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.
Corporate communication
Grey zones are costing your organization big time
There’s a lot of focus in organizations on moving fast to meet customer needs and shifting market conditions. We’re encouraging employees to be more involved in defining and delivering organizational success. People from all levels and all functions of the organization are getting together to ‘hack’ solutions to important business problems. Collaboration is our mantra. Innovation our goal.
When the formal structures and systems of the organization aren’t supporting what we’re trying to do we’re finding ways around them. And this is a good thing. But, in our rush to collaborate and democratize our organizations we’re losing clarity. While we’re busy crowd sourcing hacks: Who’s got the responsibility? Who’s got the authority? And, how do we know? Will we only find out once whoever it is pops out of the wood work to disagree with what we’ve been working on/towards?
This lesson came crashing home last summer when I discovered that, on a not-for-profit project I’d been working on for several years, I had all the responsibility and no authority. Since, I’m in the business of clarifying, helping make the grey zones black and white, this was a shocking revelation. But it was an informal volunteer thing, so… “These thing happen”.
Now I’m noticing grey zones places where I would never have expected. In a high growth, high success organization that completed a major restructuring and failed to make accountabilities clear for over a year. In a 500 year old institution where lack of clarity on roles and relationships and responsibility and authority is somehow seen as a good thing. And, in a global company where decentralization of decision taking was taken to such an extreme that their shareholders are now threatening to sue them due to lack of oversight.
The grey zones we create, intentionally or not, are costing organizations time, energy, and money. They are increasing politics. It’s more and more about who you know rather than what you know or how well you do it.
Grey zones are decreasing transparency to the point where it’s virtually impossible for anyone to figure out who’s doing what, why, when and how decisions are being taken.
And, they are decreasing trust in the offering, the leadership, the institutions and, if you’re on the inside, in each other.
At high speeds, when we’re all moving fast to meet customer needs and shifting market conditions, new ways of working are imperative but grey zones may be costing us big time. Are they worth the risk?
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Saying goodbye to jargon
Saying goodbye to our favourite jargon isn’t that easy. A recent chat on the IABC linked in page asked for jargon no one wanted to hear ever again. Here are just a few examples:
Incentivize, c-suite, granular, customer-centric, innovation, collaboration, creative, low hanging fruit, breaking silos, verticals, blueprint for change, under the tent, run of play, strategic architects, rolldown, scaling, flight risk, thinking outside the box, pick my brain, value-added, leverage, make an ask, reach out, bandwidth, deep dive, drill down, ramp up, onboard[ing], quick wins, tactical execution, think laterally, going forward, socialize, run it up the flagpole, circle back, face time, strategic decision…
And more. Many, many, more.
I think we all agree. Jargon is a bad thing. And yet, most of us have been guilty at one time or another of contributing to our jargon-filled world. Jargon just sticks.
So, now what? I’m thinking we may need a good exorcism.
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Want to know the secret to writing a great speech?
The other day I was listening to a speaker on TEDx talk about the secret to writing the great speech. She had me hooked. Afterall, in one part of my life I’m a speech writer. If anyone has found the holy grail of speech writing - the secret to writing a great speech - I want to know it. The secret she said is the structure of the speech. All great speeches begin with the present (“I have a dream …”) then shift to the future (“One day all God’s children …”). And then work back and forth between the present and the future drawing their audience forward in the dramatic tension between what is and what will be. Great, only one problem. It isn’t true.
The great speeches aren’t all structured in this single way. Pick up William Safire’s collection of the world’s great speeches, Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History. You’ll quickly discover other ways. Examples? Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address (“Four score and seven years ago …” ) begins with the past not the present. John F. Kennedy’s opening statement in the televised Nixon-Kennedy Presidential Debate also begins with the past (“In the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln said …”). Mark Twain’s much celebrated recounting of his battle with stage fright begins with the present (“My heart goes out in sympathy to anyone who …”) but then shifts sharply to the past not the future (“I recall the occasion of my first appearance …”) and then resolutely stays there. I could go on but I leave it to you to discover the many other structures that provide the scaffolding for great speeches.
What can we learn from this? There isn’t one right way. You can succeed in a thousand different ways. Have a look at Saffire’s collection. It’s worth your careful study even if your next talk is a Monday morning briefing at Bombardier and not the opening of the United Nations in New York.
The secret to a great speech? There isn’t one right way.
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Do you know the 3 best headline writing tricks ever … anyone can do, guaranteed!
