Minding Gaps

The Birthplace of Cynicism Is an Iceberg

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Companies and other large organizations—agencies or administrations of government, universities, non-profits, hospitals, museums, and the like—typically go to great lengths to craft their formal strategic messages.
 
These organizations appreciate the importance of carefully defining their mission and regularly communicating with key stakeholders like customers, employees, investors, and others who want to be kept abreast of their progress. That's what the formal voice is for.
 
It can veer off course, however, and sometimes it does. Leaders may neglect or ignore communication outside and beyond the realm of formal messages. Two other voices—the semi-formal and the informal—account for well over half of all the messages that key stakeholders receive. These messages can wreak havoc if left unmanaged.
 
The semi-formal voice consists of explicit and implicit messaging from the institutional management tools an organization uses to operate: things like budgets, procedures, policies, its hierarchy, agendas, requirements, quotas, and more. For example, who gets hired and who gets promoted send loud signals as to what kinds of behavior are expected and rewarded.
 
The informal voice (not be confused with water-cooler chitchat) consists of explicit and implicit messaging drawn from workplace experiences touching on integrity, respect, dignity, pride, teamwork, inclusion, trust, and so forth. These experiences define the employee's social relationship with the employer. As a practical matter, they commonly involve the interpersonal relationship with one's manager and with his or her manager.
 
Like the submerged bulk of an iceberg, the semi-formal and informal voices can sink the ship if they are not managed. For when the formal voice is saying one thing, and either or both the semi-formal and informal voices are saying something else, the formal voice instantly loses credibility. It's never a tie. It's never close to a tie. The ship always lists to the same side.
 
Moreover, the louder the formal voice is, the more noticeable the erosion of credibility is. That's often the case, because the formal voice alone has the amplification of marketing, publishing, broadcasting, and web presence.
 
At the risk of mixing metaphors, you can think of an iceberg as the birthplace of cynicism in large, complex organizations. When the semi-formal and informal voices fail to confirm and corroborate the formal voice, the distance between them is a credibility gap.

In the military, the difference between the formal voice and the semi-formal and informal voices is known colloquially as the official truth and the ground truth. Whenever the difference rears its head, the cynicism of the troops is bound to grow. No successful organization can tolerate that cynicism more than minimally.
 
To ward off such cynicism, it's imperative to include the semi-formal and informal voices in strategic communication planning, and it's imperative to include communication planning for key stakeholders in any strategic planning process.
 
Think of it this way. You can keep the upper hand by doing your best to manage the communication about your organization—formal, semi-formal, and informal—or you can let unmanaged communication gain the upper hand. Which makes more sense?

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

When Strategy and Culture Collide

 

By Thomas J. Lee

As most of you are aware, Ronald B. Johnson was sacked Monday as chief executive of J.C. Penney. A retail marketing wunderkind whose high-profile credits included Target and Apple, Mr. Johnson was hired in 2011 to lead a turnaround of the venerable middle American department store.

Instead of turning it around, however, he sent it reeling. In just seventeen months the chain's annual revenue plummeted from $17.7 billion to $12.9 billion, and its net income dwindled from a profit of $1.63 per share to a loss of $4.49 per share. Not surprisingly, the company's ticker teetered and tumbled from the mid-30s in early 2012 to the mid-teens this week—all during a bull market in which its rivals Kohl's and especially Target have been performing quite well.

Now I do not present myself as either a stock analyst or an expert in retail sales, and I do not pass judgment here on Mr. Johnson's turnaround strategy. However, I do know a thing or two about leadership and its challenges in large, complex organizations. One of the things I know is this: When strategy and culture collide, one of them will win and the other will lose. The same one always wins: culture. If there are exceptions to that rule, they are few and far between.

In our Master Class workshops, we put it thus: Culture is the judge, jury, jailer, and janitor of strategy. No strategy, however well designed, can survive a clash with a culture than doesn't embrace it. No amount of shouting and demanding by senior management can change that, either. Instead, senior management must begin with the culture. Ignore that reality and you ask for failure.

Now I am a big fan of both Target and the Apple stores that Mr. Johnson helped create. According to experts on retailing strategy, his approach to reviving the fortunes of J.C. Penney was creditable. He wanted to upgrade the merchandise and make the store something of a first among equals in its category. That kind of a strategy has worked elsewhere.

Mr. Johnson's big mistake seems to be a condescending attitude toward the people of J.C. Penney and their values. He often ridiculed them, and he quickly replaced many of the senior managers he inherited. He never moved to Plano, Texas, the company's headquarters, but instead spent long weekends back in California. Soon the sarcasm that frequently came flowing out of the corner office was volleyed back at it. The strategy didn't stand a chance.

A smarter approach to leadership is to begin with the culture. Initiate a discussion as to who we, the people of this organization, are, and what we believe, think, and value. Explore the legacies we inherited, and build a consensus around our destination. Show everyone what is possible, and then bring them along on a journey of change.

It will take longer, but it will pay huge dividends in cohesion. You can ignore that hard work of leadership, but you cannot expect to reap the benefits without doing the work.

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

The Business Case for Communication on Change

 

We are on our annual study and renewal period through June 30. During this time we will reprise some of our favorite posts of the preceding twelve months. We'll return with all-new essays on Friday, July 1.

 —TJL                         

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Over the last few days I have been involved in two discussions—one as an observer in an online forum, the other as a participant in an exchange of emails—regarding the necessity for communication in support of leadership and change.

It appears some people out there are not yet convinced that communication matters.

Frankly, I find that astonishing. The factual basis is so solid, and the logic is so compelling, that I cannot understand why any serious business executive has any doubt. The evidence is both quantitative and qualitative, and it is conclusive.

