Minding Gaps

Welcome!

Welcome to our blog on business leadership, its communication and credibility, and workplace engagement around change and breakthrough performance. To begin reading our posts right away, just scroll down a few inches.

A little blog with big ideas, Minding Gaps strives to build strategic engagement by enhancing the way that corporations and other organizations think and talk about their purpose, situation, vision, values, direction, progress, priorities, goals, expectations and identity.

The more clarity, credibility, and community you can bring to these matters, the more engagement you will see. We will unpack and work through this challenge with you. You'll like the result: change and breakthrough performance that are simple, natural, foolproof, and almost inevitable.

Borrowed from the public-address warning in the London Underground, our use of "minding the gaps" refers to the need for leaders to close the myriad gaps that compromise the credibility of leaders and leadership. These are gaps between aspirations and reality, between rhetoric and fact, between expectations and experience, between visions and achievement, between official truth and ground truth, and most of all between leaders and followers. Unless and until leaders close these gaps, they cannot lead people to a better, brighter future.

We invite you to browse, read, and learn; we ask only that you respect our copyrights and give us full credit for anything printed here. You can reach us whenever you wish by calling +1-847-247-2241 or by writing to info@arceil.com. We would like very much to hear from you.

(Note: We reserve the right to revise, refine, and republish prior posts. Corrections submitted to us and verified will be incorporated in a revised post. Otherwise, we anticipate anything posted here to remain here indefinitely.)

Thank you, and we hope you will check back often.

Special Announcement:
Get Answers to Your Questions on Social Media

 

The questions about social media just keep coming. If your CEO or chairman asked, could you confidently answer any of these questions, let alone all of them?

• How are high-performance organizations making the most of social media? What are they being sure to do, and what are they being sure to avoid?

• Is a lot of what you hear about social media just the usual hype? Is there any real value to a company? Is it just another fad? What can anyone say of value in 140 characters, anyway?

• Are high-performance companies really using social media to connect with employees faster than ever? If so, how is it working? Exactly how are they doing it?

• Are they using social media to enhance and maintain their reputation in the marketplace? How is that going?

• Are high-performance companies using social media to respond to rumors? To reach and attract Millennium Generation employees? To exercise more agility in the marketplace? To monitor cyberspace conversations? To troubleshoot customer complaints and issues?

• Are they just using the "old standbys": Twitter and Facebook? Or are they identifying other, lesser-known social-media sites that reach niche stakeholders?

• Are high-performance companies forbidding employees from reading any social-media sites while at work? If so, is such a ban effective? Doesn't it backfire with Millennial employees?

• Are executives of high-performing organizations blogging? Have these blogs taken the place of conventional, slower media? Do the executives write their own? Who has time to ghost them? Are the ghostwriters publicly acknowledged?

• In short, what's working, and what isn't working, in the new world of social media?

If you already know the answers to these questions, you do not need to participate in a research project we're preparing to launch. Otherwise, you really should consider joining our consortium of co-sponsors for it.

We're presently enrolling co-sponsors for this project. The research will produce real-world answers for real-world questions that the co-sponsors pose. It will find real-world solutions for real-world problems that the co-sponsors face.

However, only those companies that co-sponsor the research will benefit directly from it.

Each co-sponsor will join in designing and customizing the research for its own needs, so that the project will reflect every co-sponsor's own concerns and interests. It will result in relevant findings and actionable recommendations. It will provide external benchmarks for comparison, evaluation, and benefit. Best of all, because several companies will join together to sponsor it, each company's share of the total cost will be moderate. 

The final report will have a written executive summary and PowerPoint slides for presentation of findings. At the conclusion of the project, we will host a webinar for each co-sponsor that presents the findings and responds to questions.

Our initial research shows a wide variety of approaches and practices, in terms of both substance and tone. Our intent is to establish a benchmark of policies that each sponsor can use for evaluation and improvement.

We will enroll co-sponsors on a first-come, first-serve basis. The first five co-sponsors to enroll in each consortium will receive favorable pricing. We hope to finalize this consortium by early November to ensure the timely completion of this project.

Call us directly at +1-847-247-2241 for further information, including fees and scheduling, and for registration. Or write to us at info@arceil.com, and we can arrange a convenient time to talk by telephone. We look forward to working with you.

To Communicate a Focus, You Must First Have a Focus

Here are a half-dozen short, breezy, familiar catchphrases, each of which supports a corporate brand identity:

• Just do it!
• When you absolutely, positively need it overnight.
• We love to fly, and it shows.
• Nothing runs like a Deere.
• We pick you up.
• The few. The proud.

What do they have in common? They're all splendid examples of successful marketing initiatives, quite obviously. Each takes you only an instant to associate with its sponsor.

But they have something else in common. They're all statements of strategic focus. For all six organizations, these catchphrases succinctly state what their people must know, do, believe, and ultimately be in order to live out the organization's mission and purpose. Think of them as the verbal foundation of engagement.

For Nike, it's initiative and action. For FedEx, it's reliability and speed. For Delta Air Lines, it's enthusiasm for flight. For John Deere, it's unparalleled mechanical performance. For Enterprise Rent-a-Car, it's service and optimism. For the United States Marine Corps, it's duty and honor.

In each case, distilled to a few well-chosen words, the catchphrase captures the essence of the organization's legacy, identity and competitive advantage.

Externally, these familiar words convey an image designed to enhance the organization's public persona. Internally, they establish a cultural norm that sets a high bar for work expectations.

Both externally and internally, all six statements operationalize a strategy. That is why they work so well as statements of shared strategic focus.

Sadly, most companies lack such a sharp, shared focus. It isn't so much a failure of marketing as of leadership. To communicate a shared focus, you must first have a clear, well-honed strategic focus. You can't communicate what you don't have.

Establishing and occasionally refining the strategic focus is the foundational work of leadership. It is absolutely imperative. Without focus, a company lacks a core, and it tends to jump from fad to fad. Its leaders often carry a long laundry list of initiatives and priorities—programs of the month—few or none of which have their earnest commitment.

Those programs become their own mockery;  people see right through them. To borrow from the Bard, each successive new program soon reveals itself as another "poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more."

Creating or refining a strategic focus requires first determining your unique selling proposition, the essence of your brand. What is it that truly sets you apart? What do your competitors envy about you? You must get to the beating heart of your distinctiveness.

From the beginning, it's important to keep the end in mind. The end is naturally a high level of employee commitment, so that the leader's focus becomes everyone's focus. Thus the prospective focus must have the potential to resonate with your people. Therefore it must have roots in the legitimate, authentic values and in the noble self-identity of your organization.

While the strategic focus is yours to create, the values and self-identity are already there. In the short term, they can only be discovered, not imposed from on high. Over time, with inspiring leadership and supportive stewardship, they can grow to something better and greater, just as a plant leans toward sunlight. But that takes time and leadership.

Once a values-driven strategic focus is in place, the challenge shifts to the hard work of translating the broad theme to particular behaviors: ways of thinking and acting so that the focus can take root and thrive.

On one level, that can be expressed in a concise, memorable phrase, as we have seen at Nike, FedEx, and the Marine Corps. On another level, it must also become specific to each individual job. This process will ultimately require the intimate involvement of all managers.

Then it's a matter of repetition, reiteration, and redundancy. Saying it once is tantamount to never saying it at all. You must say it over and over and over. When you think you have it said too many times, you're just getting started.

Three Causes of Poor Communication in Companies

In my years of consulting on organizational communication in mid-size and larger companies, I have seen all too many problems boil down to three broad categories of miscommunication: mixed messages, muddled messages, and mute messages.

Let's look at each of them.