Today, I was reading an article in IABCs Communication World – “What can we learn from the ‘real world’” – by Steve Crencenzo. Steve advises companies on how to write headlines so employees, customers and other people they want to influence will read what they have to say. He suggests that you write your headlines the way newsstand magazines like Cosmopolitan do. Cosmo, he explains uses three basic tricks to hook your interest: use lists, directly address your audience and use dot, dot, dots.
For example:
- 10 sure-fire ways to have the best sex ever!
- You can be a sex goddess now!
- Admit it … you definitely need more great sex!
Wow, I thought that sure beats the typical headlines you see in corporate writing, such as:
- Speed and disintermediation
- Reputation management is strategic management
- Local values, global view
Granted, as Steve points out, Cosmo has got a big advantage. It’s selling sex. Most companies have a less appealing product. But as Steve also points out Cosmo doesn’t rely just on sex to sell their magazine. Afterall a lot of magazines are selling sex. Cosmo uses a far more powerful weapon: the headline hooks.
The big question is: should you try to use these hooks in your business writing? My take is if you do be careful. If you have something important to tell people great. If not the hooks are not a substitute. And you may turn people off using them even if you have something to say because, let’s face it – they’re manipulative. And that’s not sexy.
What’s your take?
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Why communication fails
The other day I ran across a question on an on-line discussion group for people in Organizational Design and Training: “Why do you think communication fails in organizations?” If you’re tempted to say “good question” think again. It is, I think, a bad question. Bad because there is no such thing as “communication” in organizations, only particular people trying to make themselves understood in particular ways for particular purposes in particular circumstances. The question “why do you think communication fails in organizations” invites mistaken one-size-fits-all answers: sales never listens, people are too sensitive, too little too late. It would be nice if there was a simple answer. Unfortunately, there isn’t, which means the next time you want to “communicate” you’re going to have to do the inescapable hard work of figuring out precisely what you want to say to whom for what purpose. If this is a formula, it certainly isn’t a simple one, which is perhaps why “communication fails in organizations.”
And now you know what you have to do if you want success.
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What do we do?
Good question.
“I’m an internal communications specialist.” Silence. ”Oh you mean you do employee newsletters?” Sigh.
“I work at the intersection of the brand, human resources, and business strategy. I help my clients involve their people and achieve the goals they are after.” Silence.
Then a conversation last week with a client who’s worked with me three times before – once as a colleague, and twice as a client. “You know what you do for me isn’t communication. It’s OD or change management or something. It’s not really communications… ”
This shouldn’t be so hard. I’m a communications professional after all.
Apparently I’m not alone. Just this week, the PRSA launched an initiative to update the definition of public relations. They set up a website where people can submit their definition and see it in a word cloud. Cool.
And then, Richard Edelman’s address to the IPR crossed my desk. “Re-imagining our profession. Public relations for a complex world” sheds some light and reinforces a view I’ve been trying to express – badly: ”…policy and communications cannot be separated… both are tied to operating reality. Communications must be a core element in the business planning process.”
I’d go further. Communications is core to doing business. Strategy and operations must be aligned and the only way to achieve that is through communications. Relationships with employees, customers, suppliers and vendors, governments and shareholders need to be built and sustained over time. And the only way to do that is by communicating.
Edelman goes on to say that “PR needs to create coherence out of complexity. As the stakeholder discipline, we are the profession that pays attention to the broad interests of the corporation… one foot planted on the policy side and the other on the communications side.”
The best of us [and as organizational leaders you should be demanding nothing but the best] think about the world from that place where the interests [and point of view] of key stakeholders, the operation and the strategy come together to create an institutional experience. That’s where I live and work [with a particular passion for employees].
Whatever it’s called it’s ….it’s what I do. And as my clients will tell you it helps them achieve their business and professional goals. Now I guess I need to find a better label than communications! Be seeing you!
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Story catchers
Native Americans have a tradition of dream catchers. These web-like structures are created to protect dreamers from bad dreams. When hung in the light, dream catchers only let the good dreams through.
Everyday, in every organization, compelling human stories are being ‘written’. Important moments that we can learn from. And, though much has been said about the power of storytelling to involve and motivate, to develop and learn, to build energy and momentum, most employee communications are about as far from storytelling as you can get.
Why is that?
We don’t recognize a good story when we hear or see one. In my experience the best organizations think about proof points when they are building their plans. They ask one simple question: How will we know when we’ve reached our objective? What will success look like? Despite all the work that goes into building strategic plans, articulating values and vision statements, the true test comes when they are concrete enough that we can recognize a story that shows how they play out in the day-to-day life of the organization.