Surely we can stipulate that the world is always changing. Technology changes. Economies grow and shrink. Older people retire, and younger people with new ideas come along. The market for goods and services changes as consumers and businesses decide they want and need different things. Companies merge and spin off. Trade barriers come down. Management fads come and go. Innovation creates new competition. Companies form and enter the marketplace. Always, things are changing.

Now, follow along with me. Wouldn't you agree that:

• Companies cannot control the changes around them, but they can control (a) whether and how they initiate change and (b) whether and how they respond to external change. Both the direction and the pace of their own change are variable, and both are controllable.
• Organizations that fail to change will invariably become irrelevant. Then they will whither and die. From the British Empire to the Pickett Slide Rule Company and AOL, history is filled with the bones of giants that failed to adapt.
• If what made you good is alone enough to make you great, you would already be greater than you are. In fact you will always need new ideas, new competencies, and new practices to grow and meet the demands of the future. That's life, and life is change.
• The work of leadership is largely the work of envisioning, articulating, and supporting change, commonly requiring discretionary effort and even self-sacrifice by many people, often in a state of uncertainty and risk. That fairly describes the business world of the 21st century, doesn't it?
• Communication is the energy of leadership and thus of change. You know this to be true because all of history's great leaders, those individuals who have brought about the greatest change in the most trying of circumstances, have consistently been articulate and inspiring communicators. Think of Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela. The reason this is true is equally obvious: People cannot act in concert with a leadership vision and agenda unless they have the big ideas, the information, and the incentive to do so, and they get all that through communication.
• Every organization is always communicating with itself—thinking out loud, as it were. People talk. Rumors spread. Leaks occur. The communication may be managed well or poorly or not at all. It may be clear, credible, compelling, constructive, collaborative, continuous, civil, and concise, or it may not be. The degree to which it is managed well and purposefully is the degree to which the organization can change in accord with the leadership vision and agenda and thereby determine its own destiny. 

Now forgive a little hubris, but executives who choose to deny these propositions are denying some very obvious truths, perhaps because it is comfortable for them to remain in denial. After all, it is easier to deny the need for communication than to assume responsibility for communicating and perhaps even to confront some long-festering professional competency gaps.

Executives who acknowledge these facts, and we hope this includes you and your colleagues, will properly ask what they should do first. I would suggest they consider the possibility that a systematic process of integrated strategic communication just may be the missing piece of the puzzle. At the very least, they should get moving on a needs assessment to better understand their situation and the opportunities it presents. Remember, every problem in life is an opportunity.

Call us. The number is +1-847-247-2241. We can help if you call, but not if you don't.

 

Coming on Wednesday

The Role of Emotion in Leadership

 Coming on Friday

A Great Tool for Collateral Leaders

(c) Copyright 2011 Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Ten Strategies for Straight Talk in the Workplace

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Over the past week or so we have been exploring ten “talk traps” and their alternative. Talk traps are conventions of internal communication (for leadership in companies or other organizations) that often prove problematic.

The ten talk traps are Small Talk, Sunny Talk, Scare Talk, Sweet Talk (or Smooth Talk), Smart Talk, Simple Talk, Song and Dance Talk, Slick Talk, Snarky Talk (or Surly Talk), and Self Talk. We identified an eleventh, too: Snarl Talk. You can click here or scroll down to read all about these common talk traps.

As we explained, some of these talk traps work just fine in the right place and the right time, but they can backfire in the wrong place or the wrong time. Others are always ill-advised.

We also took a long look at some difficulties that beset Straight Talk, the preferable alternative to those ten talk traps. It turns out that Straight Talk can often pose its own challenges, few of which are obvious to the leader.

Here are ten strategies to make sure that Straight Talk, not one or more of the common talk traps, is undergirding your leadership communication in the workplace:

1. Lay a good foundation. You cannot begin talking about your business environment early enough. If you’re not in the habit, start now. You needn’t talk about future plans that are not yet finalized. Just talk about the past and the present. If you don’t begin now, people won’t be prepared when you do. The straight talk you eventually offer will very likely come as a shock to the system.
2. Establish a broad context. Address the weaknesses of your processes and products as well as the strengths. Talk about changes in technology, customer expectations, and speed to market. Deal openly with your culture, its advantages and its disadvantages. Discuss the business from multiple perspectives. It’s important to view reality from the point of view of customers, investors, hourly employees, even competitors.
3. Consider forming a small communication council consisting of articulate individuals at various levels of the organization or team, both non-management and management, who can provide diverse perspectives on what’s going on.
4. Recognize the fact that senior management has the luxury of time and typically a sophisticated educational background to help it absorb the need for change, while rank-and-file employees typically do not. By the time a new policy or strategy comes down, its imperative is clear to senior managers but can still be a mystery to ground-level employees.
5. Be sensitive to the words and phrases you use to describe the business landscape and to establish the direction and the case for change. Jargon and acronyms that are part of your own day-to-day vernacular can be meaningless to others, especially to employees who must execute your strategy. Language that has no meaning cannot possibly have any credibility or impact.
6. Test your stated values against the real drivers of your decision making. It’s easy to invoke a list of pretty values and nominally pay homage to them. It’s quite another thing to recognize the powerful impetuses that truly direct and shape policy. What really matters? That’s what your values are, like it or not. (One good test: Ask yourself whether you're willing to fire a senior manager you personally like but who violates a value.)
7. Set a high bar on standards and accountability, but acknowledge that none of us is perfect or perfectible. Make clear what rises to a capital offense and what doesn’t, and underscore the hard importance of aspirations. Don’t be impetuous or fickle. Do insist on common rules. If you expect an hourly employee to pay a parking ticket on company time out of his own pocket, the same rule has to apply to a senior vice president.
8. Appreciate the problems inherent in cascading. By cascading, we mean disseminating strategic information through an organization one level at a time. Cascading spawns rumors and creates a tangled web of misinformation and misunderstanding. It is a big problem in a lot of companies, yet it is routinely accepted as necessary and even desirable. It’s neither.
9. Take emotions into account. Emotions are a big part of everyone’s personality. Ignore them at your peril. Probably no emotion is more ubiquitous at work than fear: the fear of speaking up, the fear of questioning authority, the fear of offering an idea. If you’re not dealing with it, you’re being victimized by it.
10. Get into the nitty-gritty of specifics. It is one thing to lay out a grand strategy. It is quite another thing, and much more difficult, to translate that big strategy into detailed implications for rank-and-file employees. You must do this; the failure to do it is all but an abdication of management in support of leadership.

