This edition was far and away the most participation we’ve had, thanks to interest from several prominent IABC’ers and, no doubt, relentless marketing by Yours Truly (grin).  We’re following in the huge footsteps of Twitter mega-chats like #SoloPR, #PR20Chat, #BlogChat, #B2BChat #PRStudChat #IMCChat and a bunch of others, so 20 chatters and 241 tweets gives me hope.

By the way, #ICCHat and those other # thingies are ‘hashtags‘ – a string of text that makes it so that you can find tweets that contain it when you search on Twitter.  I use a third-party application, www.TweetChat.com, to organize my chatting — it automatically puts the hashtag into the tweet and makes it so you can see the chat stream separately from your other Twitter activity. E-mail me if you need a primer.

If you’d like to work through the transcript, you can find it here. Otherwise, read on for my summary and opinions.

Defining employee engagement was quite the task, as you can read here.  Not much consensus, but many interesting perspectives. I liked @DMarkSchumann‘s line:

“you know, engagement is simple – we all simply want to believe we matter – silly us”

I also loved @JGombita‘s:

“Q1: Employee engagement is when corporate values can talked about without eyeball rolling or sniggers”

@JPChurch said:

Q1: EE is the point where emps are in synch with your org’s goals, know how they affect their own jobs, and can take the ball & run

And the capper of employee-focused employee engagement-ism from @CSledzik:

“Q1: we’ve been using a 1st person description. An EE can say: ‘I fit, I’m clear, I’m supported, I’m valued, I’m inspired.’”

We talked about how to foster engagement — and our answers ran the range from the general, from @HeatherSTL:

“Honestly? Extend trust, hold ppl accountable, reward success ”

to the specific, courtesy of @BenjaminRossDC:

“The best way to foster engagement, hands-down, is though profit-sharing incentives”

and @JostleMe:

“helping each individual understand they are part of a winning team that is making a difference”

and @JGombita:

“One of the best ways to foster engagement is if you ask employees for feedback, .actually do something with it”

Walking one’s talk — building trust through authenticity and openness — was another frequently offered mode of generating engagement. Responses to the question, “Why is authenticity, transparency, ‘do right’ seemingly so difficult for organizations to embrace” were fascinating. @JPChurch:

“Because leaders wrongly think those things are “soft,” and have no obvious ROI. Au contraire.”

@RobinRox offered the contrary example:

“Depends on how you get to that bottom line. Container Store site “what we stand for” makes me want to shop there more.”

I could go on, but just read the transcript – there are great quotes (one cool by-product of Twitter chats)…

With so much responsibility falling on the shoulders of leadership, we discussed the role of communication styles on the engagement equation. @RobinRox:

if the leader’s style is so contrary to the “feel” of the company and its values, it is harder to gain a loyal following

@CSledzik:

“Culture of comm. equally important. Nothing beats two-way open comm channels, esp when leadership is involved in the convo.”

@JGombita:

“Q4 don’t think it’s so much whether the leader is an extrovert/introvert, it’s whether s/he actually LISTENS & implements”

@DMarkSchumann:

“[...]engagement only matters to employees if leadership demonstrates that people matter”

@JPchurch:

“Must be careful not to change comm efforts too much to match exec style, though – messages must be genuine & lasting.”

@DMarkSchumann

“no longer can a leader delegate engagement to others – it is the job”

It was a terrific conversation.  You could see for yourself.  If you’re not on Twitter, just sign up for a name — you don’t have to do the rest of the stuff we Twitter-people do if you don’t want to.  Just use the account for participating in Twitter meetings like #ICChat.  By the way, we resume our discussion September 7 at 2 p.m. Eastern time — topic is likely “Emerging Internal Web Tools/Trends.” Hope to see you there.

By the way, Jostle’s Brad Palmer wrote a summary here; and D. Mark Schumann did so too.  Many thanks to all of you.

Let’s face it, it can’t be easy to be an HR pro these days. “HR jobs are often the last to go in a recession. Layoffs, wage freezes, benefits cuts, discrimination lawsuits, new government regulations and other recession-fueled workplace developments all generate additional HR work…” (Workforce Management, May 2010, p. 16).  All that extra work, especially the human factors, have to bring a boat-load of stress.

We PR folks haven’t had it easy the last couple of years, either, as our staffs and budgets got squeezed. Long hours, multiple shifting priorities…  That’s even more a reason to partner-up, even as compadres in misery.

