This blog is about improving 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.
Communication
On being authentic
The first time I ever heard the term authentic used in an organizational setting was only a few years ago and it might have been the last time it made any sense.
I was doing a small project for Nike’s Marketing team at their head office in Portland, Oregon. They often referred to authentic Nike. At first I thought it was some meaningless corporate jargon [there’s generally a lot of that going around at HQs wherever they are]. It took me a while, but I finally realized that for them a product was authentic Nike only if it had been designed with a world class athlete to improve their personal performance. Now, that’s authentic.
Three years ago, The Authentic Enterprise concluded that “…authenticity will be the coin of the realm for successful corporations and for those who lead them.” And, that “Communicators are uniquely positioned to become experts on the new art and science of organizational trust.” Now, I need to say up front that I generally find this whitepaper interesting and compelling. And not surprisingly I’m pretty keen about their conclusions for communicators.
The problem I have is that this paper and the discussion that has followed is based on two flawed assumptions:
- Institutions can be other than authentic
- Being authentic is always going to be good.
I don’t believe either of these assumptions are true.
First, how could an institution be anything other than authentic. They are what they are. They do what they do. Their behaviours and actions, the decisions they take or don’t take reflect their underlying beliefs and values. And, whether you like them or not they are a totally authentic.
Second, authenticity has lost its meaning. For Nike it was real and good. The challenge for many institutions today is that what is authentic is not that good. What’s real is not good. Think of British Petroleum or the Vatican. Their behaviours and actions tells us much about their authentic institution and it’s not good.
Importantly, though authentic and transparent are often talked about in the same breath, you don’t have to be transparent for anyone to get who you really are and what you stand for. Here’s an example:
A young friend of mine, a recent MBA grad, got a job offer from a fortune 100 global high-tech company early this summer. He was told that his candidacy had to go through the CEO. He stopped his job search – he’d received and accepted a formal offer [reflects his values]. It’s been weeks and still no word. This one act tells us a lot about this organization. And, perhaps more than my young friend would like to know. First, even though one of their 5 values is respect they have put a young debt-ridden new grad in this position. Second I believe my friend can be confident that control will be one of the most important underlying values – not innovation or accountability. Two other values that are listed on their site.
On being authentic. That’s easy. Now how to make institutions authentic and forces for good?
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Houston. We have a problem!
“E-mails and Intranet Are Top Communication Methods Used to Engage Employees”. So reads the headline on an IABC News article. What?
Recently, I spoke about Gary Hamel’s call to reinvent management. In the webcast I refer to there, Gary talks about a global study of 90,000 employees around the world that was conducted by Towers Perrin and that showed that less than 20% of employees are engaged. And, I think this IABC News headline may tell us why. Or at least part of the why.
It seems that even though we keep saying communications isn’t about pushing messages, we continue to rely heavily on push technology and message sending.
In the world Gary describes. A world where “obedience, diligence and intellect” aren’t enough to create a competitive advantage, organizations need employees to bring “initiative, creativity and compassion” to their work. And, that isn’t going to happen because of e-mails and intranet.
How are we creating inspiring places to work? Places where people want to bring more of themselves.
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What can we learn from Chef Gordon Ramsay?
It has food. It has wine. It has crazy characters. It has drama. So it had to happen. Michael and I are now completely addicted to the original “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares”. We stopped watching television months ago. Now we’re watching streaming video online. And thanks to The Food Network we’re hooked on Chef Gordon Ramsay’s show.
Who knew how complicated running a restaurant could be?
And who knew that beside the food [Ramsay’s an advocate for fresh local ingredients and simple plates – a higher purpose for the customer], communication seems to be the most important ingredient for success. And, perhaps surprisingly, I don’t mean marketing communication or PR. I mean internal communication.
We’ve now watched about 8 episodes. And with one exception – a brigade of experienced French chefs and service staff from Michelin starred restaurants who clearly knew what they were doing – the mantra of every show has been ‘Communicate!”
Ramsay’s challenge; get communication going between:
Once you get past his foul language, the man is masterful. He starts by raising their awareness of, and gets them focused on, the customer experience. A reality check.