Mixed messages are those where the explicit and the implicit communication are at odds with each other. The company has said something is important, but its actions say otherwise. For example, perhaps it has said that safety in the workplace is important, but front-line supervisors commonly overlook hazards. Or perhaps it has said that customer service is important, but telephone bank operators have rigid quotas of 20 calls per hour. Or perhaps it has said that product quality is important, but the choice is always to ship a deficient product rather than send it back for rework.

These mixed messages compromise the credibility of the company. That, in turn, undermines the integrity of leaders and their leadership. No chief executive should stand for it.

Muddled messages are those beset by confusion. Some are explained poorly. Some are fickle, changing daily with the breeze. Some are lost in a fusillade of communication around too many initiatives, and people just cannot keep them all straight. Some are the victims of so many acronyms and so much jargon that even long-time employees scratch their head at times. Some are the unhappy result of cascading, which succeeds only at feeding the rumor mill.

These muddled messages are a lost opportunity. They prevent an organization’s leadership from creating a keen strategic focus. Without that focus, employees cannot possibly engage themselves in the work of the organization or the satisfaction of its patrons.

Mute messages, the silent killers of business, are the issues and challenges that management either ignores altogether or simply chooses not to talk about. Often, this is a deliberate choice not to invest time and resources in communication on anything at all. There are managers who genuinely believe they can run the business and even grow it without engaging employees in the brand promise and strategic direction of the company. With luck, and for a short time, they may be able to. Sooner or later, they pay the piper.

These mute messages leave well-meaning and eager employees without a sense of strategic priorities and direction. They don’t know which thing is more important than which other thing. They must rely on their own intuition and guesswork. That may work for a while. Ultimately, the lack of communication will lead to a conflict in expectations, and that will mark a profound failure.

Smart companies don't settle for any of this. Alas, many companies out there aren't so smart as they think.

By the Numbers: Trust and Distrust in Business

Two months ago we introduced a weekly feature, By the Numbers, which leads off each week (or most weeks, anyway). It presents a statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion.

To date we have explored the lack of candor and honesty in supervisory communication (scroll down to last week’s post on September 28), the economic impact of employee disengagement in U.S.-based companies (see September 21), the extent of disengagement in the workplace (September 14), the frequency of projects that fail (August 31), the link between employee disengagement and absenteeism (August 24), the myths around the impact of nonverbal communication (August 17), and the fear of recrimination in the workplace (August 10).

Today we explore the degree of trust that Americans hold in business.

According to research by Abt SRBI Public Affairs and published in Time magazine, 49 percent of Americans agree that businesses will make socially responsible decisions without the government telling them what to do. A slightly smaller share, 42 percent, believe the opposite, that businesses cannot be trusted to make socially responsible decisions, and that it’s up to the government to tell them what to do. The remainder were undecided or chose not to answer the question.

Here are some questions to consider:

• Do these figures surprise you? How do you interpret them?

• Do you believe they represent entrenched social, economic, and political perspectives? Can they be changed?

• What accounts for the distrust in business?

• Can you recall any well-publicized cases in which business decisions reinforced the perception of trust?

• Can you recall any well-publicized cases in which business decisions reinforced the perception of distrust?

• Do you think certain industries are to blame for distrust in business? Are other industries comparatively angelic?

• How does distrust affect your business?

• What do you think are the costs of distrust in business? Can you put a dollar figure on it?

• What can good companies do to move the needle in a favorable direction?

Feel free to respond to these questions by leaving a comment. Comments are subject to review by the blog’s editor, who may edit them for grammar and clarity and may leave a response of his own. Comments with abusive, promotional, or profane language will not be published.

By the Numbers: Front-Line Supervisors Fail to Communicate

About a month ago we introduced a weekly feature, By the Numbers. We start off each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion.

To date we have explored the economic impact of employee disengagement in U.S.-based companies (scroll down to the September 21 post), the extent of disengagement in the workplace (September 14), the frequency of projects that fail (August 31), the link between employee disengagement and absenteeism (August 24), the myths around the impact of nonverbal communication (August 17), and the fear of recrimination in the workplace (August 10).

Today we explore the lack of candor and honesty in supervisory communication.

Probably most companies still rely on the front-line manager or supervisor as their mouthpiece in the workplace. In those companies, the supervisor is supposed to convey key strategic information and messages to employees who do the work.

We will return to the question of whether that is the most appropriate role for front-line supervisors in the 21st century, with the ubiquity of communication by BlackBerry, text, Twitter, and good old-fashioned email. Today, far more and far faster than in the 1990s and before, electronic communication reaches everyone in an organization by leak and by rumor. (Those of you who participated in my webinar last Thursday know that I have a perspective on this issue. We’ll come back to it here in Minding Gaps in a few days.)

For now, let’s concentrate on how well front-line supervisors communicate. They appear to need some help. According to research by Towers Perrin, only 38 percent of employees of global corporations say their managers communicate openly and honestly. As for the other 62 percent, we can only speculate.

It’s hard to imagine that employers or the managers in question would agree with that perception, but communication, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It is the listener’s judgment that counts. If the listener perceives half-truth or untruth, or if the listener perceives double talk or fast talk, then that is what it is. You have to deal with the perception, because perception is reality.

Here are some questions to frame your thinking on this challenge:

• What roles and responsibilities with respect to communicating business strategy and priorities do managers and supervisors in your organization have?

• What particular skills and competencies are necessary to carry out those roles and responsibilities?

• To what extent does the organization assume those skills and competencies are inherent in anyone with the normal and overall qualifications to work in management?

• To what extent are they, truly?

• What training in strategic communication—that is, the communication of business strategy—is provided to the new front-line manager or supervisor? How well and how often is that training upgraded and renewed?

• What does the training say about clarity and honesty?

• What is the process of support in strategic communication for the front-line manager or supervisor? In particular, how does the organization funnel strategic information to the front line?

• What accountabilities for strategic communication does the front-line manager or supervisor face?

• Does your organization have a review process, involving the people who report to the front-line manager or supervisor, to assess each manager’s and supervisor’s communication of business strategy?

Feel free to respond to these questions by leaving a comment. Comments are subject to review by the blog’s editor, who may edit them for grammar and clarity and may leave a response of his own. Comments with abusive, promotional, or profane language will not be published. 

Quote / Unquote: Benjamin Disraeli on the Paradox of Leadership

 

Last week we introduced another new feature, which will appear irregularly but frequently. To be known as Quote/Unquote, it will offer a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, or business. In most cases we will also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion. Occasionally, however, the quotation will stand alone.

Our inaugural feature quoted the British novelist Charles Dickens, who presciently imagined some of the difficulties with email—140 years ago. (Scroll down to the September 11 post.) Today we quote another Brit from the same era, Benjamin Disraeli, who was both an author and a Conservative Party political leader. Not incidentally, he was also a wit; scores of his incisive quotations have survived the decades and are as relevant today as they were in the 19th century.

Benjamin Disraeli was twice the prime minister of England during the reign of Queen Victoria. An intimate friend of the monarch, and the only person of Jewish heritage ever to serve as prime minister, Disraeli intuitively knew that compelling leadership is a kind of spiritual transaction between the leader and the led. Moreover, he understood and appreciated a paradox of leadership: that leaders must follow, and followers must lead.

In one of his most famous remarks, Disraeli said:

I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?

 

Take a moment to think about that. Now, ask yourself these questions:

• What exactly do you think Disraeli is driving at?

• Is he suggesting that leaders should abdicate the responsibility of leading?

• Is he calling for anarchy or a kind of mob rule?

• What relevance, if any, does Disraeli's remark have for leadership in business generally? For leadership at your level (enterprise, division, department, team) more particularly?

• Should leaders be more humble than prideful? Why or why not?

