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.
Management
Not all stakeholders are created equal. Now what?
- Partners would inform each other immediately – face-to-face or by text or by email – of the outcome.
- Employees directly involved on the pitch, in the office and in other offices, would also be informed as quickly as possible and ideally in a face-to-face meeting [conference call or Skype if necessary because of the schedules of the partners] with a chance for them to learn the outcome and discuss the implications for the team. This meeting would be relatively short.
- Other employees – depending on the size and nature of the news and it’s implications – would either receive an e-mail [while the pitch team was in their meeting] inviting them to a small group meeting with their partner, or to gather with the pitch team for a celebration or mourning
- Peers and colleagues outside the office would be informed as appropriate after that
- The partners and pitch team would create opportunities for debriefing and learning within the days following the news.
Random Posts:
Why you need to master the art of segmentation
People and relationships are at the core of all organizational strategies.
This means an adequately thorough and complete stakeholder analysis is key. If the stakeholder analysis is weak then so too is the strategy. And stakeholder analysis starts with adequate segmentation.
Segmentation doesn’t start with a list of generic stakeholders. It starts with a deep understanding of who will be impacted by what you are planning, saying, doing? And how they will be impacted.
Seems so obvious, and yet it’s not. In the past few weeks I was asked to pull together work of several other consultants to create an integrated strategic framework that would help identify gaps and overlaps in the work and thinking that had been done so far.
Communication was just one of 6 strategic priorities but every other priority had a significant communication component. Three consultants had already prepared three separate plans – media relations, government relations and fund development.
Each plan referred to their own key stakeholder, but not one of them adequately developed the segmentation. Instead, they were almost generic.
It’s a government relations plan so the target is government. No differentiation between Federal, provincial though both could impact the outcomes for this organization. No reference to which specific ministries. No differentiation between elected and non-elected politicians, or bureaucrats [senior and junior]. Even though each of these segments would have different and important impact on the work of this organization.
None of the plans did any more than a superficial analysis of this already thin segmentation. Instead of really thinking about what the client organization was trying to achieve in relationship to each of the segmented stakeholders, again, plans fell back into generic descriptions and no real analysis.
Even cutting an orange into segments takes some thought and skill…
And, the sad thing is, this failure to segment stakeholders and do some pretty fundamental analysis is not unusual.
The result. Bland planning and a focus on tools and tactics.
No strategy at all.
If you want to be strategic, then developing mastery in the art of segmentation is a good place to start.
Random Posts:
The “4 enablers of employee engagement” are really 1
According to “Engage for success“, a government initiative designed to increase employee engagement across the UK, there are four enablers of employee engagement:
- Visible, empowering leadership providing a strong strategic narrative about the organisation, where it’s come from and where it’s going.
- Engaging managers who focus their people and give them scope, treat their people as individuals and coach and stretch their people
- There is employee voice throughout the organisation, for reinforcing and challenging views, between functions and externally, employees are seen as central to the solution.
- There is organisational integrity - the values on the wall are reflected in day to day behaviours. There is no ‘say –do’ gap
Each of the four enablers is, at its core, a question of communication: The ability of leaders, managers and employees to communicate in a way that involves.
The UK figures they’re losing £25.8bn [that would be $40.25 billion!] in GDP annually. Why? Employee engagement. Or rather the lack of engaged employees. Now if that doesn’t wake business and government up I don’t know what will.
Employees want to go to work to do a good job. They want their work to matter. They want to feel involved. They aren’t. Or they aren’t enough. Shouldn’t encouraging and building the capacity to communicate be a priority? If not, why isn’t it?
Random Posts:
Tilting at windmills – The transparency, authenticity challenge
There has been much written, especially since the financial crash of 2008, about how institutions and individual leaders need to be transparent and authentic. And, there’s been at least as much written by communication professionals and leaders about how difficult this is to achieve. Are we just tilting at windmills? Let’s take a closer look.
The underlying assumptions: Institutions and leaders can be either
- authentic or not.
- transparent or not.
The first assumption. Every decision or action is a reflection of who and what they are; their fundamental values. How could an institution or individual be other than what or who they are? We might not like what we see, but it is always authentic: good, bad or ugly.
As communication professionals and leaders this can be hard especially where our values are in conflict. The best we can do for ourselves and our organizations: Face reality. [see below]
The second assumption. There are two possible reasons for not being transparent. It’s:
- a conscious decision designed to hide reality [there are different ways to do this - spin, black out - but these are for another post] or
- unconcious. Leaders simply don’t know they aren’t being transparent and/or don’t want to know how to be transparent.