Then, he facilitates often profound change – he encourages, he cajoles, he demonstrates, he brings new and sometimes jarring perspective and insight, he’s rational, he’s emotional and slowly but surely most teams get it.
No crafting of messages. No pushing them out. He just gets them speaking to each other. He helps them get the right conversations/communications going in the right way and at the right time to ensure the best customer experience. Remarkably completely dysfunctional teams start working well together and end up delivering outstanding experience for their customer and each other.
So, should we be spending more time as facilitator and less time as message pushers? I’d love to hear what you think?
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Great idea #1 – Mayo Clinic’s roving video reporter
An occasional post on a really great idea for internal communications – simple and high impact.
The Mayo Clinic is not only a globally recognized medical institution but it turns out they’re pretty accomplished communicators too.
They’ve created the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media “to improve health globally by accelerating effective application of social media tools throughout Mayo Clinic and spurring broader and deeper engagement in social media by hospitals, medical professionals and patients.” Now that is a great idea!
And, one of the best internal communication ideas I’ve seen in a long time takes the old idea of a reporter at large and refreshes it creating a video reporter at large.
A member of the Mayo Clinic’s internal communication team [i.e. an employee] roams the halls and interviews staff and patients with a videographer in tow. The reporter happens to be fun and charismatic. The choices of topics interesting and aligned to their overall brand positioning. Scripted and unscripted. And the pacing just right. And, bonus, they post it on YouTube and link it on their website, getting both internal and external impact. It really works.
The Mayo Clinic’s approach is a real contrast to the usual talking heads and static interview style of most internal videos. A simple idea. Executed well. It’s great. Take a look.
Now, this production is pretty snazzy. So for those of you who are thinking – yes, but… here are a couple of things to think about.
1: Hand held cameras create videos people really trust, so, maybe the production values in most other contexts would actually work against it in some way.
2: You can produce professional looking video at very low cost today. What it takes is a little imagination. My 15 year old nephew Matthew is making great video productions using a 3 year old JVC camera and using editing software he got online. He doesn’t even use an external mike.
The potential’s incredible. So, grab your teenager’s video camera and editing software. Find yourself the right stories and the right employee reporter and go. Have some fun!
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Oh dear, what can the matter be?
“E-mails and Intranet Are Top Communication Methods Used to Engage Employees”. Oh dear.
In my last post I spoke about Gary Hamel’s call to reinvent management. In the webcast I refer to there, Hamel talks about a global study of 90,000 employees around the world that was conducted by Towers Perrin and that showed that less than 20% of employees are engaged. I think this IABC News headline, above, may tell us why. Or at least part of the why.
We talk about communications as being more than crafting and sending messages. And yet, this new survey just released by the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Research Foundation and Buck Consultants makes it clear, We still rely heavily on push technology and message sending.
And, in case we needed more evidence, the IABC article goes on to say that “32 percent of survey respondents indicate that their organizations rarely or never conduct employee listening activities”. Oh dear.
In the world Hamel describes. A world where “obedience, diligence and intellect aren’t enough to create a competitive advantage, any more, organizations need employees to bring initiative, creativity and compassion to their work.” And, that “isn’t going to happen if we command it.” It isn’t going to happen because of e-mails and intranet. It isn’t going to happen if we aren’t listening. Oh dear, what can the matter be?
What do we need to do to create inspiring work places? Places where people want to bring more of themselves.
Is it possible? Is there a role for communications in creating inspiring places to work? If so, what is it? How do you see it?
Something to read and think about
Bill Jensen, Work 2.0: Rewriting the contract, Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, 2002
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Management innovation = Communication innovation
Another wake up call.
I just tuned in to Gary Hamel’s recent webinar [ironically - given the closing line to last week's post - called]: Lighting the Fires of Management Innovation.[1] In it he describes how Management innovation was once the source of significant competitive advantage. But, most management innovation took place in the very late 19th and very early 20th century.