• Why should, if at all, leaders follow the people they are nominally leading?

• Doesn’t that undermine the leader's role?

• In a modern organization—a large business enterprise, or one of its divisions, or one of its operating teams—what would this look like and sound like?

• What would be its practical impact?

Strategic Communication: Getting Back to the Basics

I couldn’t agree more with Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff. Every corporate CEO and every communication consultant and practitioner should think hard about Admiral Mullen’s message, too. It would do business a lot of good.

I’m referring to the admiral’s recent essay on strategic communication. Published in Joint Forces Quarterly, a military journal, the essay is a broadside on facile, fast-talking communication. Mullen is naturally concerned with communication seeking to promote American military and foreign policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But as you read his essay, think in terms of corporate communication. Try to distill the admiral’s thinking to your own business challenges. It will be well worth your while.

Let me pause for a note on terminology. Admiral Mullen and I define “strategic communication” differently. We have our own mental constructs for it, too, and they bear heavily on our thinking. I have long championed strategic communication as a systematic key to authenticity and credibility, whereas Mullen scorns it as so much propaganda. So we’re coming at the issue from quite different points of view, but we’re both striving for greater authenticity and credibility. That's the important thing.

Having said all that, I find the admiral’s thesis compelling. Indeed, in spite of our differences over terminology, his argument is actually in complete alignment with my own thinking.

Before proceeding any further, you should read the essay in full. It’ll take only five or ten minutes.

Now as you can see, Mullen delivers a blistering attack on the use of verbal and visual messages that are out of synch with reality on the ground, and he is critical of mass communication as a substitute for genuine, sincere relationships. He writes: “Our messages lack credibility because we haven’t invested enough in building trust and relationships, and we haven’t always delivered on promises.”

Mullen goes on to define good communication as “having the right intent up front and letting our actions speak for themselves. We shouldn’t care if people don’t like us; that isn’t the goal. The goal is credibility. And we earn that over time.”

A little further on, he writes: “Most strategic communication problems are not communication problems at all. They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are.”

Years ago, I had a mentor who stressed that the secret to good communication was doing the right thing and getting caught at it. To me, that is strategic communication. In the admiral’s view, it’s good leadership. The semantics aren’t as important as the judgment, and Mullen’s judgment is exactly right.

It is indeed a matter of getting back to the basics. Whatever we call it, let’s get on with it.

Quick! Counting Your Spouse, How Many People Really Trust You?

 

What's a decent, hard-working business leader to do?

I have been in business a long time, and just about every executive I meet is decent and hard-working, and most of them will call a spade a spade. Dismiss me as a Pollyanna, but that is what I see and experience.

It is not, however, what I read in the newspapers and what I see on television. The story is always the man biting the dog, so the notorious exception gets the headline. If it isn't a rogue CEO looking out for his own pocket at the expense of investors, it's a company or even an industry that says whatever it wants so that it can do whatever it wants.

Even companies that are otherwise well-managed often have an inadvertent problem with credibility. Their key stakeholders—customers, employees, investors, regulators—don’t necessarily believe what they say or trust them to do what is right. That isn't just my opinion. We can point you to objective, confirmative research.

This is a fundamental challenge for business. The catastrophes of Enron and Tyco have faded into the mist of memory, but their ghosts are walking alongside us. Now is the time to get serious about the credibility and trust of business.

It's a tough, tough situation. It won’t be easy. But brick by brick, business can rebuild the ramparts of its credibility. It will take systematic attention to any potential perceived sleight or slight, but it can be done.

The critical first step is to recognize and remember that you are constantly communicating, even and especially when you're least aware of it. There's no getting around it.

Like most business people, you probably think of communication as the totality of what you and your company say and write. It certainly is that. But it is also so much more.

The reality is that you and your company speak in three distinct modes or "voices": the formal, semi-formal, and informal voices. Building and keeping your credibility is largely a matter of avoiding conflicts or gaps among those three voices.

The formal voice is the traditional mainstay of leadership communication. It consists of information and messages expressed in a speech, an announcement, a banner on the wall, a glossy brochure, a Web site and the like. Externally, it includes advertising and public relations.

Its common uses include your vision statement, perhaps a slogan such as "We Love Our Customers," or a promise to customers. Other uses may include an ISO9002 certification, a quarterly earnings release, the "dog and pony show" around an IPO or explicit instructions for a task or responsibility. If it's expressed in words and numbers, it is usually formal communication.

The formal voice is a vital and basic component of leadership communication. However, too many firms rely on it excessively or even exclusively. If asked to do too much, formal communication can fail completely. When it comes crashing down, it can take a company and its leadership down with it. You’ve seen examples of that in the last five years.

The semi-formal voice is different. You can think of it as a steel case of management tools. Few leadership teams regard it as communication at all. That's half the trouble.

Semi-formal communication consists of all those programs, policies, processes and procedures that companies use to manage their affairs. These things truly function as communication because they do what conventional (or formal) communication does: convey information, direction and meaning to employees, establish priorities and concerns and encourage or discourage certain thinking and behavior in response.

Everyday examples of the semi-formal voice include meeting agendas, training mandates, job descriptions, standard operating procedures, Six Sigma processes, lines of authority, accountabilities, sales quotas, cubicle sizes, budgets, personnel choices, spending authorizations, organizational structure, performance evaluations and employee surveys.

Quite a lot, you'll agree. All of it must be managed as communication, because that is what it is.

The informal voice is different still. Not to be confused with body language or the grapevine, it consists of relationships between people in positions of leadership (not really leaders until they actually have followers) and people in positions of 'followership' (not really followers until their putative leaders step up to the plate).

Day-to-day examples of informal communication include presence and accessibility, responsiveness to questions, sharing strategic information, alignment of visible behaviors and ordinary courtesy and respect. Not surprisingly, all bear heavily on workplace relationships, especially those across the boss's desk.

These crucial relationships can be mutually respectful, or mutually spiteful, or anything in between. Their nature and character communicates with power and clarity—often without your knowledge, until it's too late, as when a key employee abruptly resigns or a big customer defects.

The informal voice is driven and defined by routine conversation—comments, questions, complaints, anecdotes—and by all those countless decisions, behaviors, choices, and attitudes on the part of leadership that so often "speak louder than words."

Now here’s the key point.

Only when an organization's formal, semi-formal, and informal voices are all sending much the same message, only when they are facilitating a mutually respectful dialogue with employees, only when they are honoring the nobility of an organization's values, and only when they are encouraging the alignment of behavior with strategy, can the organization reach its fullest potential.

Otherwise, all bets are off. The semi-formal and informal communication will prevail over the formal communication and employees will perceive a lack of integrity and thus a lack of leadership.

The key point to remember is that your formal (or rhetorical and official) voice can never operate in a vacuum. It must either compete with or complement your semi-formal (institutional and programmatic) and informal (individual, relational and behavioral) voices. Your credibility hangs in the balance.

If left unmanaged, the three voices will generate their own messages. Each message may contradict the last, and employees may be left in a state of confusion that sets the stage for cynicism and complacency or even contempt.

That is a recipe for disaster. We all know of companies that unwisely chose it. Some of us worked for them, and it wasn't a pleasant experience.

The alternative holds more promise—much more.

If managed well, the three voices can resonate throughout the organization to clarify and reinforce important strategic priorities, not to mention your credibility as a leader. That's a beautiful thing.

Over time, the people in your organization will hear, see, and feel a consistent and purposeful message and they will have the dignity of speaking up and being heard. You will have the benefit of followers who enthusiastically participate. That's a win-win all the way around.

(Written by Thomas J. Lee. Revised and republished from Industry Week Online, 5 November 2006.)