We don’t know where to begin to look to find a good story. Every organization has moments that are critical to the business – trade shows, proposal submissions, shareholder meetings, product launches. And, they are generally pretty predictable. In my experience the best organizations plan their storytelling annually. What are the key moments in our planning horizon? How can we share these moments with employees? What kinds of stories will have the most meaning and impact? How can we most easily gather, tell and share them?
We don’t have the resources – time or budget – to gather and tell stories. This is the fun part. The opportunities are endless. Employee networks are everywhere creating opportunities for roving reporters. Tools and channels grow daily. A little imagination and ingenuity goes a long way.
A story. One of the highlights of my career happened when I was the Director, Internal Communications for Bombardier Aerospace [for another]. Le Bourget is the largest aerospace show in the world and critical to Bombardier’s business. It’s a time to close deals – - more deals are signed there than at any other time of the year, meet current and potential customers, and see what the competition is up to. Despite that few employees knew about the show. Those that did saw it as an executive boondoggle. Paris, foie gras and champagne.
We were introducing a new brand at the show – Ideas that fly – and decided very early on that we wanted to find a way to bring employees to Le Bourget and Le Bourget to employees. One of the most important and exciting things that we did was to introduce a new employee newsletter – BFlash. Over the first 4 days of the show, managers and administrative staff in Montreal, Toronto and Wichita came in each morning and found a pdf version in their inbox. Belfast in the afternoon. Given the limited access for plant employees we couldn’tt reach them directly or in real time, but managers posted the newsletter on bulletin boards and spoke about highlights from the show at the shop floor meetings that week.
It was important for us to humanize the story of the show without being able to interview customers. So, we made sure that the template was simple and colourful and thanks to the professional photographer that was there for marketing we had wonderful images of employees at the show. Each edition updated employees on the business facts – our sales and how the competition was doing in comparison but also told the story of one employee at the show each day [My Paris] and one employee’s experience of the show over the 4 days [Shasta's Paris - this ended up being a highlight], presented short interviews with executives from different functions about why they attend the show and what it means for their part of the business, facts about the show and our presence there, etc. We created buzz across the system. And a new understanding and appreciation for the role of Le Bourget to the business. The approach was such a hit that we continued to use this model for other key moments – new aircraft introductions, first flights, other air shows.
We’d built our first story catcher.
How often do your leaders tell stories? What forums do you have for sharing stories across the organization? Isn’t it time to build story catching and sharing into your communication strategies?
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A small story about a big event
September 11, 2001 and the days that followed were terrible times. Today, as the world marks this 10th anniversary, there will be many remembrances and stories. As a professional communicator working in the aerospace industry during those dark days, I learned a lot. This is my story – a small story about a big event.
September 11, 2001. Bombardier Aerospace headquarters, Dorval, Quebec.
8:48. Our VP Corporate Communications hurries out of his office and gathers, his Communications Directors including me – Director, Employee Communications, together: ‘Did you hear?’, ‘An explosion at the World Trade Centre’, ‘Some report said it was a plane.’
8:50: We’re in our ‘war’ room transfixed by what we see on a tv screen that covers one whole end of the boardroom. The first network television reports and images of the World Trade Center in flames. “No way it was a plane.” Moments later we learn it is a plane and see images of the plane’s crash and the explosion – played and replayed in what seemed like an endless loop. Early reports say the aircraft was a Cessna or other small business aircraft.
“Was it one of ours?” “Looks like a Learjet.” “Might be a Challenger.” No one even suggests it might be a passenger aircraft. We get our senior engineer on the phone to see if he can confirm if it’s one of ours. Not sure.
Potential public relations nightmare.
9:03. By now the CEO and a few members of the executive join us from their offices down the hall. We, and several millions, watch live as a second plane crashes into the south face of the World Trade Center. Shock. Disbelief.
We knew this was no accident. Chilling. In the next minute, news confirms the ‘weapon’ was a large passenger aircraft.
It’s not one of our planes. Momentary relief.
The VP HR and his senior Director arrive. Where are our people? Was anyone in, or near, the towers? Phone calls and e-mails to Bombardier networks around the world.
Our CEO leaves us to go and call his family who live in lower Manhattan just a few blocks from the World Trade Center. Phones are down. Calls to our own families wherever they were.
Our communications focus shifts to employees and their families.
9:39: A report of an explosion at the Pentagon.
By 9:45. The executive team is with the CEO in his office to hear that US Airspace has been completely closed down. Security lock down of our floor.
Glimmers of an industry-wide crisis that will re-frame our communications efforts for months, if not years.
By 10. Reports that our production lines in North America [Montreal, Wichita and Toronto] have stopped. Employees want to go home to their families. They want to know what’s happening and expect us to provide the ‘news’.