So, if we are going to effectively tackle the urgent challenges of today, we need a fundamental reinvention of underlying management principles and practices. And, we need to create this ‘management advantage’ at a time when the pace of change – political, economic, social, and technological – is increasing.
How? Well according to Hamel it will take courage. The courage to:
- Take on big and noble problems
- Question dogma
- Learn from positive deviance [he refers specifically to the ethos of the web and the values that he believes must infiltrate management]
- Start small – we need to be able to be both revolutionary and evolutionary at the same time.
[echos of Grassroots thinking]
Innovation in communication – the communications function and the communications themselves – will be absolutely fundamental to the reinvention of management.
As communicators it’s sometimes easy to be a little complacent around the idea of communication innovation. After all the past decade has brought significant and important innovation to how we do communications. The number and kinds of navigation tools, distribution channels, communication tools and tactics that are available grows exponentially.
But the kind of innovation that Hamel is calling for asks us to fundamentally rethink what we do. Are we taking on or encouraging our organizations to take on big and noble ideas? Do we question dogma – ours and others? Are we learning from positive deviance? Do we start small or are we caught up in one system wide campaign after another?
Are we ready to take this challenge on? As a profession? As executives and managers? As advisors to leadership? As employees and as voices for employees and other key stakeholders?
I’d love to hear what you think. [the conversation continues]
[1] You need to be registered on the Management Innovation Exchange to access it, but it’s well worth it.
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Creating extreme competitive advantage
Meeting people who really get communication is rare. So, I was pleasantly surprised to meet with Bob Weiler, founding partner of Brimstone Consulting Group last week.
It was a meeting that proved to be both interesting and provocative. Early in the conversation Bob suggested I change my business card to read Hinton : Communication strategies for extreme competitive advantage. Boy did he have my attention?
He pushed on. Reminding me of what, as an air force brat, I once knew, which is that the first thing you do when you go to war is take out or try to take out your enemy’s communications. Once you’ve got your enemy in the “dark” and unable to communicate with HQ or each other they start to think very dark thoughts. They will imagine the worst things possible about what’s going on. And this gives you a very critical strategic advantage. So the very first thing you go after is communications.
I felt like a light bulb went back on. Somewhere 100 conversations ago and in the constant fight for limited resources and budget my clients and I’d lost touch with reality. The reality that communications is not nice to have. It’s critical to have. And, great companies aren’t just OK at it. They are great at it. Individual, team and organizational mastery of communications is a top business priority. And, for the super great it is used as a weapon.
Bob suggested I go back to Kotter’s 8 steps of change model [it's a classic]. As a reminder they are: 1. Create urgency, 2. Form a Powerful Coalition, 3. Create a Vision for Change, 4. Communicate the Vision, 5. Remove Obstacles, 6. Create Short-term Wins, 7. Build on the Change, 8. Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture. Every one of these steps requires not just good communication, but great communication at the individual, the team and the organizational level.
And since Kotter’s change model isn’t the only way think about change I pulled out some notes I had on a newer favourorite of mine – Viral ChangeTM . As Dr Leandro Herrero describes it, this approach takes “a small set of behaviours spread by a small number of people through their networks of influence to create massive behavioural tipping points, translated into new routines and ‘cultures’ (new ideas established, new ways of working, new process adoption, new culture).” What will it take? Great communications.
So, I went back and pulled out some other classics:
Remember the 5 elements of management from business school? What managers need to do to get things done through their people: Planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling. What will it take? Great communication.
Or the 5 P’s of marketing, those things that marketing managers use to control marketing mix: product, people, place, promotion, price. What will they take? Great communication.
Or Jim Collins description of how to move an organization from “From Good to Great”. Remember: Develop level 5 leadership, decide first who and then what, confront the basic facts, use the hedge hog concept [know what you’re deeply passionate about, what drives your economic engine, what you can be the best in the world at], build a culture of discipline, be a technology accelerator, use the flywheel effect. What will each of these need? Great communication.