There’s more, but that’s enough to give you pause as you move forward. Don’t let it paralyze you, and certainly don’t allow it to keep you from speaking the truth. Honesty is still the best policy. Just be careful out there.

Coming on Wednesday

 Four Rules for Growing Engagement

(We will be off Monday for a national holiday in the United States.)

 

(c) Copyright 2011 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved. 

What We Measure When We Measure Engagement

by Thomas J. Lee

As companies come to recognize the importance and value of the full engagement of their employees, they are increasingly inclined to measure it, chiefly by means of surveys.

However, unless and until they agree on a workable definition of engagement that ties it to their strategic priorities, companies cannot be certain just what it is they are measuring. That must change.

I favor a four-part definition of engagement as the discretionary effort—the focus, the curiosity, the passion, and the courage—that employees may or may not bring to their work in support and service to the organization's purpose and its customers. Further, I regard engagement as the deliverable, the work product, of good leadership.

Thus, when we measure engagement properly, we are measuring the extent to which the people of an organization:

• are recognizing, acknowledging, and focusing on a leadership direction
• are exploring, thinking through, and grasping the implications and repercussions of that direction on their work
• are embracing and championing that direction, and
• are adopting it as their own responsibility, their own mission, their own opportunity, and eventually their own legacy.

Ultimately, we are thus measuring the extent to which the people of an organization are engaged in the strategic work of the enterprise.

To my thinking, a survey instrument that doesn't return data on these four variables isn't really doing the heavy lifting that a company needs. Just my two cents. 

 

Coming on Friday

Accountability versus Opportunity

 ©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Precisely What Is Employee Engagement? And What Isn't It?

by Thomas J. Lee

Many companies have begun to take the engagement of their employees as a serious strategic imperative, and that's a good thing.

I fear, however, that quite a few companies regard engagement as just another kind of "positive mental attitude," in the words of the late American insurance magnate W. Clement Stone. These companies are not yet perfectly clear as to just what people engagement is, how it resembles and differs from other kinds of PMA, and why it is so very, very important.

Until we gain clarity around the definition and singular importance of engagement, the imperative of engagement won't sink its roots deep into the work and ethic of leadership. Rather, it will be widely regarded and marginalized as "soft" stuff, not truly material to the company's success. It will likely be seen as the next closest thing to a fad, and it will be in danger of fading as quickly as it arrived. That will be tragic.

So as a public service, we are here to clear up the confusion. Today we will distinguish between engagement and other kinds PMA—all of which are better than their opposites, of course. In particular, we will distinguish engagement from commitment, loyalty, morale, satisfaction, and especially alignment. They're all good things, but they aren't the same.

Trumpets, please:

• You can think of real commitment in the workplace as doing whatever it takes, and perhaps more, to satisfy the customer and therefore the enterprise within the constraints of safety, the law, fairness, and ethical decency. People who demonstrate commitment make sure they follow through. They do what they say they will do—no excuses.
• In contrast, loyalty is the disposition of employees to continue serving the needs of their employer in an honest, productive manner in exchange for agreed-upon compensation. It is the unwritten workplace contract. Employees who are loyal are generally not devoting much time and energy to looking for new opportunities, unless they have a reason (a pending merger or staff reduction that imperils their job security, for example).
• For our purposes, employee morale and employee satisfaction are synonymous; if there is a distinction between them, it is so subtle as to be meaningless. We think of both morale and satisfaction as the degree of happiness or contentment that employees derive from their employment. That may be a function of their compensation, benefits, workplace conditions, stress, personal and professional relationships at work, employment security, and the opportunity to learn new skills and take on more responsibility. It may also reflect their personal circumstances such as financial security, home life, health, activities, spirituality, and fitness.
• By employee alignment, we mean the reliable performance of duties necessary for the organization to meet the expectations of its customers, most commonly in terms of product quality, delivery and service requirements, production and sales quotas, and work processes. We think of alignment as the deliverable, or work product, of good management.
• Finally, we define people engagement as the discretionary effort—the focus, the curiosity, the passion, and the courage—that employees may or may not bring to their work in support and service to the organization's purpose and its customers. When we see commitment in action, we often call it "going the extra mile." We think of engagement as the deliverable, or work product, of good leadership. Often, and most significantly, the work of leadership involves asking and inspiring employees to mount this discretionary effort in times of great uncertainty and in circumstances of considerable risk to the employee's personal security and well-being.

To grasp fully the distinction between alignment and engagement, we recommend you read our February 16, 2011 post. You will find it here, or just scroll down a few pages.

To appreciate the importance and value of building employee engagement, we recommend you read our posts on March 7, 2011, on January 14, 2011, and on September 3, 2010. 

 

Coming on Monday

Leadership Lessons of I Love Lucy

 

Coming on Wednesday

What We Measure When We Measure Engagement

 ©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

What Is Your Change Quotient?

by Thomas J. Lee

Everyone is familiar with IQ, and anyone who keeps up with popular psychology is familiar with EQ, a parallel calculation based not on cognitive ability but on emotional intelligence.