Whether in good times or bad, HR or IT, what do we do to foster professional relationships? Follow these four steps:

1. Communicate: Start by opening lines of communication. Reach out, go for coffee or lunch, ask lots of questions about HR’s business goals and how they’re striving toward them. Put yourself in their shoes. HR folks have a lot to offer, and a lot of times, just need your expression of interest to open up. Besides, that’s how we’re supposed to gather business intelligence, anyway — by talking to people.

2. Coordinate: Where do your worlds intersect?  HR content is important, whether for employees or for external constituencies. What events, projects, initiatives are on the horizon? Again, look at it from their perspective.  It may seem basic, but the big issue is the old right-had/left-hand disconnect. Help to reconnect by sharing information from your broad perspective and by being ready to make a few changes to your plans to accommodate HR’s situation and goals. You want employees to be informed, and so does HR. You want the organization to attract qualified prospective employees, and so does HR. We’re not so different from one another — we’re professionals with jobs to do.

3. Collaborate: Every department has been doing more with less. Pitch in and offer to help out.  At Goodyear, I volunteered to be part of an organizational effectiveness audit. My participation allowed the audit to move a bit more quickly and spare some folks a couple of really long days. It also allowed me to hear from our front-line employees face to face. They weren’t shy about their experiences with leadership, and communication. I was able to look through HR’s lens — thinking and talking about how to improve the organization. Plus, I built trust, won some allies and made some friends in the organization, always helpful outcomes for a communicator. Yes, we’re all busy, but it’s worth the investment of time.

4. Counsel: The heart of being a trusted counselor is the relationship. Working hard at forging professional bonds with your HR team gets noticed. For that matter, you could apply these steps to any constituency, whether you’re in conflict or not.  When you’re known for your curiosity, willingness to help and ability to add value to a discussion, you’re setting a strong foundation for relationships and your role as a trusted adviser — a seat at the strategic table.

You still need to bring the goods, by the way — your planning, advice and writing have to be first-rate. The assumption of expert status must be backed up by your outstanding performance, again whether you’re working with HR, Finance, IT or whomever.

When you do it right, you’ll discover what great partners they can be.

Our corporate cousins in Human Resources have many of the same issues that we do. They want to be seen as strategic resources, not mere tactical cogs in the wheel. They struggle to be taken seriously outside of their functional silos.  They fight for budget and resources with some difficulty, because they “don’t drive sales,” or “don’t understand the business.”  By these lights, we should be strong partners — the shared pain of the back-office services would seem to be a logical impetus for a good relationship.

My own experience demonstrates that possibility. Goodyear’s (now retired) Kathy Geier was a trusted member of then-CEO Bob Keegan’s cabinet.  She reached out to me often on all kinds of matters, and recruited me onto a task force on business process optimization. Many of her team sought me out (and I, them), and we forged a strong, positive relationship. KeyCorp’s Diane Coble and Jeff Darner (since moved on) and I enjoyed similar mutual respect and partnering. Even my brief tenure at National City Corporation included positive experiences working with HR.

But in other organizations, jealousy, turf wars, even outright stiff-necked opposition are the order of the day. Why?

Here are 5 reasons why HR and PR don’t get along.  Next week, 5 ways YOU can build a good relationship with them.

1. HR thinks they’re smarter than PR. There’s a stronger academic body of knowledge in HR, a business school connection missing from most all PR programs, which reside in Journalism.  They think their college experience was more demanding and quantitative than ours.

2. HR is hungry for budget and control.  They want more than just the functional duties of compensation, personnel, etc.This is key to their strategic aspirations; the “support services” model often puts an HR person in charge of all the support functions, elevating them to higher pay and bonus as a result of larger budgets and spans of control.

3. HR often believes that only information critical to the employee should be communicated to them — and that means comp/benefits, business conduct and training opportunities should be top of the fold in the employee newsletter and front-and-center on the intranet. They believe that they know more about communication than we do (and sometimes they’re right, but that’s another post).

4.  HR provides training in many fields, so it believes it knows better how to train managers to be communicators than we do.

5. HR likes checklists. Communicating something is an output to be checked off, not a process with a closed loop. They prefer push to pull, wanting to declare that a communication has been sent and therefore is complete. This is especially fraught when discussing how to measure the effectiveness of communication activity.

Just a reminder — these aren’t hard and fast rules, they’re examples. Your results may vary.  In fact, share your thinking here!  Do these resonate with you? Am I full of it?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.