Or what makes for really engaged employees [this still rankles with me, but since it’s so loved by so many] – job clarity, materials and equipment, matching strengths to the job, recognition and praise, caring about the people you work with, mentoring, valuing employee opinions, connecting to a noble cause, one for all and all for one, creating the conditions so that people can have a best friend at work, regular conversations about individual progress, creating opportunities to learn and grow [based on Gallup G12 questions]. What will that take? Yep. Great communication.
So, why is it that so few organizations make mastery of individual, team and organizational communications an essential business priority? Seems like a no brainer. What do you think?
And thanks Bob for reigniting the flame.
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“Where everybody knows your name”
There are very few of us who would associate the place we work with the Cheers theme song.
In fact that was the point of the song. Cheers is the place where we can escape our worries. A place where we’re understood and appreciated.
You’d think that a place where we spend 50% to 60% of our waking hours getting to and working in would be a place “where everybody knows your name”. But it’s generally not. Instead, it’s a place where:
- An EVPs executive assistant for over 5 years told me that her boss didn’t know she had children until she had to stay home one day with a sick child.
- A manager reported that he’d never met his Director face-to-face even though he’d been working for him for over a year.
- [fill in the blank]
What is it about organizations? After all we’re all there working toward the same organizational mission, vision and values.
What is it about these places that:
- Isolate rather than integrate?
- Create internal competition rather than collaboration?
- Dehumanize rather than humanize?
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that colleagues at work need to be your best friend. Or that a weekly beer with people you don’t really even like is a solution? I’m not really a fan of the drive for employee engagement [what's really being measured?, implication that employees need to give more?, etc]. But, I do think that organizations can be places that encourage courtesy and respect. And it starts by knowing some basic things about the people you work with. Who are they? What matters to them?
Is your organization doing anything to humanize the work environment? Is there anything you can do in your corner of the workplace?
“Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got.
Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot.
Wouldn’t you like to get away?
Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name,
and they’re always glad you came.
You wanna be where you can see,
our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows
Your name.”
With thanks to Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo
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From the inside looking out
Earlier in my career I worked for one of the most admired brands in Canada. It’s the kind of thing that makes you proud. You walk into any situation and people are all over you about how great it must be. Except it wasn’t. The buzz and hype had created an external brand that didn’t match the internal reality.
What brings this to mind is that two more of the world’s most powerful and valued brands have taken big hits to their reputations in the past few weeks. And both of them for misleading customers.
DELL is accused of hiding significant and potentially dangerous technical issues from their business customers. Recently unsealed lawsuit documents reveal cover-up and purposeful deception that may have gone on for years.
Apple’s iphone customers have complained of dropped calls since the first iphone hit the market. They were told it was a network problem. A small problem of design which meant you just had to hold it a certain way. Then a software problem. Now, according to consumer reports the phone’s hardware is flawed. And it looks like Apple may have known about this problem for some time.
The thing is when we say DELL and Apple knew and have been misleading customers, we mean DELL and Apple employees knew and have been misleading customers. Certainly not all employees new. But, most certainly some of them did. And, no doubt many of them suspected the truth.
What’s it like to be on the inside of brands like these? To know that the customer’s brand experience is build in whole or in part on a myth. To know that if anyone really took a look behind the curtain they’d find behaviours that were questionable if not unethical or illegal. To know that your boss or your colleague is misleading you?
Rising employee cynicism and plummeting trust in leadership tell the tale. So the next time you’re asked how communications can help reverse these trends don’t start drafting new and better messages to push. Stop yourself from building a inspiring internal campaign or refreshing the intranet. Do start thinking about how you can help set the conditions for getting the right conversations going with the right people around where and how the employee experience is not aligned with the brand and discovering what needs to change.
Some additional reading
I went to see if I could find the values statements for DELL and Apple. Read in the context of what is in the news now, they are pretty interesting.
- Check out Dell’s official ‘Soul of Dell’
- Apples doesn’t publish its values statement on the web, but I did find a pdf post that looks pretty credible. If the actual values statement “customer empathy” is especially chilling.
And, I’ve been following the animated discussion on the smoke and mirrors of employer branding with Sean Trainor at CIPR Inside that adds another dimension to this post.