Today we are introducing another, similar metric. We call it CQ, for change quotient. It reflects neither intellectual capability nor emotional strength. Rather, it measures capacity for change.

You apply it not to individuals but to whole organizations. It measures how much and how well your entire company (or association, or team, or batallion, or garage band, or whatever) is changing, not how well a particular person is doing.

It is only intended as a rough, quick measure. What it lacks in academic rigor, it makes up in ease and convenience.

Here is how it works.

Just poll a cross-section of managers and employees. Ask them all to give the entire organization three subjective scores between 1 and 5—whole numbers only, the better their assessment the higher the number—on how fast it moves through change, how much it needs to continue or begin changing, and how wise or prudent its present course of change is.

Add the three numbers together; the sum will be a whole number between 3 and 15. Multiply it by 10. We'll call it A. This is your numerator.

Now invite the same people to answer the same questions about your competition generally. Ask them to assign a single score to all the entities in your marketplace (despite the likelihood of variability among them), giving any benefit of the doubt to better and faster-changing companies, as they are setting the pace for the future. You are seeking a composite score for the entire marketplace.

Calculate it similarly (taking care to multiply the sum by 10, just as you did before) and write it down. Let's call it B. This is your denominator.

Now divide A by B and multiply by 100. The result is your CQ, your change quotient.

Theoretically, it can be as little as 20 and as high as 500. We expect most companies to score somewhere between 50 and 200.

A score of 100 would mean that, in the view of the employees you polled, your company is just keeping up.

The higher the score, and especially if it is well into the triple figures, the faster you are already changing relative to your competitors, the more your people recognize the need to change, and the more likely your change is on course.

The lower your score, and especially if it is mired deep in the double digits, the less all that is true, and the more work you have to do.

Try it out and let me know how it works.

 

Coming on Monday

Part One of a Five-Part Series on Robust Credibility

 

 © Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

It's Raining Like Cats and Dogs . . . and Alligators and Bears

   

by Thomas J. Lee

Here is a little hierarchy for prioritizing issues you face, either personally or professionally. We use the order of the alphabet—D, C, B and A—and the imagery of four animals. We list them in reverse order of their urgency.

Dogs, the least urgent of the four, are issues that don't seem to be issues at all. Think of old Fido, curled up on the rug in front of the fireplace or greeting you with a slobbering kiss when you come home from work. He doesn't demand much attention, but if you don't take him out for a walk when he wants to go out for a walk, you'll have to clean up the mess on the living-room carpet. As issues, dogs remind you that you must look after the basics.

Cats are issues that would be evident if you ever saw them. You don't see them, because they would just as soon hide from you on the basement window sill. As issues, cats remind you that you must always be vigilant for what you don't see and don't know. That can be far more important than what you do see and do know.

Bears are issues that will overtake you if you are going downhill. As long as you are going uphill, you have the advantage. As issues, bears remind you to take on the big challenge, to think bigger than the competition is thinking, and always to be moving upward and forward. Remember, a grizzly is nothing to mess with.

Alligators, the most pressing of the four, are issues that are constantly nipping at your feet. Their snouts can reach your hands and arms. Moreover, alligators cannot regurgitate, so once they grab hold of you, you're finished. As issues, alligators remind you to keep a constant lookout and always be a step ahead.

Now here's a little exercise. First, list the issues that are confronting you and your organization. Then put each of them into one of these four categories.

Now ask yourself: What do you you realize that you didn't realize before?

 

Coming on Wednesday

 Executive Presence and Why It Matters

 

(c) Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Is Communication Really Essential to Change? To Leadership?

by Thomas J. Lee

Over the last few days I have been involved in two discussions—one as an observer in an online forum, the other as a participant in an exchange of emails—regarding the necessity for communication in support of leadership and change.

It appears some people out there are not yet convinced that communication matters.

Frankly, I find that astonishing. The factual basis is so solid, and the logic is so compelling, that I cannot understand why any serious business executive has any doubt. The evidence is both quantitative and qualitative, and it is conclusive.

Surely we can stipulate that the world is always changing. Technology changes. Economies grow and shrink. Older people retire, and younger people with new ideas come along. The market for goods and services changes as consumers and businesses decide they want and need different things. Companies merge and spin off. Trade barriers come down. Management fads come and go. Innovation creates new competition. Companies form and enter the marketplace. Always, things are changing.

Now, follow along with me. Wouldn't you agree that:

• Companies cannot control the changes around them, but they can control (a) whether and how they initiate change and (b) whether and how they respond to external change. Both the direction and the pace of their own change are variable, and both are controllable.
• Organizations that fail to change will invariably become irrelevant. Then they will whither and die. From the British Empire to the Pickett Slide Rule Company and AOL, history is filled with the bones of giants that failed to adapt.
• If what made you great will make you greater, you would already be greater than you are. You aren't, so it can't. You will always need new ideas, new competencies, and new practices to grow and meet the demands of the future. That's life, and life is change.
• The work of leadership is largely the work of envisioning, articulating, and supporting change, commonly requiring discretionary effort and even self-sacrifice by many people, often in a state of uncertainty and risk. That fairly describes the business world of the 21st century, doesn't it?
• Communication is the energy of leadership and thus of change. You know this to be true because all of history's great leaders, those individuals who have brought about the greatest change in the most trying of circumstances, have consistently been articulate and inspiring communicators. Think of Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela. The reason this is true is equally obvious: People cannot act in concert with a leadership vision and agenda unless they have the big ideas, the information, and the incentive to do so, and they get all that through communication.
• Every organization is always communicating with itself—thinking out loud, as it were. People talk. Rumors spread. Leaks occur. The communication may be managed well or poorly or not at all. It may be clear, credible, compelling, constructive, collaborative, continuous, civil, and concise, or it may not be. The degree to which it is managed well and purposefully is the degree to which the organization can change in accord with the leadership vision and agenda and thereby determine its own destiny. 

