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.

Discovering your unique ability

My coach has me on a journey to discover my innate ability.

Innate ability is that which comes naturally to us. It is our preferred mode of operation; it is instinctual. We do it very well and we get a great deal of satisfaction from work performed in this mode. However, because it is instinctive we tend to take it for granted – until someone points out how valuable it is.

Some of you may remember a book “Now Discover your strengths” by Buckingham and Clifton. The premise of the book is that we should build on our strengths and if we do we will be successful.

In reality we often train our weaknesses which means that we end up with mediocre weaknesses. Why not train our innate strengths for excellence! Imagine our organizations full of people employed for their strengths and trained to become outstanding in the areas where they have natural talent. Sports people do this all the time – with obvious rewards.

It’s a “win win” when employees are operating in their natural mode. They are happy and more productive and the organization gets the benefit of an employee who does a darn good job with passion. I had coffee with a woman yesterday who used to work for a large financial institution in town. She found her passion for facilitation quite by chance and realized where she wanted to spend the rest of her working life. She is now busy, and happily, pursuing that career elsewhere because the bureaucracy she worked with had her pidgeoned in a box she no longer wanted to be in.

Because we have certain innate abilities doesn’t mean to say that we aren’t good at other things. I’m pretty good at administrative stuff - when I have to be – but it is not on my list of favorites things and I do tend to avoid it. On the other hand, I love to work with groups and help them move toward a stated goal in a creative fashion that engages them. And the more time I spend doing this the happier, and more productive, I am.

Your innate abilities and those of your staff may surprise you. My coach had me ask my clients what they thought my abilities were. None of them told me I was a great trainer or a fabulous creative writer, but all of them mentioned my ability to communicate effectively and get people on board and behind a project - which might explain why I do so much work in the area of change.

You might want to figure your innate abilities, as well as those of your team members. This is the kind of information that you can use to focus people on activities that will make them happy and your organization more successful. One way to do this is by taking an online assessment. I recently completed the Kolbe A Index www.kolbe.com . The Kolbe looks at four action modes; information gathering and sharing, arranging and designing, dealing with risk and uncertainty and your best way for handling space and tangibles. The results were pretty surprising. My scores showed me to be very high on conceptualizing and risk taking. Again, skills that are important if you work in the area of change. The Kolbe is around $50 for each person.

Another option is the Strengths Finder from Gallup. Purchase the book “Now Discover your strengths” by Buckingham and Clifton and you will get access to an online profile and find your five top strengths.

A lower cost strategy is to get together as a team and focus on what you consider the other team members unique or innate abilities might be. Try and be as specific as possible, focus only on positive attributes. For example I’m a risk taker. This could be seen as negative but the Kolbe highlighted it as very positive for example it allows me to initiate change, improvise solutions and options and create a sense of urgency. You get the idea of why working for change is good for me!

Here are five steps you and your team can take to identify and take advantage of your unique abilities:

1. As a team consider one another’s unique abilities. Summarize the findings. If you prefer do online assessments.

2. Circulate everyone’s unique abilities – give people time to celebrate how they are perceived or assessed.

3. Come together as a group – celebrate the great strength you have as a group

4. Consider how you can support one another to ensure each individual is spending more time on his or her unique ability.

5. Review your training strategy. Train your unique abilities.

Nicky Fried is the principal of Nicky Fried Consulting Inc. She helps organizations to translate strategy and change so that employees understand where the organization is going and how they support it through their daily actions. Learn more about us at http://www.nickyfried.com/.

Accountability is engagement

Do you have 45 minutes? Pick up a copy of John G. Miller’s QBQ: The Question behind the question. http://ping.fm/cBNx9 . It’s all about personal accountability.

Miller believes the answers are in the questions. He has a simple formula for taking accountability:
• Ask What and How questions
• Use I in the sentence
• Make the sentence action orientated.
E.g. What can I do to improve our relationship with marketing.

Imagine working in an organization where people functioned like that!

Why we choose to live by the rules

A dear friend of mine shared her woes with me about her teenage son. He is testing boundaries, and the value of rules, in a very trying fashion for his mother.