 

The Power of Stories, and the Power of Redemption

The airwaves this morning are filled with remembrances of Edward M. Kennedy, the liberal lion of the United States Senate who died late last night at the age of 77.

His 47-year tenure in the Senate is one of the longest ever. Beginning in 1962, he was in the forefront of legislation on social, health, and education issues. Objectively speaking, it is no exaggeration to say that America is a different society because of his work.

I have no special insight or homage to offer on the late senator’s behalf. Many others will fill that need quite ably. I do, however, want to take note of a couple of things that could easily be lost in all the encomia.

First, we would do well to observe the power of stories here. It is only mid-morning as I write, and already I have heard fifteen, maybe twenty stories about something that Senator Kennedy said or did, and that, until now, only a handful of people knew. Think back to the last funeral or memorial you attended, and you will recall the same thing. Eulogies are, after all, stories.

Storytelling is a uniquely powerful forensic device, and it is especially useful for the work of leadership, which depends on a connection to large numbers of people. In the human psyche, narrative has always been a key social dynamic that knits people together. For thousands of years, our ancestors told stories around campfires. That predilection for stories is alive and well today in every John Grisham novel and every Mad Men episode. Every business leader should master the art of telling quick stories to illustrate and buttress an observation or argument.

In the case of Edward Kennedy, laudatory stories are told not just by fellow liberals and Democrats but also by conservatives and Republicans. They seek to capture the essence of the late senator’s personality, compassion, and wisdom. It is important for us to see that, in eulogy, these stories actually become the remembered person. We recall the story, and it is thus that we recall the person.

Second, this is a good place to observe the power of redemption. We live in a society that values any accountability over any forgiveness. Woe to the politician, celebrity, or business executive who commits even the slightest sin. Pass the hatchet, we want his head.

As a young senator, Kennedy had an infamous test of his own character. He didn't measure up. He acted with grievous irresponsibility, and a young woman died as a result. In today’s political culture, he would be forced to resign at the very least. Kennedy survived politically, however, and he went on to storied decades of service that, on his passing, are celebrated by the likes of Trent Lott and Orrin Hatch, two of the most conservative figures of our time. Hearing the tributes today, one finds a theme of profound redemption.

I have a friend who, as a plant manager for a major corporation, suffered through an embarrassing incident with the company’s CEO. My friend offered his resignation the next morning, but the CEO wisely refused to accept it. “If you think I am going to let go of a key executive who just went through a valuable learning experience, you will just have to think again,” the CEO declared. “You are more valuable to this company today than you were yesterday.” The plant manager went on to another ten years of successful service with the company. I personally worked with him throughout that decade, and I can attest to his growth and contribution to the company.

We need to rediscover redemption as a cultural verity; we need to redeem redemption itself, at the very least when hypocrisy is not bringing authenticity into doubt. None of us is as good as the crowd wants us to be, and indeed none of us is as good as the face in the mirror wants us to be. The issue should not always be one of accountability. Some times, we should focus instead on the opportunity to learn and grow. Certainly we all have that need.

Then, when we are old and gone, our friends and fellows will tell stories of our learning and growth, and we can smile from the other side.

Companies Need Leadership Up, Down, and Across Their Hierarchy

Most of the spotlight and most of the credit for business performance go to the top of the organization: the chief executive officer and other C-suite executives. In recent years, the CEO has increasingly been held to account by shareholders, hostile takeover suitors, and boards of directors, as well.

As crucial as leadership at the top plainly is, however, no senior management team can do it all. Especially in large, far-flung organizations, vast numbers of aligned and engaged people are necessary to bring about performance and change.

One position is commonly overlooked and yet absolutely critical to that fine-tuned engine. It is not the chief executive. It is not the division head. It is not even the plant manager, store manager, or site manager. It is the front-line supervisor.

When the front-line supervisor is not an agent of performance and change, the people on his or her team have no sense of direction, no confidence in the organization's leadership, no predilection for high performance, no energy for constructive change.

When the front-line supervisor is an agent of performance and change, the organization at least has a clear shot at improving its performance and changing its culture and priorities to meet the challenges ahead.

Moreover, the front-line supervisor plays a pivotal role in translating the big-picture strategies to day-to-day operating objectives and activities. Enterprise and division leaders cannot do that; it is the retail work of performance and change, and it must take place at the retail level.

Change has been a watchword of business for fifteen to twenty years. From quality circles and management by objective to lean manufacturing and personal coaching, the only thing constant has been change itself. But how much of it actually works?

Not very much. According to John Kotter, professor at Harvard Business School and author of Leading Change and other bestsellers, 80 percent of all change initiatives fail to meet their goals and objectives. Another study reveals that 57 percent of all mergers return less than the average for their industries. In other words, on learning of a new merger, you are better off investing in a stock index fund for that industry than in the newly merged entity. Still other studies reinforce and document this unfortunate arc.

In focus groups across the United States, we have found that front-line supervisors are often abjectly misaligned with larger strategies, and I have heard many front-line supervisors confess to a sad cynicism over what they perceive as the insincerity and ignobility of senior leadership. They are the forgotten middle, and it is no wonder that so many efforts at high performance and dramatic change yield such disappointing results.

Organizations that are serious about their performance and change will invest in a systematic approach to involve front-line supervisors in their overall management process.

At a minimum, that includes educating front-line supervisors on the dynamics of the industry, its markets, and its customer expectations; nurturing and maintaining a dialogue with front-line supervisors about operational changes from the supervisor's point of view as much as senior management's; teaching front-line supervisors the differences between managing and leading and the style and substance of communication that drives each; and giving supervisors the competencies, time, and clear-cut expectations as to their roles and responsibilities.

Anything less is tantamount to tacitly accepting mediocre performance and lackluster progress on change. The question every company and every senior management team must ask itself is: What kind of future do we want, and what are we willing to do to achieve it?

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Leadership and the Internet

I want to share with you a fascinating presentation by Clay Shirky, which I found on ted.com.

It takes about 16 minutes, and it just may change your view of how organizations and their leaders will communicate with their people in the decades ahead. I recommend you devote the time to watching it. Then come back.

Here it is.

Now, after viewing it, think about the implications for leadership and change in your organization. In particular, ask yourself:

• Haven’t “the many” always been talking to “the many”—albeit more slowly? What exactly is changing? How will that affect leadership?

• What does viralism, to coin a word, hold for the future of leadership?

• What are the implications of Twitter and Facebook, in particular, on leadership messaging in your organization?

• How will gaps between the “official truth” and the “ground truth” of your organization become even more problematic?

• How can we harness the power of viral communication to enhance directional change and control chaotic change?

Questions to Key Your Leadership

As a leader, it is so very easy to lose sight of what matters.

It is so easy to excuse yourself and blame others for a lack of progress.

It is so easy to wander purposelessly from urgent task to urgent task, and it is so easy to accept the present reality as an excuse for resigning yourself to mediocrity.

So here are a dozen questions to think over, in the spirit of remaining true to your cause and honest with yourself:

• Do you have a tangible vision of the result of your work? Can you actually see it in your mind's eye? What are you doing to make it real?

• Do you have tangible visions for the persons you work with? Can you visualize them in that future state?

• How are you supporting and serving the people on your team?

• Are you constantly reminding yourself of your stated values? (You did take time to reflect on and record your values, didn't you? Ahem.) Who is checking on your fidelity to these values?

• Apart from financial comfort and security, what is the fundamental purpose of your business life? How much does this purpose influence your decisions and your behavior all day long? Where does it stop? What are the loose ends?

• What special opportunities does this year offer you? This month? This week? Today?

• Do you begin the day with priorities—not just a rag-tag list of things to do, but Thing No. 1 to do, Thing No. 2 to do, and so forth? Do you stick to these priorities? When push comes to shove, are these priorities determinative?