Now forgive a little hubris, but executives who choose to deny these propositions are denying some very obvious truths, perhaps because it is comfortable for them to remain in denial. After all, it is easier to deny the need for communication than to assume responsibility for communicating and perhaps even to confront some long-festering professional competency gaps.

Executives who acknowledge these facts, and we hope this includes you and your colleagues, will properly ask what they should do first. I would suggest they consider the possibility that a systematic process of integrated strategic communication just may be the missing piece of the puzzle. At the very least, they should get moving on a needs assessment to better understand their situation and the opportunities it presents. Remember, every problem in life is an opportunity.

Call us. The number is +1-847-247-2241. We can help if you call, but not if you don't.

 

(c) Copyright 2011 Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

The Best Way to Change Is Just to Change

by Thomas J. Lee

Throughout the Upper Midwest at this time of year, you will see groves of several species of tree—pin oaks, white oaks, and immature beeches—with dry leaves still clinging to their twigs, like infants hugging their mothers at the knee, long after brisk autumn breezes have brought down the leaves of other trees to the ground.

I walk past just such a grove of pin oaks, lean and shivering against the steel-gray sky, on my way to coffee with friends almost every morning. Until recently, I hadn't really noticed. Now, thanks to a fellow blogger, Michael Hyatt, I not only see these particular leaves, but I also appreciate a parallel between them and the prospect of change for so many people. Let me explain.

You already know that trees generally fall into two broad categories; evergreen and deciduous. Evergreens like the pine, cedar, and spruce replenish their needles continually throughout the year. They are always shedding some needles and quickly replacing them with new growth, but they are never naked to the sun. In contrast, deciduous trees like the ash, maple, and elm shed their leaves in a blaze of autumn glory. Then they are barren for months until springtime.

What I had never fully recognized was a subset of deciduous trees. Like other deciduous trees, these few species lose their leaves annually. But unlike other deciduous trees, they retain their leaves for months after the leaves stop growing, lose their chlorophyll, and turn first a burnt crimson and then a rusty orange.

These trees are known as marcescent (the first c is soft, as in incessant). Marcescent trees keep their leaves all winter, until the warming sun of spring. Even powerful gusts of arctic air sweeping down from Canada week after week through a Midwestern winter cannot pry the leaves loose. But finally, new buds emerge. The growth of buds literally pushes last year's leaves out of the way. Only then do the old leaves fall to the ground.

Here's the parallel to change and people. As the great Earl Nightingale observed, we are creatures of habit. We will do tomorrow what we are doing today, and we are doing today what we did yesterday. Like the leaves on those marcescent trees, dysfunctional behavioral patterns will persist—unless and until we recognize them and act decisively to change, like new buds emerging from twigs.

Now the thing is, the change we undertake must be constructive. It must reflect an affirmative alternative. People don't just stop doing things, even things that are hurtful and destructive, without an alternative. They can try, but they will usually fail; they will usually lapse back into the old pattern.

Rather, to be successful, we must substitute something else. Only by replacing one behavior with another do we stand a realistic chance of changing once and for all.

As a young parent, I experienced this phenomenon with my daughter. At one point her grades weren't what they should have been, only because she wasn't completing her homework assignments and preparing for tests. Instead, night after night, she was playing video games.

Her mother and I intervened. We forcefully substituted a productive activity for an unproductive activity. It worked. She turned her grades around. (Years later, I can report to you that she has graduated from the University of Chicago and is midway through Northwestern Law School.)

For people, as for marcescent trees like the pin oak, the old way persists until a new way replaces it, because until then the new is not fully present and real. The lesson here is to underscore the importance of identifying an alternative behavior and arranging for it to replace the previous behavior. Otherwise, people will probably never find their way out of the rut they are in.

Questions: What behavioral pattern are you in that you must replace with something else? What will you replace it with? When?

 

(c) Copyright 2011    Arceil Leadership Ltd.    All rights reserved.

There's Nothing More Valuable Than a Good Theory

 

by Thomas J. Lee

How often in business have you heard someone dismiss an idea as "just theoretical"?

They'll say something like: "Well, that's all well and good in theory, but I can't imagine it will work in practice." Or: "That's all theoretical. Just give me the facts, and keep it straight." Sometimes their words will make no reference to theory, but the sentiment is the same: "It looks good on paper," someone will say, "but will it fly?"

In truth, nothing is more valuable than a good theory. A theory with its feet on the ground and its eyes on the horizon can change the way you look at things forever.

By good, I have two criteria in mind. One, it has emerged from clear-eyed observation of reality. It has not simply been invented out of someone's wild imagination. Two, it has a great deal of explanatory power. It explains why something is the way it is. It helps people understand.

We rely on good theories extensively in other disciplines. Medicine has its germ theory. Geology has its plate tectonics theory. Physics has the theory of relativity. Chemistry has the atomic theory. Statistics has the theory of probability. Economics has the theory of markets. Political science has game theory. Mathematics has chaos theory. Astronomy has the Big Bang theory.

All those theories and many others have powerfully changed the way we view the world.

Until they have a good theory to guide them, people wander in a desert. They don't know how to make sense of things. They are easily confused and frequently mistaken.

When someone finally arrives at a good theory, people are able to get their bearings. They know which way is which, and they know where they are. They finally have the means to regard their past in perspective, to see the present with clarity, and to imagine a realistic future. They can see a path from where they are to where they are going.