All social systems have rules; most often they are a good thing and make our lives much easier. I am a Canadian and here in Canada we feel it is important to abide by the law and give everyone an equal opportunity. This means we respect line-ups, patiently wait our turn when traffic lanes merge, and we all experience equally unreasonable wait times for our certain medical procedures. Our tax laws are quite ridiculously cumbersome because they aim to be fair. That is the way we do things here.

And sometimes it’s frustrating. When you have to wait six months or a year for knee surgery – all this fairness seems, well – a little unfair. But for the most part it works and people respect the system.

Organizations too have systems and we would hope that when people join organizations they take the time to understand its values to ensure it’s a place they will feel comfortable in; a place where they can follow the rules.
My husband works for a large Canadian company with a very strong set of values. A small group of employees clearly did not share the same set of values; they broke the company rules – and the mess landed up on the front page of the newspaper.

That little drama has now played itself off of the front pages and out of the public arena. Inside the organization the drama has lingered. The remaining employees are deeply wounded. They were incensed that a few rogue individuals have brought into question their values. These are people who take great pride in what they do and the company they work for. This was a deeply personal and very upsetting experience for them.

I am given to understand that the executives were a little taken aback at the strength of the reaction. They should not be. We are all human and we all have strong emotional reactions when our values are messed with. Why should it be any different at work?

Employees need to feel part of a greater whole. They need to feel their values are in sync with those of the organization. They need to understand the big picture and how they contribute to the organization’s success; common values are a part of that bigger picture.

The skills we need from internal communications and engagement employees

In my first job in corporate communications the department was filled with crusty ex-journalist types. They were the most wonderful men (yes - all of them were male) - each a unique character with amazing stories to tell.

But let's get one thing straight. They were not communicators - they were writers. The copy they produced was excellent. But good copy alone does not a communicator make - particularly in internal communications.

A recent article from Ragan talks for the value of hiring journalism graduates in corporate communications. Maybe - if you are hiring for writing ability and someone who understands a variety of different social media. But you better make sure that person is able to develop other skills.
Internal communications is about a great deal more. Key to effective internal communications is the understanding that this is a strategic endeavor focused on facilitating discussions throughout the organization with the goal of performance improvement.

Please don't get me wrong. A good newsletter is worth its weight in gold. But it is one of many tools and skills that we as communicators bring to the table.

I'd be interested in your views on what's critical in the internal communications skill and tool box.

Interactive communications helps employees understand relevance

This week I have been working on proposals. If you are a consultant proposals are very much a part of your life. The job of a proposal is to persuade. And a proposal persuades not by selling what you have to offer, but by providing a solution the purchaser is looking for – there is a difference.

It’s not unlike the difference between top down and interactive communication. Top down communication tells people what to think, is if often general in nature, and as such may not create relevance for employees. Interactive communication, while more time consuming, suggests a dialogue which provides an opportunity to show personal relevance for the employee.

The corporate communications folk clearly can’t enter into discussions with every employee, but they can facilitate the debate between managers and employees. If managers can help employees understand goals and objectives and their personal contributions, your organization will be in the pound seats. Like a good proposal, interactive communication talks directly to individual needs and offers a solution – in this case how the employee can support goals and objectives more directly and be part of something bigger.

When opportunity knocks

Imagine - if you do not already have this - that the most perfect person walks into your life. This is your soul mate. He or she is gorgeous and meant for you in every way. Do you:

1. Jump in boots and all

2. Decide you can't possibly get involved because he/she is not in your social circle

3. You really like this person but you are too busy right now - you will get to him/her later

4. Check your bank balance and decide you don't have enough money to ask out your soul mate

5. Take nine months checking the person’s credentials by which time he/she has found someone else.

What has this go to do with business? Quite a lot actually. Often we come across strategies, tools and processes that we instinctively know will work for our organizations, but for a variety of reasons we brush them aside; we're too busy, it's too much money, need to do more research, have never worked with this company before. And so the opportunity passes by.