Employees become, and will remain, the communications priority over the coming weeks. How to be empathetic as we all go through this uncertainty together and get and keep production back on track. Everyone of us is afraid. And we have jobs to do.
Even though the field is asking for it, Corporate Communications cannot replace the feed of real time news available directly from the networks.We don’t have any tvs or radios on the plant floors. “Get some!” It is also clear this is time for real visible leadership. Our team does not let us down.
10:03. A United Airlines aircraft crashes into a field southeast of Pittsburgh in Somerset County, Pennsylvania
Flashback to June 2001. Bombardier Aerospace celebrates 100 years in aviation by launching a new brand – “Ideas that fly” at the largest airshow in the world. Le Bourget, 2001, is our most successful airshow ever. We confirm the most aircraft sales. The Corporate Communications team, with the help of our colleagues in the field, get the most positive media coverage ever. And, for the first time ever we’d engaged our employees in this essential moment in our business cycle using unique real-time reporting and employee stories from the site. The new brand was designed to highlight our technical expertise and to humanise the experience. The “We make it fly” internal tagline resonates. By September 11th, new pride in the company and the work is building.
Around 10:30. I take a breather from the terrible news in the next room. I walk into my office and glance down at a box of our next generation of branded material – a view of two towers shot from the ground looking up at to the sky and three dark beautiful and now menacing birds flying high between two towers.”We make it fly” and those once beautiful and compelling images are now something very sinister. All of our current internal communication plans are put on hold indefinitely and the visual image – now ready to go – scrapped forever. Context is everything.
Mid-afternoon. Sitting alone with my boss, in the now unfortunately named ‘war’ room, watching bombs fall in Iraq. We think we may be seeing a retaliatory attack. “Is this the beginning of a third World War?” We don’t know. No one does. And, we knew we would have to keep focused if we are going to help the Bombardier team get through this terrible time.
The next day. We find out that:
- miraculously [since some employees were in the towers at the time] all of our employees and thier families were safe [including the CEOs]
- many of our employees had been in the air, or away from their home bases, and were directly affected by delays caused by the US decision to stop all flights. Over the next few days they would find their way home
- many of our US employees were members of the US National Guard and would be off work for the foreseeable future. More challenges for our US operations. There’s an incredible outpouring of support from our Canadian and Irish operations for our American colleagues.
And, as the day unfolded, we knew that our business and the whole industry is facing the most critical and challenging time in its 100 year history. When, people don’t want to fly carriers and business aircraft owners don’t want to buy planes.
Bombardier survived these challenging times and is still one of the largest aeroplane manufacturers in the world.
Today, when I look back, I’m proud of how we as a team did our jobs during those dark days. And, as a professional communicator I realize now that we learned some important lessons:
- Strategy matters. We had a clarity of structure and roles built up over a year of working together. The communications leadership team – media relations, employee communications, marketing communications, and public affairs – had built and operationalized a robust integrated communications strategy. When in doubt or danger we could go back to our strategy. We were very clear about what we were trying to accomplish and who, what and how things needed to happen no matter what the crisis.
- Relationships matter. The strong networks we’d built across the system – in operations, engineering, business strategy and hr – and the relationships with communications teams in the plants and offices around the world and made it easy for us to get information and share what we knew and didn’t know and what we were doing about it. These same relationships gave us a critical real-time pulse on what was happening far from HQ and how and where we could best support the operations.
- Having the right channels and tools matter. The time we’d spent over the previous year developing the executive and management channel helped a lot. The leadership team knew they had communications responsibility and we knew how to reach and support them. It still wasn’t perfect, but it worked incredibly well given what we were facing. And, the new tools and tactics we’d been working on with the global communications team gave us a way to reach any internal stakeholder we needed to reach and get their reactions. Fast.
- Access to executive leadership matters. Direct access and proximity to the executive for decisions was essential for us to do what we needed to do.
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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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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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Recent Posts
- Grey zones are costing your organization big time
- Saying goodbye to jargon
- Don’t leave them laughing
- A master class with Ed Sullivan
- Innovation & collaboration: Strategic priorities or not?
- The truth about the number 1 fear
- Want to know the secret to writing a great speech?
- Connecting for big business benefits
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Recent posts
- Grey zones are costing your organization big time
- Saying goodbye to jargon
- Don’t leave them laughing
- A master class with Ed Sullivan
- Innovation & collaboration: Strategic priorities or not?
- The truth about the number 1 fear
- Want to know the secret to writing a great speech?
- Connecting for big business benefits
- Staying in touch with reality
- “Just hire a Dalek”
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