This blog is about the relationship between organizations and the people who work for them. And, it’s dedicated to the millions of people around the world who go to work every day wanting to do a great job.
Change Management
If the US Army is embracing social media, you can too!
Imagine this paragraph from the opening letter to the US Army’s social media policy - Army social media – Optimizing online engagement - written for your organization:
The US Army isn’t embracing social media as a nice to have. It’s a critical element of their operational strategy.
If the US Army is embracing social media, isn’t it time you did too! And not as a nice to have but as key to your operational strategy.
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Thriving in chaos
According to a recent article in Fast Company, This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business, we’re in trouble. The volume and pace of change is relentless and uncontrollable. We can’t know the future. And the past may or may not be relevant. It’s chaos.
“Our institutions are out of date; the long career is dead; any quest for solid rules is pointless, since we will be constantly rethinking them; you can’t rely on an established business model or a corporate ladder to point your way; silos between industries are breaking down; anything settled is vulnerable.”
And then, just when you think there’s nothing we can really do institutionally, except hope and pray, comes this: “The key is to be clear about your business mission. In a world of flux, this becomes more important than ever.”
When you can’t know, get back to basics. Get back to your institutional values and aspirations. Not the stuff that’s written on plaques on walls. The real stuff. The essence of what your organization is and what you stand for and care about.
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Great brands are more than marketing
Imagine you’re an Apple employee in 1997. It’s over a decade since Steve Jobs was ousted from his position as CEO. You know you’re part of a team with “good people”. But, despite strong “brand loyalty” and “millions of dollars of investment in research and development”, Apple feels like it’s “standing still” and the business you love is being described as the “failure story of wall street”. [quotes]
And, now, Jobs is back. And, he’s describing Apple’s core values: “We believe that people with passion can change the world!”
In this short video, he talks about the Apple he’s come back to, gives a primer on the power of core values to create great brands like Nike. He’s talking about marketing and introducing an ad campaign.
But, great brands, like Apple are about more than marketing! And, Jobs knew that.
Great brands capture the imagination of people inside and out and then they deliver.
What are your core values? It’s a question that has been asked before. It’s a question worth asking again.
How do you describe who you are and what you stand for? As an institution? As a CEO? As a leadership team? And, how do you translate that into an experience for employees and customers?
Thanks to Lisa Barone for the inspiration.
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When form becomes formula
I know many of you are fans, as I am, of design and Design Thinking. The field has much to offer. Understanding the ‘customer’ experience from the ‘customer’s point of view is how I’ve spent much of my career. It’s the basis of what I do when I help clients design and implement successful internal and external communications strategies.
Last month, there was a Design Thinking unConference held in Vancouver. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make it, so today I’ve been trying to pick up some of the threads of the conversation and I tripped across this talk by Harold Nelson, author of The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World and Nierenberg Distinguished Professor of Design in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University.
It’s a bit of a ramble but quite thoughtful. For those of you who don’t have 8 minutes: He cautions us on the “commoditization of design thinking”. And suggests that “Design Thinking can effect human evolution”… “it’s “a big deal and it’s not 4 steps you can sell to commercial clients to guarantee product success.”
Once form becomes formula we become mindless. Once we are mindlessly implementing steps the power of the form is lost. Something to think about. And not just as it applies to Design Thinking.
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Smile!
… and the world smiles with you! Or not, according to an article in today’s Globe and Mail. How and when we smile depend on “gender, race, culture, and class”.
It’s interesting to think about the impact this small thing, a smile, has on our boardrooms and workplaces. As an example: ”Impassive facial expressions are the default for men” and “women are more likely to… return a smile and … to smile when the are disappointed.”
So, the people in power aren’t smiling [men hold 86% "of board seats among the 500 largest Canadian companies"] and their women employees are out there smiling even when they are disappointed. See a problem here?
If employee involvement is our goal, then maybe we need to start with a smile!
Have a great weekend!
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Changing your point of view changes everything!
We’re busy. We’re very, very busy. We’re announcing new strategies. We’re launching refreshed brands and new identities. We’re introducing new values. We’re introducing new products and services. We’re up-sizing and downsizing and reorganizing. We’re changing processes and systems. We’re reducing costs and increasing investment. We’re changing our culture to be more innovative, collaborative, flexible, [insert other]. We want our employees to be engaged, loyal, and proud of the organization they work for so we’re “communicating” and “communicating” and “communicating”.
Changing your point of view is an important source of insight and understanding. Today, I’m wondering if this isn’t what it all looks like from an employees point of view.