• Do you set deadlines for yourself, or just for others? What is the difference between your expectations for yourself and your expectations for others?

• Do you accept your own excuses on days when you haven’t achieved what you set out to achieve?

• Do you allow small interruptions during the day, such as replying to emails whenever they arrive rather than at a prescheduled time? Do you tolerate procrastination?

• Do you set aside blocks of time for reflection, perhaps journaling?

• What have you learned today? Yesterday? How will you use those insights?

Just asking, you understand.

Walter Cronkite (1916-2009)

Everyone old enough to remember Walter Cronkite feels the same way about his passing. We all have lost a favorite uncle. Had he gone into politics, he might have been elected president, but he was content to stand on the sidelines of history, and tell it as it was.

His voice was the voice of authority in a period of tumult. It was the voice that interrupted “As the World Turns” to tell us our president was dead. It was the voice that described what was really happening on the streets of Chicago in August 1968. And it was the voice that happily cheered the safe return of the Apollo 13 astronauts after they had told NASA a quarter-million miles from home: “Houston, we have a problem.”

Here was a man so trusted by people across the political spectrum that things weren’t the way they were until he said they were. The Vietnam War was still winnable until the day Cronkite said it wasn’t; and when Cronkite said as much, Lyndon Johnson remarked in the Oval Office: “If I have lost Cronkite, I have lost America.” Five years later, the Washington Post’s crusading reports about the Watergate break-in were belittled and dismissed until Cronkite said they shouldn’t be. Then it was Richard Nixon’s turn to bemoan the loss of America’s great chronicler and arbiter.

What can leaders learn from the newscaster identified in a 1972 poll, and then immediately recognized by everyone, as “the most trusted man in America”?

• Let people know the truth. People want straight talk. They don’t want happy talk or sweet talk, and they don’t want fast talk or double talk. They want to know how things really are. Treat people with respect and dignity, and they will deserve it. Never talk down to people.

• Let yourself be an example of equanimity in a world of anxiety. Be calm. Cronkite never lost his temper. Today, every other television personality—from Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the right to Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann on the left—seems unwilling or unable to keep his cool. In politics and in business, leaders who lose their temper almost always lose respect. Having squandered that, they are left to rely on exaggeration, shouting, intimidation, and fiat.

• Let yourself see for yourself. Decades of reporting from the front taught Cronkite to go and have a firsthand look. He knew it was a fool’s errand to make up your mind beforehand and then pick and choose which facts to believe. Leaders must learn to recognize and respect the truth. Your preconceived notions just may be wrong. Indeed, they probably are.

• Let the tone of your voice reflect your disposition. When the news was good, you knew it was good just by Cronkite’s voice; and when it was bad, you knew it was bad for the same reason. Night after night, Americans sat down to dinner and knew how things really were.

• Let others have the credit. As a journalist, Cronkite knew that he had a front-row seat to history, and he knew that he was not a player on the stage. The most he could and should do was to create conditions conducive to history. In a 1977 interview with the CBS newsman, Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat said that, if invited, he would go to Jerusalem to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The very next day, Begin offered just such an invitation. Their meeting was the first step to the historic Camp David Accords.

• Let people see your soul. On learning the finality of the news from Dallas on that awful November day in 1963, Cronkite took off his glasses and choked back a tear as he announced JFK’s death. Through the long weekend that followed, he struggled for composure as a nation coped with its shock. He was no less and no more than a human being in a human moment.

Certainly you have your own observations. Do take a moment to share them in a comment, or send them to me at tom@arceil.com.

And that’s the way it is, Saturday, July 18, 2009. God bless you, “Uncle Walter.”

To Be Someone, You Must Be Someone

A month after I posted it, people are still inquiring about the Father’s Day essay on my dad (just scroll down to June 18, but be sure to come back). Dozens of folks have written to thank me for capturing in words what so many of them had also experienced. To all of you, thank you for writing.

As I reflected on it yesterday, I recalled a similar phenomenon that happened early in my career, when I was a young newspaper journalist. Together, these experiences offer an insight, a compelling life lesson, for all of us, especially for anyone who aspires to lead others.

My beat on the newspaper was politics—national, state, local. I loved the excitement and the rhetorical combat. Moreover, the assignment afforded me front-row seats for some phenomenal experiences and events.

I was in the Moscone Center in San Francisco the night that New York Gov. Mario Cuomo gave his historic speech, one of the most electrifying in modern political history. I laughed nervously as off-duty Secret Service agents broke out in their own choir—“Peggy Sue, Peggy Sue, oh how my heart yearns for you, oh Peggy, my Peggy Sue”—aboard a small airplane carrying a presidential candidate as it took off in an Iowa snowstorm near Clear Lake, where Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper went down. I lunched in the State Dining Room of the White House and wandered alone through the Red Room, Blue Room, and Green Room afterward. I listened raptly to liberal U.S. Senator Paul Simon in an off-the-record conversation as he offered astonishing encomiums to, of all people, Richard Nixon.

Now you’d think this kind of stuff would grab every reader’s attention. It did, certainly, but it was nothing compared with the reader reaction when I wrote about ordinary, everyday experiences of life. Only then did I touch people.

You see, along with the political beat, I also had a weekly column on the editorial page. For an entire decade, neither the publisher nor any senior editor, and certainly no one in government, ever sought to limit or constrain the opinions I expressed in that column. I had perfect freedom to say whatever I wanted to say in 100,000 newspapers. For me, the First Amendment became very personal indeed.

Here’s the amazing thing. I could write feverishly about politics and politicians, and a smattering of letters would trickle in. But when I wrote about the birth of my daughter, or about the home invader who held my wife at knifepoint, or about the South Dakota pastor’s eulogy for my father-in-law, or about my uncle’s exploits as a small-town mayor in Wisconsin, or about my own draft deferment and my high-school classmate who gave his life in Vietnam, or about friends of mine who were senselessly shot to death, then heaping piles of mail would pour in. People would remark about those columns for months and months afterward. Strangers would stop me in the grocery store. WGN would call. Two different congressmen told me they cried—cried, for heaven’s sake—at the column on my daughter’s birth.

There’s an important lesson for leaders here. It just goes to show that we are all persons first, and when we put our personhood first, we can connect. We cannot connect with people if we present ourselves as robotic automatons. The more impersonal we are, the more self-objectified, the less that people see us as leaders they truly want to follow.

Now there’s a fine line between revealing ourselves emotionally and wallowing in doubt or vacillation. I am not advocating the latter, by any means. Leaders need to be resolute. At the same time, it helps enormously to be fully present as men and women of heart and soul, as leaders who can be touched by the exquisite joy or piercing pain that life so often brings.

You can’t fake this stuff, either. Would-be leaders who try to fake it quickly find themselves on the sidelines. People seem to have a sixth sense for authenticity. They feel a bond with a leader, or they don’t. The difference is tangible, real, undeniable.

One of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s biographers tells the story of his mingling with Allied troops just before D-Day. The general asked the soldiers to talk about fear. When some of them expressed bravado, he was quick to bring them back to reality. Courage, he said, is not the absence of fear; it is the will and the strength to overcome fear. The legendary five-star commander said even he was afraid. Who wouldn’t be? Who couldn’t be?

Leadership and the communication that drive it are as much the province of emotion as of reason. Their currency is not just fact but feeling. For many managers, that is a difficult row to hoe. But hoe it you must if you are truly to lead.

It all comes down to a simple maxim: To be someone, you must be someone.

"Be careful. She trusts you."

