity – Access to information directly correlates with an ability to perform in a work setting. Syndication fundamentally changes how information can be provided and increases in productivity should be expected. At a minimum, managerial spans of control can be expanded.
Rethinking the Internal Communication Function - The internal communication function typically works as a mass-media broadcaster today. Messages are controlled and broadcast over a few channels of distribution. With corporate blogging and syndication now available with virtually no barrier to entry, message control is gone and channels multiply wildly. Doesn’t this change the work of Internal Communications?
You might want to try to figure out those orange buttons before some whippersnapper is competing for your job.
The view of communication as information transfer was furthered by the application of Claude Shannon’s “Mathematical Theory of Communication,” as posited in his 1948 paper of the same name.
In his paper, Shannon posited the reproduction of messages as an engineering problem and looked at the process of communication in terms of accurately conveying the symbols of communication through technological sources, such as the telegraph. The main issue at stake for Shannon was the proper encoding of information, which he felt would allow for a time savings by encoding the message sequences into proper signal sequences that eliminated some of the redundancy found in language, and which, in turn, would lead to better encryption forms.
Shannon’s one-way communication model helped to set off the academic field of modern communication theory and research by providing an understanding of the main components to communication: source, message, channel, receiver.
The ability of a theory from one academic discipline to provide intellectual points of leverage for investigation in another discipline shouldn’t be discounted. Applying theories in new ways enhances our ability to think more broadly about the worls. However, not carefully exploring new paradigms can intellectually trap us in unfounded assumptions.
That said, the No. 1 reason Shannon’s theory shouldn’t have been applied to human communication rests in its origins. Shannon’s major goal was to determine how an information source could be described mathematically to ensure proper information encoding to save time and protect the message. It was not to influence or cause someone to take some action.
Shannon’s theory grew from the desire to prevent effective communication, by introducing noise to the message, making the encrypted message more secure. Thus noise was a positive aspect of his information theory. The more noise, the more secure the encrypted message.
As I mentioned in an earlier posting, the transmission model is based on the work of John Locke. It also has ties to the transport model from the 19th century when writing (communication) had to be transported from writer to reader in some physical form like books, letters, newspapers (Chandler, 1994, para. 15). Applying the transmission model to modern communication is problematic because it focuses on the transmission of information and not of meaning.
First, the transmission model fixes the roles of sender and receiver – with the sender having the primary role and the receiver a secondary, passive role – in a linear, one-way model that relies on the receiver to absorb information (Chandler, 1994, para. 22). But, a linear communication model can’t accurately explain or account for proper communication in a multi-vocal world consisting of multiple societies, languages and belief systems.
We also have the processing of information – in this case in terms of absorption, as if through the skin – of content or information in the form of words and a not their meaning. But we don’t just absorb information. Rather we frame the information we receive based on many factors – our gender, age, social class and education in a nonlinear world- and on the relationships we have with the “senders.” So, there’s no possible way any one message could have just one fixed meaning for all “recipients.”
Likewise, a third issue revolves around the purpose of language, which is to express ourselves to one another through recognizable symbols. Given that the 500 most common words have more than 13,000 different meanings, language is a tricky and elusive thing. Thus we can’t assume that two people will use or understand the same language we use in the same way. And we can’t take an Orwellian approach and create our own Newspeak to purge the shades of gray and redundancy in our language.
This leads to a fourth issue with the transmission model: the model equates content with meaning even though the intended and generated meanings might diverge. But books, letters and such only contain words; meaning is constructed when a listener or reader makes sense of those letters and words. So inserting a meaning into a message isn’t easily done.
Finally, the transmission model doesn’t account for context. Context is often based on our perception, and perception is not single-sided. We see things in their completeness – like a complete table, and not just its top – in the context of our kitchen.
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