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A Manager Who Can’t Communicate Can’t Lead

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

“As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word.” It’s been years since Peter Drucker offered that bon mot, but it certainly seems to be truth. The New York Times’ Corner Office feature, which runs Sundays on page two of the Business section, talks to business leaders of all stripe, and each of them has something to say about the importance of communication to their business style.

Dec. 6, Joseph J. Plumeri, Chairman and CEO of Willis Group Holdings (the insurance broker whose name now graces the former Sears Tower in Chicago), was Corner Office’s subject. He said:

I spend 25 percent to 30 percent of my time calling my associates — whether they had a family problem or pulled off a great deal and brought in a new client, or saved a client. Two-minute phone call, or handwritten note. I can’t begin to tell you how important that stuff is. E-mails are easy, but sometimes they get in the way of really feeling how somebody feels about your effort.

Is it time consuming? Yes. But that’s what you’ve got to do…

Plumeri goes on to say that helping people understand and believe in the choices the company makes is essential to realizing business vision.

On Dec. 13, Nancy McKinstry, CEO of Wolters Kluwer, a Netherlands-based information services company, says “Every culture is very different in how people make decisions” as she relates how her leadership style changed over time according to the communication styles of her team.

In the Netherlands, where our company is based, people really want to be heard early in the process. So if you just go to someone and say, “I want you to go take this product and enter this new market,” most likely the first response they’ll say is, “No, and let me tell you how that won’t work.” What they really want to say is, “I’m not going to commit yet to that objective until we have a chance to really sit down and explore how we’re going to do that, what your expectations are, and how we measure success.”

Then, when I work with my Italian colleagues and the Spaniard colleagues, what you find is they can’t always tell you how they’re going to get something accomplished, but they manage to get it done.

Shocking news, really, that one’s leadership team expects to have a clear strategy in place before acting, and wants the freedom to choose how to accomplish the goals they’re responsible for.

What concerns me is how few middle managers (or even executive managers) have undertaken the sort of self-examination that both McKinstry and Plumeri evidently have. In 20 years, I’ve met only a handful who embrace the power of participative communication. By the way, they’re the leaders who typically win in the marketplace.

Why don’t more organizations evaluate the communication strength of their leaders?  One reason is the perception that you can’t hold people accountable for “soft” skills. Yet, we know that there are very strong correlations between effective communication behavior and employee understanding and comprehension. So, if we want an informed, educated workforce which understands the business and their role in it, their managers will need to be the ones providing context and leadership.

Therefore, let’s evaluate communication skills among managers and come up with ways of helping those managers improve and thrive. It’s not too difficult a concept.

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Posted in Internal Communications, Measurement, News Analysis, Strategy | 8 Comments »

Objectives most critical element in measurement

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

One smart PR pro told me years ago that even the best road map is useless without a destination. Because so many communicators are struggling to understand the role of strategy in a world of fascinating tactics, it can seem like the universe is throwing map after map to us, shouting “you need this right now!”

When I step back from “being strategic” (quite a trick for someone once called, with some derision, “strategy boy”) it is no exaggeration to say, echoing the travel metaphor, that the best strategy is useless without an objective.

Strategic objectives need three things: 1) a benchmark. You need to look back to see where you’ve been. 2) A target. You need to look ahead and see where you’re going. 3) A time period. You need to articulate how long it’s going to take to get from where you were/are to where you want to be.  If you’re missing any of those things, chances are good that you don’t have a strategic objective.

The trick is, too often, we set objectives with no clear understanding of where we are, let alone where we were. That’s where research comes in. It’s right out of PR 101 — start with research before you launch a campaign — and we find lots of reason not to do the research. Sometimes it’s related to cost, sometimes to our own skillsets. We like to think of ourselves as creative geniuses, unencumbered by such trivialities. This attitude is especially prevalent in media relations, where our relationships and seat-of-the-pants skills can mean so much in a crisis; when things go right in our activities, that can reinforce the perception that PR is art, rather than science.

Of course, our “gut” is merely the application of our accumulation of experience, both in terms of time and in terms of education. We think we know what our employees, or our customers, for example, know/think/feel about our organization, when we could remove any uncertainty with some simple research.

