Posts Tagged ‘manager communication’

IT Conference Reveals Unexpected Connection with PR

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Ask most PR people whether they’d like to attend a conference filled with IT people. Go on, ask. Read the conference brochure and marvel at “2000 Years of IT Service Management,” “Achieving Technology and Business Superiority through IT Organizational Transformation,” and “IT Alignment: It Takes Two to Tango.”  It turned out to be one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended.

Everyone should take the time to assess their own objectives for attending a conference, seminar, luncheon or other event. Think through what you want to get out of it, what you’re willing to put into it. My objective, this summer, is to expand the network, among people who might want to engage my services.  I’ve been marketing myself through social media, and among communication organizations — the IABC Conference, my presentation to Lake Communicators, and this fall’s presentations at the PRSA International Conference and IABC’s Research and Measurement Conference.

While reviewing networking opportunities here in Cleveland on Pat Ropchock’s blog (she’s locked in big time), I noted “Integrate 2010: Uniting the World of IT” put on by the Greater Cleveland Local Interest Group of the ITSMFUSA – it’s a mouthful of an acronym that means, “IT people who want to be more relevant and strategic.”  They call the main discipline “Service Management,” a process for aligning IT services with the needs of the enterprise.

The themes that emerged from most of the presentations I saw were fascinating.

  • IT feels like it’s not at the leadership table. Instead, they’re brought in after the business strategy’s in place and have to scramble to make things happen.
  • IT struggles to articulate its business value for all but a handful of services.
  • IT gets stuck on describing activities rather than defining its service portfolio in terms that the business leadership understands.
  • IT often can’t “sell” itself effectively, caught up in jargon and technical detail that isn’t relevant to leadership.

What happens if we replace “IT” with “PR” or “Corporate Communication?”

  • A consistent theme of IABC/PRSA material for years was “winning a seat at the table,” and then keeping it. We’ve been talking amongst ourselves for as long as I’ve been in the business about being business people first and communicators second. Yet, we’re still not there consistently.
  • Think about the debates over measurement methods — PR activity is difficult to isolate in the communication mix, and there are no standard answers for return on communication investment. Just last year, PRSA and the Institute for PR began working on a project to prove the business value of our profession. Internal communication is especially vulnerable to the question of ROI — and social media value outside of direct sales is still an unfinished book.
  • PR/Communications people frequently take as a given that their professional activities are impactful, regardless of the lack of data to support that claim. Our “service book” describes our activity from our perspective, not from that of our customers.
  • We (especially in internal communications) tend to resort to tactical explanations using our own lingo, rather than speaking about our work in terms readily understood by HR, Finance and leadership.

Sometimes it may seem like IT is on a different planet — more science than art, more Mars than Venus.  We, however, aren’t that different in our desires to be taken seriously by leadership as business people who employ specialized skills.

In addition to a few other things I discovered, this knowledge about IT was worth the price of admission.

More to follow on the conference shortly.

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Posted in Communication Skills, Strategy | 5 Comments »

HBR: Research Shows Futility, Not Fear, Quashes Employee-Manager Dialogue

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

A group of researchers looked into the state of employee-manager discussion and found that fear of retribution is not the leading cause of employee silence.  Instead, it’s futility, at least among the professional class, and among women, a Harvard Business Review story said today.

If this research can be extrapolated, the emphasis we communicator-types have placed on helping managers create a “safe” environment for people to speak up isn’t helping managers get the straight scoop that they need. It’s almost an HR article of faith that humanistic style, paying close attention, smiling and telling people you really want them to share is the path to effective leadership. Now this.

Does employee feedback matter? It does to employees, but we can’t get at the problem presented by this research without addressing the elephant in the living room… When they give feedback, does anything happen to fix the issues they share? It’s just like doing employee surveys — if you aren’t willing to change your organization as a consequence of the research, don’t do it.

The disappointment of truly thinking like a business owner and offering suggestions that go nowhere is soul-crushing. Why do it if it just doesn’t matter? Cue up Bill Murray and “Meatballs.”

On the other hand, what if organizations committed to changing where it makes sense and letting people know. Sounds kind of, well, motivational.

Nah.

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Posted in Internal Communications, Strategy | 4 Comments »

Communication Important in Change Management (Shocking!)

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

A professor from San Francisco State used three quick cases to show that when employees are dealing with difficult change initiatives, leaders have to talk with them.  Stunning, eh? OK, I’m feeling snarky today, I admit it!

Professor Mitchell Lee Marks writes in the 24 May issue of the Wall Street Journal (in the MIT/Sloan Review section) that empathy, making the business case and getting employees to think about the future are essential to getting them to let go of the past and move on. It ain’t brain surgery, but for many business folks, the fact that there are actual people hiding under the numbers on the income statement can be a bit of a shock. Here’s a quick rundown of Dr. Marks’ thinking, and my two cents.