 

On returning from a bicycle ride Sunday afternoon, I caught the last few innings of the Chicago Cubs game—they actually won, believe it or not—and then flipped the channel to our local PBS station. I always enjoy the Great Performances series, and this was to be no exception. It was the Metropolitan Opera’s performance of Puccini’s poignant tragedy, Madama Butterfly.

The curtain was just rising. For the next two and a half hours I was transfixed. The entire three-act production was masterful. I have enjoyed opera for years, and Butterfly is a favorite of every opera buff. Newcomers to the opera always seem to like it, too. The final scene is passionate and heartbreaking. If you see it, you’ll be humming Puccini’s music for days afterward.

Beyond the drama and the music, a moral truth embedded in Butterfly flew off the screen at me. It is just this: We often underestimate the degree to which others trust us.

It is a paradox of leadership that the leader, not the follower, is often the more cynical. That fact, coupled with the leader’s blindness to his own cynicism, makes it deceptively easy for the leader to carelessly betray the trust of the follower.

The betrayal, often beginning with only the slightest of difficulty, sows the seeds of further, larger betrayals of trust. Together, these betrayals unintentionally but inevitably cost the leaders the loyalty of their would-be followers. In short, the potential for leadership often falls on its own sword. It is a sad truth that leaders can have themselves to blame for the disengagement of employees.

Butterfly is set in Nagasaki, Japan, in the late Nineteenth Century. Its themes, as in so much of opera, are love, devotion, and betrayal. The narrative, in brief, involves an American naval lieutenant by the name of Pinkerton who has lustful eyes for a 15-year-old geisha by the name of Cio-Cio-San, whose nickname is Butterfly.

Pinkerton, over the objections of the U.S. consul, a gentleman named Sharpless, betroths and marries Butterfly and settles into a modern home. Expecting a life of mutual devotion, Butterfly renounces her religious faith at the cost of all her family ties. On their wedding night, Pinkerton and Butterfly consummate their marriage.

Soon, Pinkerton is recalled to the United States. He promises to return “when the robins nest.” Three years pass before he reappears. During that time, Butterfly has given birth to a blue-eyed boy, obviously the lieutenant’s son. Butterfly waits patiently, never doubting her husband’s promise. Day after day, she looks out on the harbor for an American ship, sure to bring Lieutenant Pinkerton.

Eventually, the American officer does return—but with his new American wife. Butterfly’s heart and soul collapse in agonizing recognition that her devotion was misplaced. Knowing that her son can never live a life of dignity in Japan, she commits suicide and leaves her son to be adopted and raised in the United States.

The salient lesson on leadership comes in the first act, when Sharpless (in this production performed by baritone Dwayne Croft) warns Pinkerton (tenor Marcello Giordani) not to enter into a commitment lightly with Butterfly (the exquisite soprano Patricia Racette). Sharpless sings: “Be careful. She trusts you.”

What marvelous words: “Be careful. She trusts you.”

Every leader should come to work every morning with those words in mind. He should remember that trust is fragile, that it is always a function of perception, that it is inherently subjective, and that it is always in the hands of another person.

All day long, every day, the leader should strive to be increasing the level of trust in the organization. To do that, a leader should begin from a position of trust. Be the first to trust, and trust the most. Trust in spite of mistrust and distrust. Trust anyway. Lead through trust.

Anything less is a slippery slope to denial, deception, and disappointment. Even little and sporadic deceit will cost you the organizational integrity and cohesion that you need. That, in turn, will cost you the engagement of your people. Without their engagement, you cannot serve your customers and you cannot grow.

Trust is the real social capital of any organization. Without it, people cannot work together. No one wants to come to work for untustworthy managers. No one wants to buy from an untrustworthy company. No one wants to invest in an untrustworthy enterprise. For all these reasons, trust is your most important asset. Prize it. Protect it. 

So be the first to trust. Be eager to trust. Trust most. Leave cynicism to the losers. There will always be enough of them, and they will never understand.

"I'm Sorry We Got Caught"?

Given their precarious hold on a dwindling readership, newspapers should do everything they can to protect their stock in trade, the one thing they have that so many other news sources lack: the presumption of credibility.

They should do nothing, absolutely nothing, that can even remotely be construed as compromising their integrity.

So when the online media portal Politico reported that the Washington Post had offered corporate sponsorships for private dinners at the publisher’s home with Post journalists and political power brokers—at $25,000 a pop, or $250,000 for a series of eleven—it wasn’t just the Post’s integrity that was for sale, it was the newspaper’s future.

Now there’s dumb, and there’s dumb dumb. Then there's dumb-da-da-dumb-dumb. Dumb-dumb!

Please pardon my flippancy. Objectively speaking, this kind of thing is dumb-da-da-dumb-dumb. Dumb-dumb. Dumb!

In today’s editions, Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth publicly apologizes to readers. You can judge for yourself the sincerity and candor of her statement. If the online comments from readers are any indication, she has a lot of hard work ahead of her to restore the newspaper’s credibility. It won’t be easy, but nothing is more important.

Finding Opportunity in a Crisis

 

Crises are good for something. They separate the great from the good enough.

Probably most business leaders look at a crisis and curse it. In the crisis, they see problems and burdens.

A few outstanding business leaders do just the opposite. Bold and imaginative, they look at a crisis and grin. For where others see only problems, these exceptional leaders see the gold of opportunity. They see potential for breakthrough competitive advantage.

At this very moment, you have just such a crisis on your hands, and therefore you have just such an opportunity in your hands. It is wise to seize it while you can.

The crisis looks like a leaky faucet of trust. Year after year, the credibility of business has been eroding among all three lifeline stakeholders: employees, investors, and customers. It has truly reached the point of a crisis.

You are well familiar with the litany of reasons: Mergers that haven't worked. Earnings that have to be restated. CEOs who retire with gazillions. Layoffs as a first resort, not last. Corporate values honored in the breach. "Customer service" that is a Jay Leno oxymoron. Broken promises everywhere. Manipulation as a core competency.

All Companies Pay the Price

If some companies are faultless, all companies suffer the collateral damage. Reputable studies show a broad, significant diminution in credibility affecting virtually every sector and extending around the world. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, some industries hold the trust of fewer than one of three people.

Not surprisingly, no one wants to address this issue. At first blush, it is seemingly thankless. Certainly it is hard to turn this around. To the casual observer, no single company can break out of the pack. If none can, then trying will be futile.

But is that true? Some organizations do manage to hold the public's trust. I can rattle off a list: Northwestern Mutual, Toyota, Johnson & Johnson, the Mayo Clinic, Virgin Atlantic, Chick-Fil-A, Southwest Airlines, Apple Computer, Harley-Davidson, the BBC, the Weather Channel.

All these organizations recognize an essential truth: No one wants to do business with someone who is untrustworthy. No one wants to work for an untrustworthy employer. No one wants to invest in untrustworthy management. And no one wants to buy an untrustworthy anything.

The inverse of that is also true. Establish yourself as trustworthy, and people will choose your organization to work for, invest in, and buy from. That's a competitive advantage you can measure. That's a competitive advantage that grows your company. That's a competitive advantage you can take to the bank.

Trust Offers Competitive Advantage

In the work I do, which often involves corporate departments of communication, I am frequently asked: How can we contribute to the company's top-line growth and bottom-line profitability in ways that we can measure and prove? Here's one way: Manage the company's trust both inside and outside systematically.

By systematically, I mean nothing less than putting in place a system that methodically forces consideration of implicit as well as explicit, and distributed as well as centralized, messaging. Such a system will pay for itself in weeks if not days.

What you have here is an opportunity in the robes of a crisis. Smart people will see it for what it's worth. Gold.

Why Your Communication Fails

 

Let me tell you a little story.