But, I digress — the objective-setting process is even more important when considering social media.  Too many organizations are jumping in without a clear idea of what they want to accomplish.  More on this topic to follow.

What about your communication planning process? Does it start with objectives?

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Posted in Measurement, Public Relations, Social Media, Strategy | 2 Comments »

Ethics in PR: The Social Media Question

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

In the political firestorm that engulfs the United States, one side claims the other has no principles, whilst the other claims their opponents show a slavish devotion to ossified beliefs that make no sense in modern America.  Moral relativism, one side’s rhetoric goes, has brought our society to the brink of destruction. Outmoded thinking, the other side’s speaking points read, has made our country a cruel, Darwinist dystopia, where “survival of the fittest” is played out in policy.  For some reason, the ongoing debate of tea parties and new Fascism makes me think about public relations.

The collapse of centralization of news and the growth of social media is fueling a similar decamping in our profession.  On one side, those who believe that social media is an incarnation of evil, bent on destroying the concept of objectivity and authoritative sources, not to mention the homicide of the public relations industry. On another side (there are more than two), those who see social media as the democratization of information and the dissolution of concentrated media power, elevating ordinary people and adding to the diversity of voices in the media mix.

The ethical questions percolating for me these days relate to our role as PR people in participating in social media.  In the sense of the “Excellence Theory,” social media should represent the triumph of two-way, symmetrical communication; active engagement of organizations and their stakeholders, seeking mutual benefit.  But it seems to me that organizational participation in social media is still largely an asymmetrical game of persuasion, of message sending rather than dialogue. Marketers dominate the conversation online, devaluing PR objectives regarding reputation in favor of metrics focusing on revenue generation.  Organizations continue to struggle to find applications for social media inside the enterprise (speaking broadly here; fully aware there are exceptions), as despite efforts to embrace openness and multi-directional communication, command and control is difficult to release.

The dilemma for practitioners is especially acute for agencies and suppliers, and the ad value equivalency debate is an example. AVE has been discredited for years, but is still in common use because many clients demand it. They understand it, and AVE provides a shorthand description that they find useful.  The Institute for PR Measurement Commission recently condemned the practice, with one member writing that just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s right.  When a client pays an agency and asks for AVE, we should say “no,” goes that argument. But the fear is that, “If I don’t give them AVE, they’ll go find someone who will.”

On the social media side, should all organizations use social media?  What is our ethical responsibility here? I’d be hard pressed to say that everyone should embrace social media.  I cannot make that claim, that is, if I care about giving good advice to my client. It’s not much different than telling a client reflexively that they need an intranet, or a newsletter, or a video. I need to understand the client’s objectives before I jump to tactics.

That doesn’t even address the more serious ethical challenges represented by social media.

Look at the Astroturfing issues, from fake blogs to agency staff commenting on client products.  Is the free market of ideas and caveat emptor sufficient to rein in those who have no compunction about engaging in such tactics?

I have always been an idealist with respect to media, seeing the years between Edward R. Murrow and Watergate as the pinnacle of journalism, heroic reporters, courageous editors and committed publishers digging for The Truth, all with peerless ethical grounding. The disappearance of even the pretext of objectivity in journalism (reaching its zenith — or nadir — with MSNBC/Fox News/The Washington Post/New York Times) has disgusted me, even as I admit that objectivity was a goal, not a reality according to my own journalism professors. We could aspire to objectivity and embrace fairness, something few media outlets now even attempt, at least by my crude measure.

Certainly the outright failure of the trust equation (media, government, business all suffer), should be laid bare here. One must evaluate the media’s biases and objectives, and caveat emptor reigns there, as well.

People determined to do wrong will find a way if their personal ethical compass permits. Maybe that’s the scariest part of all of this. We’re relying on individuals to manage their own ethics in a time when ethics are subjective, not objective, and right and wrong are relative concepts.

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Posted in Measurement, News Analysis, Public Relations, Social Media, Strategy | 4 Comments »

NYT ‘Corner Office’ shows power of leadership communication

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

It’s usually on page two of the Sunday New York Times business section. A short Q & A with some notable business leader that covers the usual ground –  “How do you hire? What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?” This week, Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, is on the hot seat, and she joins a long list of her peers in crediting effective communication for much of her organizational effectiveness.