You can even make money on theory. Portfolio theory guides the investing decisions by many Wall Street mavens. You don't even need a portfolio. Just learn how to tell a story. After all, Malcolm Gladwell based his wildly successful book The Tipping Point on diffusion theory. He made a lot of money on a theory!

Of course, it is true that theories can take you down the wrong path, sometimes with disastrous consequences. In the 20th century, for example, many people believed in a conspiracy theory for President Kennedy's assassination. Marxist theory led to the oppression of many millions under communism. The domino theory pitted the great powers against each other in Asia, and hundreds of thousands of people died.

But when theories go awry, it is the particular theory itself that is at fault. The problem is not the overarching fact that it is a theory. As the other examples demonstrate, we can explain everything from disease to earthquakes, energy, wars, and supermarket prices by the application of good theories. That isn't a bad track record for a few concise words.

So I like good theories. Especially in business, we need more of good theories, not fewer. Just make sure that a theory has its feet on the ground and its eyes on the horizon. Just make sure that it is truly a good theory.

 

(c) Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

How Compelling Is the Communication in Your Organization?

  

 

(Fifth in a Series.)

by Thomas J. Lee

Last week we introduced the concept of a culture of communication. (Click here to read the November 24 post).

Then we explored each of the eight hallmarks of a healthy communication culture: clear, credible, compelling (or cogent), constructive, continuous, collaborative, civil, and concise. (Click here to read the November 26 post.)

We're taking a look now at diagnostic questions a company should ask itself to gauge its culture on each of the eight hallmarks.

Today we take up compelling, or cogent. Here are some of the questions I like to ask to get a sense of the cogency—the power and the energy—of communication around strategic direction and work-place priorities:

• Does the organization rely on hit-and-miss cascading important strategic information down through the ranks one level at a time?
• How much information ultimately gets through?
• How problematic is the erosion of context and rationale around messages as a result of cascading?
• On introducing a new initiative or program, does senior management think through the day-to-day implications on the work performed by rank-and-file employees?
• How does it convey those implications and expectations?
• Is the passive voice common?
• Are strategic messages put in proper context, and do they carry an explicit rationale and explanation?
• How often does the organization repeat itself on mission-critical messages? Are the challenges of social noise and the curse of knowledge fully appreciated?
• Does management shift focus frequently as new programs are adopted or periodically re-emphasized?
• Is management communicating more than a few strategic priorities?
• Are you providing front-line supervisors with adequate information to explain strategies and critical principles?
• Are senior leaders manifestly preoccupied with the strategies? 

 

We would be happy to help your organization assess and improve

its culture of communication. Just call us at +1-847-247-2241

 or write to us at info@arceil.com. 

 

(c) 2010 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

What Is Your Organization's Communication Culture?

 

(First in a Series.)

by Thomas J. Lee 

Just about everyone takes corporate culture for granted. It is a well-established concept. No one disputes that their company has a culture, for better or worse.

But you may be surprised to learn that, less than a generation ago, corporate culture was unheard of. Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy introduced the term in their trailblazing 1982 book, Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life.

The concept was initially controversial. Companies resisted the notion they were about anything more than their numbers. Since then, of course, many companies have come to compete on culture as much as on goods and services. You see it whenever a company touts its ranking on the Best Places to Work list.

Sociologists define culture as the totality of attitudes, norms, and behaviors that distinguish one group of people from another. In business, culture is commonly regarded as "the way we do things around here."

There are profound cultural differences between Google and Microsoft, for example. Similarly, there are significant cultural differences between Toyota and General Motors, between Southwest Airlines and Delta Air Lines, between Nordstrom and Macy's, and between Bank of America and Chase Bank. The list could go on.

Just as cultures vary from company to company, so do cultures within a single company. Each corporate culture consists of many smaller subcultures. The closer you examine subcultures, the more variability you see. Some experts believe there is more cultural variability within companies than among them.

For example, in any one company, you may notice cultural differences between headquarters personnel and field representatives, between the engineering geeks and the marketing mavens, between salaried staff and hourly workers, between grizzled veterans and young turks, between teams supporting a growth product and teams supporting a cash cow, between the day shift and the night shift, between manufacturing and sales, between legacies of an acquired company and legacies of the acquiring company, and so forth.

All these fault lines reflect the priorities and sensitivities of various perspectives, owing to various circumstances, backgrounds, and values of people.

Another kind of subculture, equally important, gets even less attention. It reflects particular processes, such as quality or planning. Of special importance to me, not surprisingly, is the culture around communication of business issues and information.

Think about it. All the variables around communication are powerful determinants of culture and subculture. In some key respects, communication is culture. And the culture of communication is critical to everything.

By culture of communication, I mean the tendency of people throughout a company to share information, ideas, and their intuition on business matters in a particular way. It is less about the flow of official information and more about the countless decentralized eddies of information converging and diverging throughout a company. Here it's important to remember that communication is more than just words, numbers, pictures, and images; it is anything that conveys information or creates meaning for people, and it is often unintentional, implicit, and unmanaged.

Now corporate cultures and subcultures of any sort are very, very powerful. They are tantamount to being "the judge, jury, and jailer" of strategy. In other words, whenever companies adopt a new strategy or policy or initiative or program, their culture can make it or break it.

Any strategy (or any policy or initiative or program) depends on compatibility with the culture for survival and growth. If the strategy and the culture are compatible, then the strategy can survive (not that it necessarily will, just that it can). If they aren't compatible, then all bets are off, and the strategy is probably doomed.

That's especially true of the culture of communication. Because communication is the very energy of leadership, the culture of communication determines to a large extent whether leaders will be able to lead.

Ideally, any company's culture of communication has as its hallmarks eight descriptors that just coincidentally begin with the same letter: clear, credible, compelling (or cogent), constructive, continuous, collaborative, civil, and concise. That's a tall order, but it's mightily important to a company's success.