 

Years ago, I worked as an executive speechwriter for the CEO and board chairman of a Fortune 25 company. He was pretty good on his feet. With a little help, he got even better.

 

I'll never forget one of the most important speeches he gave. It was to the top 350 executives of the company. They flew in from all over the world. They were eager to hear the CEO's new vision and business strategy. For the most part it was a terrific meeting.

 

But one thing went wrong. Actually, one thing went awfully wrong.

 

At the end of his closing address, the CEO laid out an explicit roadmap for change. Then he declared: "Six months from now, if you're still doing basically the same thing, basically the same way, then you didn't get the message. That makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution."

 

Moments later, the crowd rose in a standing ovation. The CEO was exhilarated. He was confident he had communicated his message with clarity, credibility, and cogency. So was I.

 

 

Alas . . .

 

So far, so good, right?

 

Well, no. The message that those executives heard was not the message the CEO sent.

 

This actually happens all the time. You think you are communicating, but you are miscommunicating. You are speaking, perhaps even eloquently. You are writing God-knows-how-many emails.

 

But that doesn't mean you are getting through. It doesn't mean you are clear or compelling or even collegial, and it certainly doesn't mean you are credible.

 

Remember this: The communication that ultimately matters is the communication that is received and understood and believed. It is not the communication that is merely sent.

 

Yes, there is a difference. Almost always there is a difference.

 

 

Senior Managers Need Training, Too--Especially!

 

If you think communication coaching and training is only for young managers, think again. Few senior managers are as good they believe they are.

 

Most of the time, most senior managers and even most senior executives are sending mixed, muddled and mute messages. Most of the time, people have to read between the lines to derive a message that fits their own reality. That's the message they receive, understand, and believe. And that's the message for which they informally hold the speaker accountable.

 

The root cause for this phenomenon is fairly simple to explain. All of us communicate both implicitly and explicitly, but we manage only our explicit communication: the words and numbers that pour forth from our announcements and pronouncements. We diligently manage the big stuff, and we gloss over the little day-to-day stuff.

 

We especially neglect to take ownership for the messages we implicitly send all day long, such as the meaning of our visible behaviors, our inaccessibility, our impetuous decisions, our inconsistent priorities, our silences, our penchant for blaming the other guy, our rat-a-tat directions, our refusal to reach across siloed departments, our budgets at odds with our values, our deference to urgency over importance, and on and on.

 

Moreover, even with regard to our formal voice, we assume that people are paying attention, that they understand what we say, and that they believe what we say. We assume that they remember what we say, that they have no further questions on what we say, and that they see the relevance of what we say. We assume that they know what to do with what we say.

 

 

The Banality of Miscommunication

 

Is any of that even remotely realistic to expect? How often do you pay rapt attention to others without mentally multi-tasking? How often do you understand what someone is saying right away? How often do you believe it without casting a doubt? How often do you remember it perfectly? How often do you find it relevant and applicable without a welcoming opportunity to ask questions?

 

And about that welcoming opportunity: Are you, as a manager, going out of your way to create a safe harbor where anyone can ask any question without fearing a cold, dismissive, or perhaps even explosive response?

 

The truth is, people do not communicate perfectly because they are human beings. They will never be perfect, and neither will you. But they can be better, much better, and so can you. Look at the work and competencies good communication requires as an opportunity, not a burden. It means we are living in a civilized society.

 

Let's go back to the CEO's standing ovation. What can go wrong with a speech that draws such sustained, enthusiastic applause by the people the speaker is trying to influence?

 

Just this: Most of the executives in that room heard the CEO say that in six months he was going to bring down the sledgehammer on the other guy.

 

 

 

What Did They Hear?

 

None of them heard the CEO say that the sledgehammer was coming down on him. Sure enough, after six months passed, the CEO began getting questions: When are you going to do something about Business Unit A? About Business Unit B? After all, you said they were part of the problem.

 

Twelve months passed. Eighteen months passed. The more time that went by without a visible sledgehammer, the less credibility the CEO had remaining. He had said one thing. He had said it sincerely, earnestly, even eloquently. But people had heard him say quite another. That's what they would remember.

 

Gradually and then suddenly, to paraphrase Hemingway, the CEO had a credibility problem, and it was a problem of his own making.

 

Now ask yourself: Where was the real sledgehammer? More to the point, what messages are you sending implicitly or inadvertently, and how are your messages perceived by people you seek to lead?

 

What is the price you are paying for that, and what are you going to do about it? When?

The Three Voices of Leadership

Little has changed in the decade since the Harvard Business Review published an incisive analysis by John P. Kotter on failures in corporate transformation. In it Kotter listed a handful of reasons why change efforts founder. One major reason was inadequate, slow, unclear, dodge-the-bullet communication.

“Transformation is impossible unless hundreds or thousands of people are willing to help, often to the point of making short-term sacrifices,” Kotter wrote. “Employees will not make sacrifices, even if they are unhappy with the status quo, unless they believe that useful change is possible. Without credible communication, and a lot of it, the hearts and minds of the troops are never captured.”

Kotter, a professor at Harvard Business School, went on to suggest that companies undergoing transformation typically devote only a minuscule share of their formal internal communication—newsletters, brochures, Intranet sites—to their new vision. His estimates ranged from just .0001 percent to .0005 percent. In a subsequent book, Leading Change, he generously calculated it at .58 percent, still leaving 99.42 percent of a company’s formal in-house communication to non-strategic matters.

Quibble about decimal points, if you will. Kotter’s essential point is still on target. The messages that an organization’s leadership presumably considers the most important—messages which can make the difference for the company between profit and loss, between innovation and catch-up, between growth and stagnation—are typically lost in the din of minutia and noise.

The bottom line: Transformations fail in large part because of the absence, for all intents and purposes, of clear, compelling, credible, constructive communication. You cannot expect employees who lack awareness, understanding, and acceptance of a strategy to become enthusiastically committed to carrying out the strategy.

We can take Kotter’s argument a step or two further, by addressing another critical fault line in strategic communication. For even the organization that carefully orchestrates its formal media in support of transformation still faces long odds against success—unless and until it brings its semi-formal and informal communication in line with its strategic intent.

Not only is the overwhelming share of formal communication usually given over to non-strategic matters, the overwhelming majority of all communication within an organization stands quite apart from strategic messages in those formal media.

Most workplace communication by far is semi-formal or informal. Unfortunately, many line managers (and even some communication professionals) mistakenly fail to regard semi-formal and informal communication as real communication at all. But it most certainly is, and average employees most certainly realize it.

Semi-formal communication includes those official programs and initiatives, procedures, systems, and processes that carry the organization’s imprimatur. They function as communication because they convey meaning to people and induce or impede certain thoughts or behaviors in response. Specific examples might include a performance management system, the requirement for some but not all to attend a management training institute, or a recognition and reward program, perhaps honored mainly in the breach.

Informal communication consists of relationships and routine conversation—comments, questions, complaints, humor—as well as those myriad decisions, attitudes, behaviors, and choices on the part of leadership that so often “speak louder than words.” Some real-life examples, good and ill: on the positive side, using consistent, focused questions to establish priorities and a sense of urgency; on the regrettable side, a dangerous decision to direct an unskilled worker to repair an electrical box.

Ironically, semi-formal and informal communication is often more strategic, more powerful, more contextual, and more credible than a company’s formal communication. In many respects it is the communication that matters most.

But because it is typically not regarded by management as deliberate communication—at least not as official communication—semi-formal and informal communication is often left to work against the organization’s formal communication. Indeed, it has the potential to corrode employee perceptions of the organization’s strategic intent.


Let’s take a closer look at all three voices—formal, semi-formal, and informal communication—to see the need for bringing them together.


