I’m not a Facebook user of any great note. My children laugh at the small number of “friends” I have. However, yesterday, laid low with back troubles, I decided to see if I could find any of my old school mates. I found Sheila.
Sheila got “knocked up”, as we used to say in those days, when we were 16. I only saw her once after the baby was born. She brought her baby to school for a visit. I was intimidated and frightened by her new role and we lost touch. Facebook showed me that Sheila went on to a full life. She is now settled in the UK, where she and her husband run a tax franchise. Her albums are full of children and grandchildren.
There is much debate about the value of Facebook in the workplace. I recall a client being very distressed because employees would put their place of work on their Facebook pages. He felt it would lay the company open to security issues. Trying to manage what people say on Facebook, or anywhere else for that matter, is pointless. Social media is the modern equivalent of the water cooler and no boss every managed to keep that one quiet. Humans need to connect.
Social media, such as Facebook, should rather be seen as an opportunity for organizations to create networks and communities well beyond those with whom it would typically interact. The traditional mindset of a business is one where you put up a shingle and send out a few flyers. In effect “build it and they will come.” That notion of business is based on the idea of pre-existing communities, of high streets filled with people making connections and hopefully talking about your business. Sadly, communities like that do not, for the most part, exist any longer. We live isolated lives in the suburbs, using cars to connect us with our communities of friends, our work and other parts of our lives.
Because of the fractured nature of our lives, community is becoming more and more important. Savvy organizations recognize this and are attempting to provide employees and customers with a greater sense of belonging. MyStarbucksidea is an online community of coffee lovers (employees and customers) coming together to offer the mother company ideas to make the Starbucks experience even better.
Similarly a client of mine has had a fan page for clients and employees for quite a few years. It’s an opportunity for like-minded people to get together and share chat about what they consider to be important, in effect, a community. Even my neighbourhood corner store is into the notion of community. The guy who owns the store is bringing in local produce and putting in a kitchen so people can come and have a cup of tea or coffee and meet with neighbours.
There are huge advantages to building a sense of community within your workplace; the most obvious is enhanced engagement and improved productivity. In addition, once you build a community others want to join and work with your community. This translates to more potential (and like-minded) employees and customers.
Here are some basic strategies for building community within your organization:
• Tell stories of successful employees – story is the bedrock of community building
• Show employees why the organization is heading in the direction chosen by the senior team. Help them understand the broader context in which you operate and why your particular niche is important – in other words what makes us a community and how we contribute
• Have employees involved in the annual planning cycle
• Hold very regular town hall meetings with senior leaders. Make sure food is always part of your meetings. Food is fundamental to human relations
• Have a corporate cause to which everyone can contribute either financially or through time.
• Try social media in a managed fashion with a clear goal of establishing a sense of community. Start up a blogging centre. Collectively blog about your cause. Showcase stories related to your cause on your blog.
• Socialize. We are humans. Once we understand one another’s humanity – it makes working together a great deal easier.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Beyond training your leaders to communicate
I am currently working with a large client in Ontario to develop a storytelling toolkit. The aim of the toolkit is to provide managers with the resources they need to effectively share storytelling as a strategy with their staff.
Toolkits allow organizations to share top-down messages and strategies with employee in a consistent fashion, using managers as messengers. It’s not unlike “train the trainer”; managers become subject experts through a supported process.
Using managers as communicators of corporate messaging makes sense since study after study tells us that they are the most trusted source of information. Managers are in daily contact with staff and much of their time is spent communicating; anywhere between 50 to 80 percent according to research. Every day managers communicate to ensure effective performance management, innovation, understanding of clients, and coordination of effort and management of expectations. Managers are key communicators.
The message is getting out that communication is a core management skill. A recent American Management Association survey of leaders showed that 80.4 percent of companies measure communication skills and hire with communication in mind. Three out of four (75.7%) executives who responded to the AMA survey said that that competencies, such as communications, will become more important to their organizations in the next three to five years, particularly as the economy improves and organizations look to grow. Ninety-one percent of leaders rated the pace of change in business today as a leading cause for the need to grow these competencies.
As change escalates and employees become more sophisticated and diverse, business has responded by offering more management training. It’s estimated that North American businesses spend around $100 billion on training and development. I’m not sure what proportion is devoted to leadership communications but judging by the number of companies catering to the market – not inconsiderable.
The focus should be on what happens after the training session. To maximize communication training dollars we must support managers and ensure they have the tools and resources to share messages with employees in a consistent, relevant and reliable fashion.
