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.
Disciplined approach
You have a presentation to make
You get there just in time, find the room, and grab an empty seat. The event begins and you sit patiently listening to the other speakers and making small talk with the people at your table. Finally, after an hour and half of waiting, it’s your turn. You look around the room as you’re being introduced. The applause begins. You take your time getting to your feet, shake hands with the people at your table, and make your way in slow measured steps to the lectern. Taking out your notes, you straighten your jacket, clear your throat, and looking back at the screen where your PowerPoint slides are flashing you begin: “I hope everybody can hear me. These don’t look like the right slides.”
What do you think is the single greatest mistake made by this presenter? There are a great many, but one might you might have missed is: “you sit patiently listening to the other speakers and … .”
Recently I had a conversation with my friend Mitch Joel, the marketing guru who wrote the book Six Pixels of Separation, and writes the newspaper column and blog by the same name. Mitch is president of the Montreal-based marketing agency Twist Image and makes a lot of high-profile keynote presentations. Anything he says about presentation I listen to. You might want to as well. What does he do before the presentation begins? He said that in the time immediately before he goes on he focuses entirely on what he is going to say, his message, and getting his energy up. Pacing up and down. Rehearsing before a mirroir. Whatever it takes. You might not give many keynote presentations, so you might not think you have to go to all this effort. After all it takes alot of dedication, concentration, and discipline, to be a professional speaker, but then again you might want to give it a try. It just might be what you need to do:
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From campaign to composition
Let’s face it, we live in an event, event, event world. One event after another. Big events and small events. A new brand. A new executive. A new policy. The latest quarterly results. A new acquisition. A divestiture. A new product. A flood of separate moments. From an employee point of view it can all look pretty disconnected and confusing.
The challenge we have as leaders is to have these discrete events build momentum toward the business results we’re after.
But in an event, event, event world here’s what usually happens. A big shiny new brand launch. A month or two of hints about what’s coming. Lots of energy and hoopla focused on the day of launch. A campaign. Internally all goes incredibly well. Better than expected in fact. Then nothing. Or maybe a little something. And then nothing.
Communications based on discrete events will only ever be just that. What’s missing? The composition, “the plan, placement or arrangement of the elements” in relationship to each other. The same events communicated in the context of the whole will build momentum and action toward the business results we’re after.
To move from a series of campaigns to composition takes a change in perspective. It means looking at the events in context and understanding how each event impacts the other as well as how separately and together they support the overall business objectives over time.
It means understanding what these events separately and together look like from an employee [insert any other important stakeholder here] point of view. What does success look like? If the new brand [insert any important business event/announcement here] is a success, what will we see? Specifically how will it advance the business? What are the proof points? How and when will we know? How will we tell that story over time?
As business leaders isn’t it time to insist on integrated communications strategies that will help build business momentum. Isn’t it time to move from communications campaigns to composition?
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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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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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Back to school. Back to work.
Rene Magritte’s famous painting Golconde. Work as a formalized dreary rainy man’s world.
This image, seems so right and so wrong. Today, after the official end of summer holidays here in North America and in much of the western world, we are returning to our work routines.
The good news. The opportunity for change is perhaps as great as at any time of the year as plans will be submitted for final approval for 2012 [and in some cases beyond].
Time to think about the institution’s real values. Time to think about the culture that will best suit your institutional objectives given those values. Time to make the business case for investing in the capacity to make it happen.
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Go for the gold!
Over the weekend we attended our first triathlon. Before you get too excited, Michael and I were just there to cheer Michael’s brother Stephen on. The top ranked competitors [including I'm proud to say - my brother-in-law] take it very seriously and are very good. They swam 1.5 km, rode 40 km and ran 10 km on a still, hot day [30C+ without humidex] when Michael and I could barely stand the heat as we stood in the full sun [no where to go] and rang cow bells to encourage Stephen as he flew by.
There was a moment when two competitors were running within inches [maybe millimeters] of each other, when the lead just lost “it”. It was obvious. His face changed, his stride changed, everything changed. Less than a second later he’d fallen lengths behind with only a few meters to go to the finish line. And it was at that moment that I started to think about what it really takes to bring home the gold. And to think about what we can learn from top ranked athletes and how they train.
The difference between being a good athlete and being a great one can be pretty small as anyone who’s watched the Olympics knows. These athletes don’t just know how to do their sport. They bring their body, mind and spirit to what they do in a very focused and intentional way.
Last week I asked what our organizations are doing to support employees doing their best. Today, I’m asking what we as employees and professionals are doing to be our best.
Are we clearly articulating what success looks like for ourselves in our work life? When do we want to realize that vision? Does that vision inspire us? If not we need to start over.