You can easily think of examples, for better and for worse. A worst-case scenario might involve the proverbial Mushroom Theory, keeping employees in the dark and feeding them—well, you get the idea. A best-case scenario would embrace employees as intellectual partners in the enterprise, whose thinking is integral to the company's success. You can easily see just how critical communication is to performance.

On Friday, I will explore the eight attributes of a healthy culture of communication. Then over the next couple of weeks, I will post some diagnostic questions for each attribute that a company's leadership should ask itself to recognize and improve its communication culture.

 

We would be happy to help your organization assess and improve

its culture of communication. Just call us at +1-847-247-2241

 or write to us at info@arceil.com.

 

 

(c) 2010 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Let's Begin to 'Mind the Gap' on Credibility

 

by Thomas J. Lee

One of the many little charms about London is the stern, disembodied voice in the Tube that booms forth whenever the doors of a subway train open. "Mind the gap," the voice reminds us. The gap, of course, is the few inches between the subway car and the platform. Catch your heel in it, and you can sprain your ankle, or worse.

I use the word gap to describe the chasm of credibility that afflicts, burdens, and undermines so much corporate rhetoric. Continuing the metaphor, Minding the Gap is my way of reminding you to look after your credibility as a leader, regardless of the position you hold. It is critical to your leadership.

No one needs to be told that the last five or ten years have seen more than their share of frontal assaults on credibility. It isn't just a matter of Enron and Tyco. The real wars over integrity play out in little offices and cubicles. It is there, day in and day out, that compromises can so easily occur. It is there that we can fall short of our promise, and short of our potential, in so many ways.

Often it seems we lose our way because we have no compass to point us northward. So we have developed a little diagram that can help companies map their own integrity. They can use it to analyze how their credibility was damaged in the first place, or they can use it to avoid damaging their credibility in the future, or both. Moreover, in support in a leadership vision, it actually enables the achievement of the previously unachievable.

We call this model the Rainbow™, because it looks like one. It identifies three distinct modes or “voices” of communication, and it brings them together. We have designated these three voices formal communication, semi-formal communication, and informal communication.

Be careful: formal communication has nothing to do with tuxedos or taffeta, and informal communication has nothing to do with denim or dungarees. Rather, they are both terms of art. Each voice has a specific meaning and role associated with it. Like the Three Musketeers, they need to work together -- all for one, and one for all.

Let's get more specific:

Formal communication is the traditional mainstay of organizational communication. It consists mainly of information and messages expressed in newsletters, banners across factory walls, glossy brochures, closed-circuit television, announcements, and bulletin-board postings, along with their high-tech kin such as intranet sites and interactive kiosks, and through external communication such as advertising, press releases, investor advice, and government filings. All these are vital and basic components of a communication system. However, too often organizations rely on them excessively or even exclusively. When asked to do too much, they ultimately fail even in their modest efforts to build awareness.

Semi-formal communication is commonly thought of as a management toolbox. It consists of all those programs, policies, processes and procedures that companies use to manage their affairs. These things function as communication because they do what conventional communication does: convey information, direction and meaning to employees, establish priorities and concerns, and encourage or discourage certain thinking and behavior in response. Examples of the semi-formal voice include meeting agendas, training mandates, job descriptions, standard operating procedures, ISO 9000 processes, spending authorizations, accountabilities, sales quotas, cubicle sizes, and employee surveys. The semi-formal voice is always sending either complementary or inconsistent messages. It primarily facilitates both understanding and acceptance, but it can thwart them just as easily.

Informal communication is a live-wire interpersonal connection. Not to be confused with the rumor mill or body language, informal communication consists of relationships between leaders and the led, 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.” It is the bond or connection between a leader and her followers. When this connection is strong and resilient, great things can happen. When it is weak and fragile, they cannot. Informal communication is always there whether it is recognized as such, and whether it is integrated into the whole system, or not. It is the fulcrum of commitment.

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 organization’s values, and only when they are encouraging the alignment of behavior with strategy, can the organization reach its fullest potential.

Otherwise 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 an organization’s formal (or rhetorical and official) voice can never operate in a vacuum. It must either compete with or complement the semi-formal (institutional and programmatic) and informal (individual, relational, and behavioral) voices. Management’s 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’s 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 harmony of the three voices can resonate throughout the organization to clarify and reinforce important strategic priorities.

The bottom line is just this: Organizations are wise to develop a broadly integrated, widely decentralized system of communication as a vital management tool to deploy strategy and to leverage change. Semi-formal communication and informal communication, by fostering relationships of sincerity and respect, of integrity and mutuality, build understanding and acceptance as an indispensable foundation for commitment.

Employees hear, see, and feel a consistent and noble message, and they have the dignity of speaking up and being heard. Leaders have the benefit of followers who enthusiastically participate. It’s a win-win all around.

 

(c) 2010   Arceil Leadership ltd.   All rights reserved.

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How Can Hewlett-Packard Enforce a Non-Compete Agreement Now?

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Everything a company says and does should support and reinforce the achievement of its strategic goals. All its statements and actions send messages to key constituencies: employees, customers, investors. When a company does something that contravenes something it has said, it begins spiraling downward.

That is the basic precept of what we call integrated strategic communication. It is at the foundation of our approach to leadership and to the communication, both implicit and explicit, that energizes and drives leadership.

Surprisingly often, you don't see it in practice. Our object lesson for today is Hewlett-Packard. Surely the iconic Silicon Valley company has insisted that all its knowledge workers sign non-compete agreements. After all, NCAs are a basic component of management. They have been for many years.