My client in Ontario has a full time person dedicated to developing the storytelling toolkit and supporting managers in rolling it out. Not all of us have those resources. However there are steps all organizations can take to ensure leaders have the know-how and confidence to communicate to their full potential and to the advantage of the organization.
Here are some strategies to strengthen management communication in your organization:
1. Consider a communications audit; a systematic assessment, either formal or informal, of your organization’s capacity for, or performance of, essential communications practices, in particular as it relates to management communication. An audit will determine what is working well, what is not, and what might work better if adjustments are made. A strategic communications provides a “snapshot” of where an organization currently stands in terms of its communication capacity or performance, and it points to areas in which the organization can strengthen its performance. While an audit can be on the costly side, I believe it’s worth its weight in gold in terms of directing future efforts.
2. Develop consistent communication messages to support corporate goals and objectives.
3. Have your senior team actively communicate these messages; modelling the expectation that managers do the same to their employees.
4. Involve managers in developing communication behaviours that they should adhere to.
5. Develop consensus on how to handle certain types of communication issues for example performance issues, disagreements in the workplace and so on.
6. Link management communication proficiency to performance review.
7. Provide communication training. Begin with listening skills this is the foundation of all communication
8. Support managers when they are required to communicate information from the corporation by:
a. Creating a consistent process for top down communications. A process that cascades information logically.
b. Communicate the process to managers along with expectations on deadlines and key messages
c. Ensure managers have all the support tools needed to share the communication with their employees, such as discussion guides
d. Poor communication is self-sustaining because it omits the feedback loop. Senior leaders must model good communication behaviours with managers by providing a feedback loop. Make sure managers are able to get all the answers to questions they may have. Employees will go to them first.
Toolkits allow organizations to share top-down messages and strategies with employee in a consistent fashion, using managers as messengers. It’s not unlike “train the trainer”; managers become subject experts through a supported process.
Using managers as communicators of corporate messaging makes sense since study after study tells us that they are the most trusted source of information. Managers are in daily contact with staff and much of their time is spent communicating; anywhere between 50 to 80 percent according to research. Every day managers communicate to ensure effective performance management, innovation, understanding of clients, and coordination of effort and management of expectations. Managers are key communicators.
The message is getting out that communication is a core management skill. A recent American Management Association survey of leaders showed that 80.4 percent of companies measure communication skills and hire with communication in mind. Three out of four (75.7%) executives who responded to the AMA survey said that that competencies, such as communications, will become more important to their organizations in the next three to five years, particularly as the economy improves and organizations look to grow. Ninety-one percent of leaders rated the pace of change in business today as a leading cause for the need to grow these competencies.
As change escalates and employees become more sophisticated and diverse, business has responded by offering more management training. It’s estimated that North American businesses spend around $100 billion on training and development. I’m not sure what proportion is devoted to leadership communications but judging by the number of companies catering to the market – not inconsiderable.
The focus should be on what happens after the training session. To maximize communication training dollars we must support managers and ensure they have the tools and resources to share messages with employees in a consistent, relevant and reliable fashion.
My client in Ontario has a full time person dedicated to developing the storytelling toolkit and supporting managers in rolling it out. Not all of us have those resources. However there are steps all organizations can take to ensure leaders have the know-how and confidence to communicate to their full potential and to the advantage of the organization.
Here are some strategies to strengthen management communication in your organization:
1. Consider a communications audit; a systematic assessment, either formal or informal, of your organization’s capacity for, or performance of, essential communications practices, in particular as it relates to management communication. An audit will determine what is working well, what is not, and what might work better if adjustments are made. A strategic communications provides a “snapshot” of where an organization currently stands in terms of its communication capacity or performance, and it points to areas in which the organization can strengthen its performance. While an audit can be on the costly side, I believe it’s worth its weight in gold in terms of directing future efforts.
2. Develop consistent communication messages to support corporate goals and objectives.
3. Have your senior team actively communicate these messages; modelling the expectation that managers do the same to their employees.
4. Involve managers in developing communication behaviours that they should adhere to.
5. Develop consensus on how to handle certain types of communication issues for example performance issues, disagreements in the workplace and so on.
6. Link management communication proficiency to performance review.
7. Provide communication training. Begin with listening skills this is the foundation of all communication
8. Support managers when they are required to communicate information from the corporation by:
a. Creating a consistent process for top down communications. A process that cascades information logically.
b. Communicate the process to managers along with expectations on deadlines and key messages
c. Ensure managers have all the support tools needed to share the communication with their employees, such as discussion guides
d. Poor communication is self-sustaining because it omits the feedback loop. Senior leaders must model good communication behaviours with managers by providing a feedback loop. Make sure managers are able to get all the answers to questions they may have. Employees will go to them first.
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