  • Dr. Marks likes empathy, because employees often feel that no one understands their pain. He calls for leaders to acknowledge the feelings of fear and resentment. My Take: That’s an oversimplification. You run the risk of insincerity– remember President Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain…”? You will have to demonstrate that you care — and it’s anyone’s guess whether you’ll be believed. You have to try, but it’s not a certainty that it will work. Nor is it certain exactly what kind of demonstration is most likely TO work. It’s trial and error. A bit of venting IS healthy, but not too much and not too often.
  • Making the business case is the hardest dictum to follow, because the most persuasive facts and data from the leader’s perspective are often not-so-much for employees. My Take: Don’t make the business case into a pie-in-the-sky employee benefit if there is any chance of downsizing, layoffs, firings — whatever you want to call it. Making the business case is like the flip side of empathy, because it’s much more a left-brain activity.  Facts and data eventually win the day, but have some pity for these folks.
  • Looking to the future — the visionary leader sees the next objective, then the next and so on, and is supposed to keep us focused on the future. My Take: I don’t think you can get people to focus on how great the future will be until they exit the “anger” stage of their mourning. The world is changing fast. Talk about customers to move from problems to solutions.

I think what set me off was Dr. Marks’ tone (probably the editor’s tone, now that I think about it). It was as though all of this was brand spanking new.

News flash — every leader should know this backwards and forwards. It’s part of leading.

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Posted in Internal Communications, Measurement, News Analysis, Strategy | 1 Comment »

Measurement Crucial to PR’s Business Value

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

My learned Australian colleague Geoff Barbaro waxes rant in a post from 17 May (US time), where he inveighs against measurement.  Perhaps not the concept, as much as the practice. He asks:

Do you measure how you look after your family? Do you count the meals, the trips to school, the time spent with children to evaluate effectiveness? When you buy that great new dress or suit that you love, did you then sit down and work through complex metrics to measure what you did?

So why do you think it’s different in business? I’ll tell you why, it’s because you don’t trust people to do the job you employed them to do. You don’t believe they are motivated and care about their work, so you can only make sure they are working by measuring what they do, and then argue that this is the motivational tool. Measuring because “we do what we measure” is a failure of leadership, a failure of motivation, a failure of selection, a failure to define values, a failure of engagement and a failure of communication.

Sorry, Geoff, but this is fuzzy-headed thinking about a vital enhancement to the profession of Public Relations.

I started a comment on Geoff’s blog (a fine and interesting read, btw), but found that it was all too likely that I’d hijack it. And that’s not right. So, here is my reply to Geoff’s shot across the bow. Man the torpedos!

========================

Oh, my. Nothing like an existential rant to get one’s blood up, eh Geoff?

Let’s start by differentiating terms. Measurement isn’t gotcha. It’s not “check-up-on-the-poor-employees.” Neither is it merely about outputs or activities, at least not when it’s strategic.

We in PR have long been the only department in a firm that can say to the C-suite, “trust me” and get away with it. The question on the CEO (and CFO, especially) mind these days, however, is, “What business value do I get for my investment in PR?”

We can take a SWAG (stupid, wild-assed guess) at the answer, but then we sound like witless weasels (um, we build reputation and protect…uh, no, uh, we get media coverage…no, uh, we help the organization communicate effectively, wait, ummmm.)

The fact is that most of us don’t have a clue what the quantifiable business value of PR is, and that’s why PRSA has commissioned a task force to work on that very question. It’s also one of the driving forces in modern PR. It’s created an industry specialty that people are finding value in, even though there is much sophistry and bad measurement out there.

In modern business, every department must contribute to the bottom line. So, direct sales and the support for sales is a winner, as is direct effort to improve efficiency, save money, etc. There’s also credible research about the effect on brand awareness, attitude and disposition of various PR activity. On the internal side, engagement metrics, and employee knowledge and behavioral metrics lend credence to a communicator’s value.

The trick is to a) Measure what matters; and b) Link communication outputs to business outcomes. This is, indeed, a hairy process, filled with risks — bad math the most prevalent, if you ask me.  Correlation is not causation, but frequently it’s a pretty good stand-in for it, if your math is good.  We mustn’t give up on the goal of establishing impact metrics and ROI just because it’s so much easier if we don’t!

I don’t know, Geoff, if I agree that “what gets measured gets done,” but I’m sure that if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.

Cheers,

Sean

@commammo

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Posted in Measurement, Public Relations, Strategy | 7 Comments »

Communicators too often out the door in hard times

Monday, March 8th, 2010

I’ve been a regular reader of the New York Times’ Corner Office series, where they interview a senior executive, usually a CEO, about how they hire, how they lead and manage and what they do.  There is a central theme that runs through literally all of these interviews: communication excellence.