The Formal Voice

Intranet sites, interactive kiosks, and closed-circuit television are rich cousins of the old standbys of formal communication—newsletters, brochures, all-employee mailings, videos, leadership packets, telephone recordings and the like. Irrespective of their technology, they all function much the same as the old-fashioned bulletin board. They transmit information.

Formal media, of course, are an essential component of internal communication. They are the first building block of awareness, and they serve as a reference bank or a universally accessible source of what one hopes is “the straight scoop.”

But relying exclusively on formal media to communicate strategy is a grave mistake—albeit one made frequently even by sophisticated companies. Because its thrust is an episodic, one-directional, top-down flow of information, it cannot generate the ongoing dialogue that is necessary to develop understanding and acceptance, let alone commitment.

Without a dialogue, without mutual listening, formal communication on matters of strategy is unable even to build lasting awareness¾and it cannot begin to create the understanding, acceptance, and commitment an organization needs to execute its strategy. To be successful, strategic communication requires continuing dialogue and a broadly integrated approach, emphasizing semi-formal and informal communication. Only then can it secure the buy-in of employees.

Traditionally, companies have placed too much emphasis on formal communication and too little on semi-formal and informal communication. The danger of overemphasis on the formal media is one of both impact and credibility. It is the semi-formal and informal communication that furnishes context for information. When formal communication is deemed by employees to be irrelevant, or when it conflicts with the reality that employees perceive through semi-formal or informal communication, it renders the organization’s leadership as either out of touch or not credible.

To quote Kotter once again: “Communication comes in both words and deeds, and the latter are often the most powerful form. Nothing undermines change more than behavior by important individuals that is inconsistent with their words.”


The Semi-Formal Voice

All those programs and initiatives and systems that people love to ridicule have a reason for being. They’re institutional tools intended to facilitate or direct some aspect of the organization’s work. Unfortunately, they’re not always designed to serve one of their principal functions—namely, communication.

In fact they are powerful means of communication, simply because they do what internal strategic communication does or should do: create meaning for people, and encourage or discourage certain types of thinking and behaving. Unfortunately, when left to themselves, initiatives and systems may send confusing or wrong messages. Sometimes they inadvertently send negative messages even when they’re used as designed.

Production quotas are a common example. Supervisors may perceive quotas to be in conflict with other strategic goals, such as quality, customer service, or safety. If the quotas are an absolutely rigid requirement while the quality process, customer service conditions or safety precautions are somewhat less rigid, then the quotas will prevail. The implicit rank ordering is a powerful message that quality, customer service, and safety are Jobs Number 2, 3, and 4.

Another example: an annual training requirement for managers. If the content of the training is perceived as too theoretical and not immediately applicable on the job, some managers will complain about the new burden. Meanwhile, those lower-ranking supervisors and staff employees who weren’t required to take training may feel left out—disenfranchised from the organization’s important work.

In the other direction, the manager who abrogates his or her obligation to attend training sends a message of a different sort back to upper management. In response, senior management sends yet another signal in the manner of its reaction to the truant manager.


The Informal Voice

One of my favorite questions to ask employees in focus groups, or while touring plants and factories, is: “What’s really important around here?” And another: “How do you know?”

The responses I get are instructive. In the best operations, the responses align almost perfectly with the strategic vision and the professed values of the organization. And employees will say they know that to be the case because they “see it all around” them, in routine decisions and behaviors on the part of their leaders.

In inferior operations, employees will answer flippantly or caustically: “kissin’ butt” or “keeping your mouth shut.” Pressed for more substance, they will paint a portrait of an organization that says one thing for the record but does something else.

Such are the relationships and routine conversation¾the casual comments, questions, complaints, humor—as well as all those day-to-day decisions, attitudes, behaviors, and choices on the part of leadership that communicate so very powerfully. All of us see them every day. And all of us glean meaning from them.

How often have you heard people say: “The facts speak for themselves.” Or: “What you see is what you get.” Or: “Experience is the best teacher.” Or: “Look at his track record.” Or: “You think she’d have learned by now.” Or: “Actions speak louder than words.”

All these are different ways of observing a central truth: that what people do counts for more than what people say. In the workplace, that may translate to what managers place on meeting agendas and who is invited to which meetings. It may be what standards of work are expected, what tools are provided and what skills demanded (and furnished through training). It may be the indulgence a manager shows to an employee who isn’t carrying his weight. It may be what is purchased and what is not. It may be how much time is given to what kinds of activities.

This isn’t to say that informal communication is never verbal. On the contrary, managers communicate informally through their casual remarks and comments, their sense of humor, their assignments and deadlines, and the questions they ask of employees.

Once, some years ago, the new chairman of a Detroit automaker visited an assembly plant. As he toured the plant and chatted with workers, he asked essentially the same question, over and over, and patiently listened to the answers.

To one employee he asked: “What do you need to do your job the best you know how?” To the next: “Do you have everything you need to build quality cars?” And to the next: “Is management providing you with the conditions and tools you need to help us produce the best cars people can buy?”

After he departed, the employees certainly knew his top priority: quality. And the assembly plant’s management team knew what was expected of them—all from a succession of focused questions and a senior executive’s patience to listen. Powerful stuff.

The lesson here is one of broad integration, addressing with more or less equal attention and vigor each of the three rubrics of communication. The organization that approaches internal strategic communication as a challenge to integrate its formal, semi-formal, and informal communication will succeed where others have failed.

The organization that does not—that instead is captive of traditional over-reliance on formal communication to the neglect of all else—will fail in spite of itself. Taking a broadly integrated approach to internal communication is essential as organizations continue to wrestle with new and better strategic visions.

For further reflection, ask yourself and your colleagues these questions:

• What strategic messages do our formal media convey?
• What messages do people see and experience in the semi-formal voice?
• What messages do our people see and experience in the informal voice?
• What gaps are evident?
• How do we close those gaps?

Important essay

© Copyright 2006 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

by Thomas J. Lee

We'd like to call your attention to an essay in the August 2006 issue of HR Magazine, published monthly by the Society for Human Resource Management.

 

"The Unintended Word," by Eric Krell, makes a critically important but often overlooked observation: as a manager, you are communicating constantly, often when you're least aware of it and are quite possibly oblivious to the messages you are sending. Because this implicit but commanding communication is unintentional, it is also unmanaged. And while you may not notice it, others most assuredly do.

 

Unintended messages can easily undermine and overwhelm your intended ones. The result: chaos. It is difficult, and it can be impossible, to recover. Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best: "What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say."

 

Seeing and hearing such unintended messages, all but the best employees can easily tune out and turn off. The costs can be huge: a hemorrhage of talent, customer defections, employee cynicism, skyrocketing turnover, laborious recruitment, your own stalemated career. All because of messages you never intended to send, certainly didn't manage, and perhaps didn't even notice at the time.

 

We urge you to take a few minutes to read this informative essay. Email or telephone us directly (847-247-2241) if you wish to discuss it.

Your credibility is on the line

© Copyright 2006 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

by Thomas J. Lee

No leader deliberately sets out to undermine his own credibility. But in the eyes of followers, just about every leader's credibility is imperfect. Some managers have scarcely any credibility left.

 

How does that happen? Actually, it happens easily--all too easily.

 

It happens because it is easy, too easy, to lose sight of the myriad ways in which you communicate as a leader.

 

The fact is, as a leader you're communicating constantly, often when you're least aware of it.

 

We have a simple, powerful way to keep you and your leadership team's messages on point and on track. It is a structure that identifies three distinct modes or "voices" with which you and your leadership team speak, every day: formal, semi- formal, and informal.

 

The challenge is to integrate or align these three voices. It's really quite straightforward. You just need to know how it works. Here’s a 30,000-foot overview.