In the former, where there is a conscious decision to be opaque, then as a communication professional or leader this will be a question of whether this is in conflict with your values or not. If you find yourself in this situation, you probably need to ask yourself if you can live with the lack of transparency. There is nothing you can do to change this situation.
In the latter, it’s about not knowing what they don’t know. As a communication professional or leader this is where there’s a real opportunity to raise awareness, educate and build approaches to ensure transparency.
Conclusion. This is the transparency and authenticity challenge. We need to face reality sooner than later. The only situation where a communication professional or leader has any chance of changing things is where their organization or leadership may want to be transparent and don’t know how. Then there are two questions we need to ask ourselves:
- How to find out if they really do want to be transparent?
- Do we have what it takes to help them get there?
Otherwise we will certainly continue to find ourselves tilting at windmills: Exhausting ourselves and our organizations.
Random Posts:
Is doing good good?
Companies, all kinds of companies, are getting more involved in “doing good”. But, why? What’s the primary motivation? Building the brand or creating a better world?
Flash back to the mid 1840s, Titus Salt a woollen manufacturer had already made his fortune. He was planning to retire. Instead, he decided to consolidate his 5 mills on one site and improve the lives of his workers. He had already begun to try to improve the living conditions of his employees and would take 2,000 workers {and their families] on day trips out of the dirt and grime of Bradford and into the fresh air of the country around it: by train into the Yorkshire Dales, to his own estate or the seaside at Scarbourough.
He was not alone in taking action to improve the social needs of his workers, but his vision was bigger and more comprehensive. He would open one huge woollen mill, Salts Mill, outside of the heavy pollution of Bradford in Shipley. He would create a healthy place for workers to live and work.
They would have access to a dining hall across the road from the mill. Workers homes would be built in a ‘village’ near by with a church, schools, a library, a hospital, a park, allotment gardens. Everyone would have access to water, drainage, gas and a backyard with a private toilet. The main street would have shops to provide for all of the tenants needs. He would build almshouses [in the end 45] and a chapel for the infirm or aged on one edge of the village near the hospital. And he did. He built Saltaire – named after the mill/founder and the river that runs beside it.
The cynical would say this was all paternalistic and self-serving, but when Titus Salt died 100,000 people thronged the funeral’s processional route. And, 100,000 people can’t all be that wrong.
Titus Salt was a man of his time. He was a man who wanted to create a better world. And in making a better world for his workers he did better business and created a brand that endured well into the 20th century. Today Saltaire, the town Titus Salt built, is a UNESCO heritage site. A monument to a man and a time of incredible social vision.
Flash forward 160 years. How many of today’s brands will be remembered for the good they did? What will their legacy be?
Random Posts:
Beware: Manipulation mania
“Make employees feel they are doing something meaningful.”
“Have and show faith and trust in your team.”
As leaders and communication professionals this is the kind of advice we get. It comes regularly and it comes often.
There’s something deeply wrong. We want to build healthy sustainable relationship with employees. But taking this advice is almost certainly going to kill the relationship. Let’s take a closer look.
First, the work employees do is either meaningful to them or it isn’t. If we’re ‘making them “feel” that it is, we are manipulating them.
Second, we either have faith and trust our teams or we don’t. Having and showing faith and trust in our teams when we don’t is also a manipulation. This time we’re manipulating ourselves.
Neither of approach is sustainable. And neither is good for relationship.
There’s a manipulation mania out there. Beware. It’s a bad thing?
Random Posts:
Layoffs. When the right way is the wrong way.
I was speaking to a senior HR professional a few weeks ago. They’re going through their 6th or 7th global restructuring in as many years.
We all know that when you have to do it, the right way to lay people off is face-to-face. It’s the human thing to do. Much more human than how my friend, one of the most senior people in their organization, found out they’d lost their job when they weren’t invited to a key strategic planning meeting. Or another who learned by reading the announcement in the weekly newsletter.
But what if you’re spread out geographically and, as in the case of my HR colleague, are working in an organization that is down to barebones HR staff. The decisions have been taken. The list is made. And, because there’s not enough HR staff to go to every location and be there with the responsible executive , it will take a month or more to move across the country.