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“The new ad cost us millions mate, millions…”
A little fun, from down under, that takes a look at the employee side of this equation.
So wrong on so many levels, and yet the main point is just too right to be really funny!
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Let there be light!
Over the past couple of years I’ve had this niggling feeling that just won’t go away. Communicators and human resource professionals are working in the dark. Demands are changing. Resources low. Pressure increasing. Time? Well there isn’t enough. Result, we’re running from one event, crisis, deliverable to the next. Not only are we not thinking beyond the next week, month, quarter, but we’re working in the dark.
This came home to me again in the past couple of days. Rachel Miller had tweeted a request for help for a masters student, Sonsoles Lumbreras. Sonsoles is doing research for a dissertation that will focus on the use of social media in the context of organizational change.
Given the topic and the cause, I offered to help. And, what an interesting project that turned into. Amazing to find in my very little sample [9 executive contacts, all at major international companies] that companies either don’t have a group level internal communications person or don’t have a social media strategy so don’t have anything to say or my contacts don’t know the Communications people… What? Don’t know the Communications people?
How can we help our organizations develop strong and sustainable relationships when institutionally we aren’t doing that ourselves? How can we understand, and I mean really understand, the impact of what we’re doing if we aren’t widely and deeply networked. We have to get out more my friends! It’s not an option.
By the way, Sonsoles wants to speak to people in international businesses with operations in the UK. If you’d like to help her e-mail is: sonlumbreras@yahoo.com.
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A case of “internal communication deficit disorder”.
This week a Canadian University was diagnosed with internal communication deficit disorder. Though not rare, the disorder is almost always fatal if left untreated.
Concordia University is an institution I know well. It’s 45,000 students studying in over “300 undergraduate and 200 graduate programs” are at the centre of the downtown community I work and live in. I studied and graduated with my MBA from there; began studies for a PhD there; taught there; consulted there; worked with a student intern and volunteers from there on an urban farming project. And it’s an institution that has seemed sick at the core for some time; perhaps even further back than the Fabrikant murders in 1992.
Last year, for the second time in 3 years the President left before the end of their contract. After considerable bad press and internal finger pointing, the interim President, Dr Frederick Lowy, asked an external committee to review the governance of the university. This week, Concordia University received the report “Strengthening governance at Concordia: A collective challenge“. The review pulls no punches in reporting the situation and recommending changes to all aspects of governance.
Among other things, the review panel reported that the university was “…blatantly deficient internal communications“… had created “…a lot of distrust, often bordering on mutual contempt, between the various communities of the University.” And that “…the chorus of negative response [to the most recent President’s departure], the depth and even the fury of that response could only have arisen in a context where long simmering governance and internal communication problems between the Board and the University community, to say nothing of other outstanding matters, had neither been addressed nor resolved.” The report reflects my experience and understanding of the good [and there is a lot of good there], bad and the ugly of Concordia.
Today, the University has a decision to make: To take the recommended course of treatment for internal communication deficit disorder or not; to act on the letter and spirit of the report and its 38 recommendations or not.
If they do, it won’t be either a quick or easy recovery but recover they will. Concordia has an opportunity to change how they do things. To become a place where the board, faculty, administration, and students work together to create a unique and compelling experience for those who want to study and learn, to teach and do research, to invent and explore new ideas. In the end, this report and its recommendations are less about fixing something that is broken and more about supporting Concordia in becoming the great institution it has always had the potential to be.
As a neighbour, alumnus and friend that’s my hope.
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Celebrating failure
Engineers without borders publishes something called a failure report. They “…believe that success in development is not possible without taking risks and innovating – which inevitably means failing sometimes.” And, they go on to say that they “…also believe that it’s important to publicly celebrate these failures, which allows us to share the lessons more broadly and create a culture that encourages creativity and calculated risk taking.”
Talk about missing the point. The organizational objective isn’t failure. The organizational objective is learning. Celebrating failure isn’t the same as celebrating learning.
And for me it raises a question. How is it that good ideas like organizationally learning becomes something that ‘glorifies’ failure. Is it really so hard to learn from our organizational failures?
For two other perspectives, more individually than institutionally focused check out:
- Steven Parker’s post “Are you part of the cult of failure?”
- Bill Jensen’s post “I F@#ked Up: Big Time… Introspection is Hard!”
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Recent posts
- Do you know the 3 best headline writing tricks ever … anyone can do, guaranteed!
- You have a presentation to make
- Shocking news!
- Shining eyes
- Why oh why do presenters put so, so much text on their PowerPoint slides?
- Be aware, be very aware
- If the US Army is embracing social media, you can too!
- Thriving in chaos
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