There isn’t anything particularly earth-shattering in the interview, and truth to tell, there usually isn’t. But I continue to be heartened by the focus on communication as a business process that I see in this feature almost every week. Faust says:

“I spend a huge amount of time reaching out to people, either literally or digitally, and with alumni networks all over the worl, so that I can connect. Leadership by walking around — that a digital space now, it’s virtual space.  An enormous amount of my job is listening to people, to understand where they are, how they see the world so that I can understand how to mobilize their understanding of themselves in service of the institutional priorities.”

The interviewer says, “But you can’t make everybody happy.”  Her reply:

“No, you don’t make everybody happy, but if people feel they were listened to, they’re going to be much more likely to go along with a decision.”

If that short conversation doesn’t motivate communicators to see themselves as something other than a media publicity machine, I don’t know what will.  We, alone in the organization, are well-equipped to counsel leaders on communication effectiveness.  Yet, we too often cede this skill to Human Resources (“Well, it’s really about training people, and that’s HR!”).

We are the experts at communication. We understand why dialogue and discussion among our employee base is important. We know what a good presentation is and how to help improve the level of communication in our organization.  If not us, whom? And yet, most of us would rather work with a reporter on a media story than do the hard work of remaking our organizational culture from hierarchy to high performance.  We rationalize that choice by claiming that the media story has more impact on revenue. But the jury is still out on that, except for marketing communication and product PR. I submit that we’d positively affect reputation in a measurable way if we focused more on making our leaders and their teams communicate better.

I’ve been reading the Corner Office in the Times for years. I haven’t yet seen an executive say that media relations is a core leadership function.

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Posted in Communication Skills, Internal Communications, News Analysis, Public Relations, Strategy | Comments Off

Just Thinkin’ …

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Barron’s this week says that “Digital media and subscription TV are likely to see sizable gains in ad spending as a recovery gains…” A graphic shows that adverts on mobile phones and handhelds are estimated to increase by 33% from 2008-2013, Internet ads will rise more than 10% and pay TV ads by more than 7% during the period. Of course, another chart shows a “U-Shaped” curve for that spending increase, flat through next year.  They don’t talk about any of the newest ad ideas though, showing that the social media revolution is still at the fringe of business consciousness regarding driving sales behavior.

Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal talked about the use of Twitter in crisis situations, sharing stories from wine guy Gary Vaynerchuk (@corkd), who got hacked by unsavory characters, and Scott Townsend from a Bartlesville, Okla.-based uniform company who tweeted after an ice storm, and a few others.  I can see the application for this type of activity clearly — and I know that my Web traffic increases when I Tweet — so sharing news is great, provided you’re followed. I’ve gotten the most benefit from Twitter to simply meet people and see what others say during Twitter meetings, such as #prstudchat and #icchat.  Whether this is building sufficient awareness to help me generate business, I have no clue! Heaven knows I spent enough time Twitter-ing today.

Tuesday at Kent State, the class I’m teaching got into the community theory of PR being advanced by Dr. Dean Kruckeberg of University of Northern Iowa.  Fascinating discussion ensued as we investigated the implications of the theory, which holds that organizations are part of society and therefore owe society as a member of its community. I’m too new to this academic stuff, but this challenges me — I tend to be a garden variety capitalist, believing that a company’s only logical responsibility is to its owners, its purpose to make money lawfully. I need to think about this a while…

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Posted in News Analysis, Public Relations, Social Media, Strategy | 4 Comments »

The Tyranny of Social Media

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

Following a long weekend of being unplugged in the lush green hills of Pennsylvania, I came home with real work to do — an excellent lunch with a colleague, a great meeting with a prospective client and then teaching the third day of class at Kent State.  The rest of the week includes a client meeting, a group meeting with another prospective client and the arrival of a friend from out of town, plus a panel discussion with PRSA Akron and teaching. When exactly do I have time to blog or tweet?