A fellow I know who works for a large bureaucracy found a process he loves. But he said no because the supplier was not on the preferred vendor list.

On shoes and fish

Some weeks ago we had dinner with dear friends. No dinner party is complete without a good story and this one was no exception. The story was told by our host who is a keen fisherman. It involved a salmon – and a pair of Kenneth Coles. Shoes are important to our host. He is the CEO of a large shoe store chain.

Our friend was escaping a very frustrating day at the office. Still dressed to deal he went fishing to relieve the tension, and eventually landed every fisherman’s dream - a 20 lb salmon. (This is his story – not mine.) The Kenneth Coles were mentioned frequently and appear to have stood the test of reeling in a 20 pounder while battling the currents and avoiding large sea-faring vessels.

What’s amazing about this story, other than the fact that I remembered it, is that I now know the name of a brand of men’s shoes. And this is important because I do not buy men’s shoes. Personally I avoid shoe shopping – it’s a painful experience for me. And because I find buying shoes so stressful – I see no need to be involved in the purchase of shoes for others. Good heavens my husband actually enjoys shoe shopping and probably owns more pairs of shoes than I do. I’ve no doubt he bonds with our children while the three of them are out shoe shopping. So why I ask you should I remember any brand of male foot attire?

I remember Kenneth Cole because someone told me a really good story. And if that isn’t a powerful business tool I’ll eat my shoe.

Only 21% of employees engaged

Only 10 percent of employees around the globe believe senior management treats people as the most important part of the organization - this according to a Towers Perrin survey of nearly 90,000 workers worldwide.

The survey goes on to say that just 21 percent of the employees surveyed are engaged in their work, meaning they're willing to go the extra mile to help their companies succeed. Thirty-eight percent are partly to fully disengaged. Towers Perrin has dubbed this the "engagement gap".

Firms with the highest percentage of engaged employees increased operating income by 19 percent and earnings per share by 28 percent.

It’s clear that the performance improvement opportunity for businesses today is in accessing discretionary effort and lessening the “engagement gap”.

People are fully involved in, and enthusiastic about their work when they understand how they personally contribute to the organization’s goals and objectves. Supervisors and managers are best placed to make that connection for employees – far more so then say - the employee newsletter.

Are we investing our communication dollars in the right place?

Power to the people

I have a pen pal. Most of our communication is via email with the occasional phone conversation.

My pal Kenny is a busy senior executive who still finds time to talk to me even though he has never seen me and lives half a continent away. Pretty amazing, but then Kenny is rather special.

Kenny is the corporate ombudsman at KeySpan Corp., a Brooklyn, New York-based energy company. Before joining KeySpan he was a Roman Catholic monk.

You’d imagine that going from monk to manager would be quite enough stimulation for a single lifetime but Kenny keeps looking for ways to make corporate life better.

During our last conversation he shared with me his experiences with Open Space. Open Space Technology enables people to create inspired meetings and events. In Open Space meetings participants create and manage their own agenda of parallel working sessions around a central theme of strategic importance. In other words a group of anywhere between 20 and 200 people turn up at a session with no more than a theme - no agenda.

They spend the first part of the day setting up the agenda. People who are passionate about topics related to the central theme volunteer to run breakouts on that topic. Once everyone who wants to run a session has volunteered then they go to separate rooms and the remaining participants use their feet to take them to the subject that excites them.

Wow! Subversive. Talk about power to the people.

There are a whole bunch of things that excite me about Open Space but most of all I like that fact that it is so grounded in the positive. People are voluntarily seeking out what they are enthusiastic about.

Trouble with adopting something like Open Space is that managers have to have faith in their employees. They have to trust that employees really do have the best interests of the company at heart. And that, I believe, is the real challenge to the success of initiatives like Open Space.
I’d like to hear what you think.

Check out Kenny’s book The CEO and the Monk: One Company’s Journey to Profit and Purpose (John Wiley & Sons, 2004), written together with KeySpan CEO Robert Catell and writer Glenn Rifkin.