Now imagine you’re an employee in this company. You know – there’s been a public announcement – that 25% of your function will lose their jobs. And, you have to wait a month or more to hear if it’s you so that you can meet face-to-face for a couple of minutes with your exec and an HR person you may, or may not, have ever seen before in your life.
I don’t know. It just doesn’t sound very human to me.
What do you think? Isn’t there, just maybe, a better way?
Random Posts:
Connecting for big business benefits
This morning I came across three articles. Three different perspectives. Same conclusion. The more connected we are as leaders and as organizations the better.
Perspective 1 - CEOs. A study of 65 chief executives from around the world discovered that CEOs spend an average of 6 hours out of their 55-hour work week alone. The remainder of the time is spent in business meetings [virtual and face-to-face] and lunches and on the phone. CEOs may not like it, but it is how their work gets done and confirms Henry Mintzberg‘s seminal study “The nature of managerial work” [1973].
Perspective 2: Leadership teams. In their new book Strategy & Business, Rob Cross and Jon Katzenbach describe how: “In most companies, the phrase top team is a misnomer…” Instead, they go on to say: [P]ower comes from … members’ informal and social networks, their determination to make the most of those connections, and their ability to work well in subgroups formed to address specific issues… [A]s much as 90 per cent of the information that most senior executives receive and take action on comes throughout their informal networks – not formal reports or databases.” The conclusion: Enriching networks enriches organizations.
Perspective 3: Organizations. ”Web 2.0 … promote[s] significantly more flexible processes at internally networked organizations: respondents say that information is shared more readily and less hierarchically, collaboration across organizational silos is more common, and tasks are more often tackled in a project-based fashion.” This study goes on to demonstrate that the more networked an organization the more business benefits. If you, or your leadership team, ever had any doubts it’s worth taking a look.
Connecting is what we as human beings do. We’re social creatures. Our organizational work gets done with, and through, other people.
Helping your employees connect. A little idea with huge potential business benefits.
It’s a potentially beautiful thing.
Random Posts:
Staying in touch with reality
The single most challenging thing facing my clients is staying in touch with reality.
And, the pace of change just makes it harder.
It’s easier to assume we know what we don’t, or can’t, know. After all we have to get onto the next pressing issue.
It’s easier to react and respond rather than ask ’why‘?
In a way, it may be as Marshall McLuhan described it: “In our time we are reliving at high speed the whole of the human past. As in a speeded-up film, we are traversing all ages, all experience, including the experience of prehistoric man.” And, he added: “You can turn it off.”
And, maybe that’s what we’re doing. Maybe, in order to survive we’re just turning it off.
What’s great about McLuhan, though, is that if you didn’t like that idea he has another one: “With the acceleration of change, management now takes on entirely new functions. While navigating admidst the unknown is becoming the normal role of the executive, the new need is not merely to navigate but to anticipate effects with their causes.”
But in turning it off we’re missing that this time of change is also a time of incredible opportunity. Those who’ll succeed and thrive, it won’t be because of random luck. It won’t be because they’re comfortable with, and embrace, ambiguity. It will be because they’ve stayed in touch with the reality of what is changing and what is staying the same and what the implications of those changes are in relationship to their values and highest aspirations.
In your organization, do your leaders know what they don’t know?
Random Posts:
Shining eyes
“A [symphony orchestra] conductor doesn’t make a sound. His job is to awaken the possibility in other people.”
This is what Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, says.
And, how do you know you’re doing it?
“If their eyes are shining, you know you’re doing it… It’s about how many shiny eyes are around us.”
As a leader, how many shiny eyes are around you?
Sign up for mailing list
Recent Posts
- Not all stakeholders are created equal. Now what?
- Why you need to master the art of segmentation
- The single most important question you can ever ask
- “We didn’t know…” Now what?
- Worker health and safety and you
- Innovation. You gotta be a little bit crazy!
- In search of great communicators
- Our preoccupation with innovation. Is it just “lipstick on a pig”?
Authors
Recent posts
- Not all stakeholders are created equal. Now what?
- Why you need to master the art of segmentation
- The single most important question you can ever ask
- “We didn’t know…” Now what?
- Worker health and safety and you
- Innovation. You gotta be a little bit crazy!
- In search of great communicators
- Our preoccupation with innovation. Is it just “lipstick on a pig”?
- Anatomy of an internal announcement. Top 3 lessons from Yahoo!
- Google Glass at work!?