I confess that I am wondering about the value of social media — it requires a significant time commitment (especially if one wants to be helpful by finding interesting posts and tweeting them out rather than just trumpeting one’s latest personal ruminations.)  I know that this same question, from the reader’s perspective, is being asked in companies all around the country (at least…) I see great value in establishing connections, using the social media tools as a part of an overall outreach strategy, but thus far I’m not certain of the marketing value, perhaps because it’s been such a short time since I launched Communication AMMO.

There is no doubt that making personal connections with prospective clients will require employing other tools — I’ll attend the Institute for PR Summit on Measurement next month, as well as the IABC Heritage Region Conference here in Cleveland in hopes of broadening my business network.  But with most of my Twitter followers being consultants and providers, and my blog readers coming mostly from my existing network, the need to expand beyond social media is readily apparent.  Where are the clients?  Are they not using these tools?

What’s your view?

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Posted in Social Media, Strategy | 6 Comments »

Handling ‘No-Win’ Media Stories

Monday, August 10th, 2009

The Taliban resurgent in Afghanistan.  The U.S. House wants to spend $550 million on new jets for themselves. Banks fork over billions in bonuses after receiving trillions in U.S. taxpayer funds.  How’d you like to be the PR folks who need to handle those issues?

When I was relatively young in public relations, our top-five execs were poised to gather up a prodigious pile of cash, stock and options — they hit their targets, and then some, for the year.  The main way they’d done so, however, was to cut headcount by 10 percent across the board.  Preparing the internal communications for that proxy release (which would include the compensation details) wasn’t an easy task.

There were good business reasons for the compensation strategy, not the least that there were contractual obligations — they were owed this compensation. The packages had all been vetted by the compensation committee of the board of directors, comprised only of “outside” directors — people who weren’t also employees of the company.  The goals for the year were bottom-line oriented, aligning the interests of the executives with those of the shareholders.  A substantial amount of the dollar value of the pay was long-term compensation — three years’ deferred. And, the largest portion of the package was in restricted stock and stock options, both of which were designed to keep high-performing executives at the company for several years.

After reading the proxy, I felt reasonably comfortable with the reasons for the high pay.  I wrote a paragraph not too different from this last one in a questions-and-answers document for managers, answering the question, “Why did these executives get such high compensation?”

The corporate treasurer called me, with a smile in his voice, and said, “This is an argument you can’t win. Let’s not try to explain the reasons for the packages. Just say that there may be questions as a consequence of news media coverage and refer interested parties to the Proxy.”

I was pretty disappointed.  I’m a fan of sharing the reasons behind decisions. Of course, the danger here was the snicker factor.

The snicker factor is the likelihood that that people will snicker when they read the explanation, that the intent of being transparent and honest will instead be seen as spin.

The reality is that executive pay is a tough story. The reality is that contracts tend to insulate execs from downside risk, that the independent directors are execs at other firms, their motives suspect… You can almost hear the conversation around the water cooler, visualize the Tweets… “Yeah, right! These guys all take care of their own, they’ll do anything to get their piece of the pie, what do they do around here, anyway?”

Do we only explain if there is a likelihood of winning the argument? That certainly would simplify the measurement of our efforts in these matters. By the way, I’m aware of at least one company that, as a matter of policy, separates proactive and positive PR from reactive and negative PR. They feel like they have a great track record and lots of positive reinforcement.  It’s not exactly what the Excellence Theory calls for (two-way, symmetrical), but it has its fans.

For another firm, staying out of any no-win story was the primary objective, and they did (and do) a fine job of it.

As long as we define our function as one of advocacy — and are above board about it — this makes perfect sense.  In those circumstances, we adopt the model that calls for non-participation if there is no objective benefit to our organization. We increase reputation risk by not participating, but perhaps that’s the main question: How risky is participating and explaining compared to staying away from such controversy?

It seems to me to be a question of certain risk versus uncertain risk — we know the snicker factor will kick in if we participate. We don’t know what will happen if we don’t.

Avoiding the devil you know can be a compelling strategy. What do you think?