Still focussed on product

I had an interesting conversation over the weekend with a senior executive from a large multinational. This guy is one smart cookie. Any communication or change management professional working for him had better know what he or she is doing – because this guy can see through the bullshit.

Until very recently his organization operated under a PR-style model for internal communications. Not surprisingly it didn’t work. This savvy exec was quite clear that superficial internal communication - driven by product – was not good enough to take his company into the future.
Actually it’s not good enough for any organization.

That’s not to say that communication products like newsletters, podcasts and web sites don’t play an important part in the communication mix. However, the role of manager as communicator is, I would argue, pivotal. And if that is the case, then the role of the communications professional is to facilitate the conversation and develop the process and tools to support it.

Why are communicators still focused on product even when their execs are looking for something else? I’d be interested to hear your views.

Talking with the receptionist

One of the first items in my inbox this morning was an article from Knowledge@Wharton entitled "Talking with the Receptionist". Who can resist a title like that?

The article begins with the story of Stephen Harrison, (at the time he was CEO of Lee Hecht Harrison, a global career management services company) being reprimanded by his COO for not greeting the receptionist when visiting one of their regional offices.

The COO explains that a receptionist is "a corporate concierge. They will talk to more important people in a day - suppliers, customers, even CEOs - than you will talk to all year."

It's well known that many organizational types think more about the people above them in the hierarchy, than those below them. Yet, it is frequently those at the lower rungs who have daily contact with the client, and make and deliver the goods and services for those same clients.

Leaders who understand this and pay attention to everyone within the organization, no matter their level, will be repaid a million times as their employees apply the same care and attention to customers.

Silent movies allow us to co-own the story

I'm probably one of few who hankers after silent movies.
This weekend my husband and I, and our 11 year old son, laughed and cried our way through The Gold Rush; one of Charlie Chaplin's most successful silent films. First made in 1925 the black and white film is a masterpiece of physical humor and pathos.

We watched both the original 1925 version and the one Chaplin edited and added narration to in 1942. All of us agreed that the original was a far more powerful piece of cinema.

A good story puts you right in the middle of the action. You feel like you are part of the drama. With silent film much of the interpretation is left up to you. You project your own thoughts and feelings (and words) onto the characters. You make the story part of your own experience - your own lexicon - and that is powerful. Powerful because once it becomes your story - you begin to integrate it into your belief system.

The same may be said of radio drama where you are encouraged to imagine an entire world based on conversations between people.
When people use storytelling in a corporate setting they offer listeners an opportunity to co-own a story - to make it their own. Replace the story with facts and figures and people struggle to make the story personal and integrate it with their belief systems.

Stories make connections around the globe

Travel broadens the mind, and in my case, the hips as well. The good meals and interesting conversations I had last week in the UK are to blame.

I am struck, as always, by the cultural differences between our polite and charming European cousins and North Americans. I am also, as usual, struck by the similarities. Let me explain: In all nations we face the common challenge of ensuring our people are thoroughly engaged in the organizational journey. In all countries we struggle with the challenges of making our most expensive and most precious resource, people, highly productive.

We have long been schooled in cultural differences. North Americans and Europeans seek eye contact, the Japanese avoid it. In India you indicate yes by shaking your head, in North America that means no. In the rush to honor differences we sometimes overlook the similarities.

I attended a large corporate event in London. It was within a stones throw of Hyde Park, which certainly lent a little grandeur to the occasion. Initially I was so focused on the differences that I couldn't see the commonalities. There were obvious differences in language, humor and culture. For example I have never been to a North American corporate event where the CEO sent everyone off to get a drink before he closed the session.

But in one respect we are the same the world over. We all need to make that human connection; to be acknowledged and build relationships. Whether you are in London, Chicago, Toronto, Tokyo or Delhi that need remains constant. It also seems the hardest to fulfill, certainly within the business context. Stories do it. At the meeting in London, executives and employees used stories to talk about how they met objectives. The real human stories of endeavor and success made it right to the hearts of the attendees. Our language might change depending on where we are; our emphasis and manners might differ. But we all achieve the same result when we tell a story - connections that speak volumes to our common humanity.