Every exec talks about how important communication is to their work — both by them and with them. Of course, there is a bit of the “usual” about that kind of statement. No one would ever say, “communication is not important at all in my work.”  But what I find striking about this observation is that ostensibly, we public relations people are the experts in communication, but get too easily dismissed from the leadership table.  We are welcome during times of crisis (the one time, it seems, that the mahogany row types understand our value) but aren’t regularly consulted about the communication dynamics of decisions.

Additionally, financial pressures often lead to cuts in the communication staff that could help the company deal with the financial issues, particularly internal communication.  It’s a fact that internal communication pros earn less than their media relations colleagues and tend to be lightly regarded. I’ve encountered this in my own career. I feel reasonably comfortable saying that generally, businesses don’t care about internal communication very much at all. They care about “getting the word out” internally, or “making sure we’re all rowing in the same direction.”  But honest improvement in the process of communication within the enterprise? Not so much.

Why?

Some of the issue emerges from a distinct lack of communication curriculum in colleges of business. Marketing, management theory, finance and operations, but no communication theory that could help leaders understand their workers (and customers) better.  More of the blame goes to convenient financial thinking. It’s easier to impose across-the-board cuts than dig into an income statement and excise the real waste, duplication and nonessentials.

One company had a largely decentralized communication structure that permitted significant duplication in communication infrastructure. Some such duplication is inevitable in a multi-national company, but why have 40-something different intranets, run on multifarious platforms? Why not unify newsletter design under a singular brand?  This company really has no idea what it spends on communication, because the units are autonomous — the financials are opaque.

Canada’s Bombardier (a few years ago) published a paper newsletter that permitted regions to wrap their own around the corporate version. All the design elements reinforced the brand. You knew it was a Bombardier newsletter whether you were in Montreal or Dublin, Ireland. That kind of consistency is economical.

How about automating manual processes on the intranet? Sounds like it should be an easy sell, but companies look at the up-front costs and decide to forget it.

I fault us.  As the putative experts, we should have a deep understanding of how moving communications levers will create value for the business.

But too many of us don’t have a clue, and that means, when the going gets tough, we’re the ones who get told to get going…out the door.

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

4 Steps to Improved Manager Communications

Friday, February 12th, 2010

Every manager encounters a thousand communication opportunities every day.  It’s a metaphorical statement, but you catch the drift. A thousand chances to add value; a thousand chances to screw something up. The best of them, the leaders, know what to do with those opportunities, and fortunately, it’s not a secret.

Oh, sure, there are “naturals” out there — those gifted souls whose kind and gentle nature makes them magnets for great teams and whose command of language makes them a joy to work for. But most managers aren’t naturals when it comes to communication. They need to be carefully taught.

In my work with literally thousands of managers over the years (quite shocking to have totaled them up last year…), they seem to have two big problems in communicating with their teams.

1. They think more about what they need to say than what they need to listen to, and
2. They fail to consider the audience before deciding on messages, or methods to communicate.

Some of the issue is simple education — many people become managers because of technical expertise. They’re great engineers, accountants or public relations people who get promoted. They don’t have formal training that helps them be effective managers, let alone effective communicators. They often think communication is someone else’s job, except for operational and policy matters.

Yet, they’re often harsh critics of their own bosses — middle managers seldom feel like they know what they need to know. That takes its toll, as resentment builds. Managers feel like they’re going into battle with an unloaded weapon. Pass these four methods along to fill that gap, and use them yourself!

  1. Think critically about audiences. In this case, the more specifically, the better. It’s not just “employees” — there are groups of employees with differing needs, experiences and objectives that must be considered. Apply the same discipline to the leaders above your level.  An exhaustive listing of these potential groupings will help give a firm foundation to your communication plans.
  2. Consider communication objectives in the context of business objectives. Managers should be specific about what they want employees to think, feel or do as a result of communicating with them.  Again, go through the same exercise with your own management in mind. Keep your objectives organized by audience so you can make all communications work toward those goals.
  3. Evaluate messages. Messaging isn’t limited only to information flowing from you to subordinates. Boil down and simplify to be sure your language fits precisely the objectives for your audiences. As Strunk and White wrote, “Make every word tell.” Your employees, and your boss, will thank you for taking the extra time to do so.
  4. Finally, you’re ready to consider HOW to communicate. Methods can vary from hot (face to face discussion) to cool (email, telephone) to cold (memo, letter, statement).  As you think about the first three items on this list, fit the method to the context. Think of this less from your own preferences, and more from those of your audience, given the objectives you have for them. It’s the essence of receiver-focused communication.

If there were a #5, it would read: “Start now.”

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Posted in Communication Skills, Internal Communications, Measurement, Strategy | 1 Comment »

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 »