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Posted in Crisis Communications, News Analysis, Public Relations, Strategy | 5 Comments »

’20-somethings’ Push Cisco Toward Social Media From The Top

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

John Chambers has a terrific reputation as a CEO who “gets” communication. The Cisco Systems chairman and CEO once spoke at a KeyCorp senior management retreat that I attended and wow’d the crowd with his openness, honesty and frankness.  In Sunday’s New York Times, Chambers talked about how his leadership style has changed with the advent of Web. 2.0 tools.

I’m a command-and-control person. I like being able to say turn right, and we truly have 67,000 people turn right. But that’s the style of the past. Today’s world requires a different leadership style — more collaboration and teamwork, including Web. 2.0 technologies. If you had told me I’d be video blogging and blogging, I would have said no way. And yet our 20-somethings pushed me to use that more.

When I heard him speak some years ago, Chambers talked a lot about communication as a critical competency for leaders, recounting how he left voicemail messages, sometimes 100 per day, for various members of his team. Sometimes he was responding to inquiries or comments from leaders, sometimes he was dishing out praise to individual contributors.  He focused on the personal nature of voicemail, the individual tailoring of the message and the need to “touch” employees in a human way.

There’s no doubt that social media tools can be effective in some ways in that context, but I’m certainly not going to be as motivated or appreciative of a video blog as I am a personal message, even on voicemail.

I don’t know whether Chambers’ video blogging and other blogging has replaced his use of voicemail. I hope not. I like Web 2.0 tools as additional vehicles for mass communication and some kind of interaction, not as a replacement for personal contact.

I’m also concerned about the effective measurement of these tools. Many of my colleagues in the Institute for PR Measurement Commission have very strong opinions about that.  There’s been spirited discussion on that topic.  There certainly is some clarity on the value of social media, but what’s not clear thus far is the financial return on investment in social media in a general sense.

Social media acolytes want every company and organization to engage with their various stakeholders in social media, but I’m not yet convinced that it’s a good fit for everyone. I do believe that every organization should explore the use of social media, and monitor what’s being said about them there; it’s foolish to do otherwise, as several companies have learned to their peril. For certain organizations, this will represent a game-changing shift, particularly for large consumer brands and universities.

Customer service alone is fertile ground for exploiting social media — imagine reduced call center traffic, fewer email complaints, etc.

Cisco’s Chambers told the Times he finally asked, “why do you want me to do this? And they said, ‘John, if you don’t do it our company won’t learn how to do this. It won’t be built into our DNA for the way we interface with customers, our employees. The top has to walk the talk.’” Chambers’ willingness to “walk the talk” says a lot more about him, as a leader, and Cisco as a company than the specific tools employed. And that’s the reason he and his company are worthy of my admiration.

Chambers, near the end of the interview, lists the attributes he looks for when evaluating a potential new hire. “And I look at their communication skills, and one of the largest parts of communications is…” He pauses for dramatic affect, letting the reporter fill in the blank with, “listening?”

“You betcha. Seeing how they listen, and are they willing to challenge you?”

It’s not about social media, it’s about finding the right tools to interact with customers and employees and demonstrating commitment to communication. Social media certainly can help organizations listen, but it’s not going to replace every other mode of communication at our disposal.

Or am I wrong?

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Posted in News Analysis, Social Media, Strategy | 3 Comments »

PR News Measurement Conference an Interesting Event

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

More to follow on this, but I had the fortune to join Ogilvy’s Michelle Rios and Tim Keefe of JP Morgan Chase Card Services on a panel on internal communication measurement yesterday.

The conference was filled with interesting information and hindered only slightly by fairly large panels that required individuals to spend just a few minutes speaking. Otherwise, it was terrific — I’ll report on a few of my favorite presentations in upcoming posts.

Meanwhile, thanks and kudos to my co-panelists, moderator Courtney Barnes (PR News Editor) and that august publication for putting on a great conference.

Here’s a thumbnail:
Angie Jeffrey — Institute for PR Measurement Commission colleague and VMS research and measurement maven — talked about a new way of looking at advertising effectiveness. Linda Locke of Mastercard showed off some very impressive metrics. Matt Gonring of Gagen MacDonald was his usual inspiring self as he called for integrating engagement metrics and other business data. There’s much more. See you later.

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