Are we clear about where we are in relationship to our inspirational end state? Do we know what key actions we need to take, and what skills and capacity we need to build to get there? Are we taking action every day to get there? Are we eating properly, exercising and getting enough rest to do what we want to do over time? Are we developing the mental skills to handle our current situation and get us to the next level? Are we mentally prepared? Have we made time to meditate and develop our focusing and visualization skills? Are we consolidating what we’re learning and adjusting our plans?
If we’re not as present in our work life as top performing athletes our chances of achieving the highest levels we aspire to are significantly less likely to happen. We can rely on chance, or go for the gold!
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“Sometimes you just have to go rogue”
“Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing.” [Caterina Fake at Happiness Hack]
There’s nothing fake about Caterina Fake’s take on the role of management. She’s co-founder of Hunch and Flickr. And thanks to Hackingwork you can hear how she, as “a management 2.0 leader thinks about [her] role and best practices for being a disruptive hero”. [really gets going at 4 minutes]
Yep. “Sometimes you just have to go rogue.”
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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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Scale & proportion in communications
"The Fisherman," Saul Steinberg, from The Labyrinth
I think internal communications design at its best is compositional. So, that takes me to the arts to see if there are things I can learn there.
Scale and proportion are two important considerations for the artist or architect. Should they be considerations for those of us who design communications plans? Scale refers to the size of the work. Proportion refers to how we see elements within the work in relationship to each other.
It’s easy in the heat of the moment or the “big” announcement to lose sight of what really matters to our colleagues in different functions and at different levels across our organizations. Not all decisions and announcements are created equal from the point of view of those we’re trying to reach and engage. Not everything is as big to “them” as it is to us.
Designing a communication approach that is the right proportion and scale for the news we’re sharing is as important as any other aspect of communication plan we’re building. Overdoing something that isn’t all that relevant to employees or failing to communicate something that is will lead to equally bad outcomes: Confusion and erosion of trust.
Thinking about the scale and proportion of the communication from the receiver’s point of view helps.
- Scale – the number and variety of communication channels, the frequency and duration of the communication, the effort level to engage people in a conversation
- Proportion – how evident we want to make the communication in context of everything else that is going on organizationally at any point in time and over time, and within the communication itself what is most relevant/important for different employees to ‘get’.
Next time you’re about to communicate a ‘big’ new corporate decision, business strategy, human resources policy, technology change, acquisition, or quarterly financial results, think about what this news really means for the people you’re communicating it to. What impact – direct or indirect – will it have on them? What do you want them to know, feel or do as a result of your communicating with them?
And once you have the answers to these questions, think a little bit more like an artist, design a communication that is right in terms of scale and proportion.
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Do we know what we’re doing?
I’m just back after an “official” training run. Those of you who know me, know I am passionate about chiwalking and running. Though a “late in life” runner I came to believe what my trainer told me, that running is “perfect freedom”. It took three years to find any level of enjoyment, but I did and was getting quite confident and competent.
Last June due to unrelated injuries Michael and I stopped running. It started as a short break. We continued to chiwalk regularly and at a pretty fast pace – racking in many kilometres up, over and around Mont Royal during the fall, winter and spring. In fact our winter chiwalks made the winter quite wonderful no matter what the conditions – rain, snow, sleet, sunny, cloudy, -10C, -30C. They are all about focus and alignment two of my favourite things.
Now, almost a year later we realize that even though our chiwalks have no doubt kept us relatively fit, they aren’t giving us the same results as chirunning. Over the spring we’ve integrated a few short 20 minute runs, but without any real discipline [and to be honest mostly downhill – small cheat]. This morning was different. We followed lesson 1 of Danny Dreyer’s training guide for beginners, a 12-week program to prepare for a 10K. We went for a relatively flat [not my favourite, since I like the variation of trail running] 5 minutes on and 1 minute off chirun repeated 6 times.
Big lesson: If you want to build and maintain capacity then there’s only one way to do it and that’s with discipline and practice.
You’ll not be surprised to hear that this experience has made me think about whether and how we can achieve an adequate level of communication mastery in our organizations?
Relationships are fundamental to organizations. Organizations exist based on the assumption that working together we can do something we can’t do alone. Given that human relationships without communication are impossible to imagine then communication mastery, must be a critical factor for success of any organization. But do we think about communication in that way?
I don’t think we do. We may make the odd nod to individual development, but institutionally I think we make the assumption that since virtually all employees can speak, write and hear then as an institution you’re communicating. This of course is simply not true. Any more than making the assumption if you can walk, you can run is true. [Or if you can walk you’re walking in an aligned and efficient way that will protect your body [that’s another story].] It takes training, discipline and practice to build and maintain adequate levels of skill and capacity.
So, what would communication mastery look like? Not just for your employees or managers but for your institution as a whole? What are the institutional benefits of achieving that level of mastery? Where are you today in relationship to that level of mastery? What actions would you need to put in place to get there? And, how do you create the right conditions for achieving it?
I think these are fundamental institutional questions. Shouldn’t we be thinking about getting this conversation going? Are you ready?
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Recent posts
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