But over the Labor Day weekend, Oracle announced it was hiring as co-president Mark V. Hurd, the Hewlett-Packard chief executive who was ousted early last month for violating HP's business standards. Oracle's hiring of Mr. Hurd wasn't surprising; it had been rumored in Silicon Valley for weeks. Larry Ellison, the founder and chief executive of Oracle, had rushed to Mr. Hurd’s defense. Nor was that surprising, as Messrs. Ellison and Hurd are personal friends and tennis partners.

Here's the rub. For many years Oracle and HP were strategic partners. In some respects they still are. But last year Oracle bought Sun Microsystems. With that acquisition, Oracle is now active in some of the same markets as HP, such as servers, systems, and services. Thus, the one former HP executive with the greatest strategic knowledge of its business is now in the employ of an HP competitor. (Here is a fuller description from an industry newsletter. You may also wish to refer to this post and this post, our own two prior comments on this case.) 

What is so surprising is that HP apparently either negated Mr. Hurd’s non-compete agreement when it dismissed him last month or never required him to sign a non-compete agreement in the first place. That is just astounding.

The obvious question that all Hewlett-Packard stakeholders must be asking is how HP can possibly require other employees to sign a non-compete agreement in the future, and how HP can enforce any NCAs it already has in place. More broadly, how does HP expect to be taken seriously on anything it says?

I am sure we haven't heard the last of this. In the meantime, though, many of us will be waiting for answers.

Update 8 September 2010: Hewlett-Packard wasted no time in filing suit to prevent Mr. Hurd from revealing proprietary information to Oracle. Good. Let's see how this plays out.

(c) Copyright 2010 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved

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How BP Can Change Its Safety Culture: A Case Study in Leadership

A Special Report and Comment

BP’s new chief executive, Robert Dudley, states that his top priority is changing the company’s culture around safety. That’s a tall order. Behemoths the size and complexity of BP don’t change overnight.

Fortunately, Mr. Dudley has a remarkable, highly successful case study in his own company’s archives. He should dig out the musty file and look it over.

One of the companies that BP purchased in its heady 1990s expansion was Chicago-based Amoco Corporation, itself the product of a 1950s merger of Standard Oil Co. (Indiana) and the American Oil Co. of Baltimore. Indeed, Mr. Dudley cut his professional teeth at Amoco. He worked there from 1979 until BP acquired Amoco in 1998.

Amoco once faced a grave safety problem of its own. Through a comprehensive intervention, in which I played a role, that company dramatically changed its safety culture. If Amoco can do it, so can BP. It won't be easy, but it can be done.

Amoco's Safety Challenge

As a matter of public record, from 1986 to 1996, Amoco lost 121 lives of employees and contractors worldwide. That's an average of one death per month.

For most companies in most industries, such a rate of fatalities is unimaginable and intolerable. BP’s numerical death toll over the last five or six years is roughly similar, though BP is larger than Amoco was, so its rate is somewhat less.

For a long time, Amoco's management looked the other way. Eventually, however, the senior leadership got fed up with the drumbeat of fatalities. Larry Fuller, the company's change-minded CEO, finally declared that creating a new culture of safety was his No. 1 priority.

He formed a cross-functional team to address the issue. The team was headed by Richard Spies, who subsequently worked with Mr. Dudley in BP Russia. As an internal consultant, I lent support to the Amoco team. (I have never had a connection to BP.)

The first thing the team did was to examine the causes of all 121 fatalities. That was important, because oil industry lore held that many fatalities were inevitable due to the flammability and lubricity of its products.

As one executive told me, “You have to remember that almost everything we make is fully designed and intended to explode sooner or later. We just want it to explode inside an engine.”

The inevitability assumption was a balm to the conscience of executives. But it didn’t hold up to scrutiny. The team’s rigorous analysis showed that only a minority of the 121 fatalities worldwide were even the nominal result of explosions or fire. Most, by far, were actually the result of carelessness. Undoubtedly most employees were usually working carefully, but the tragic toll pointed to serious problems.

The Real Causes Come to Light

In fact, the analysis found the real culprits to be a pattern of haste, neglect, and flagrant disregard for safety. More than anything, there was a pervasive and wrong-headed culture that gave priority to production over people. The company never intended to create that culture. It just happened. 

Day in and day out, too many employees and contractors were failing to take routine safety precautions: attaching fall-protection equipment, tying down ladders, locking out and tagging out valves, buckling seat belts, insisting on hard hats and steel-toe shoes, respecting no-smoking areas, and even simply obeying traffic laws.

In focus groups with employees, we came across vivid anecdotal evidence that gave color and immediacy to the problem. The conclusion was inescapable. To altogether too many managers, other things mattered more than safety. A litany of their day-to-day decisions said so.

The analysis and its conclusions were bracing but not shocking. As a company, we had given only lip service to workplace safety. Our ongoing business conversation back then was all about exploration, production, and marketing. The prevailing message to employees, both explicit and implicit, was straightforward: Success was measured in dollars.

A Comprehensive Approach Was Essential

None of that would do any longer, and we knew it. Looking for solutions, we took a bold, comprehensive approach. In ways large and small, we set out to create a new culture that would truly put safety first. We were successful.

Words had to come first, but words alone would not suffice. In a three-page letter to staff signed by all the company’s top executives, senior management emphatically said that financial results would henceforth take a back seat to safety. The leadership had to be just that blunt; otherwise, employees would continue to believe the opposite. In a culture dominated by engineers, the company also appealed to an engineer’s ethic of process control. They imposed individual goals and plans for safety performance.

Then came resources. The company created a process-driven safety management system. Thousands of managers underwent training in the system, so that everyone was on board. It included an in-house investigative agency, modeled after the U.S. government’s National Transportation Safety Board. Our trained experts, deployed around the world, would speed to the site any serious mishap, fatal or not. They would determine the fundamental “root cause” and share it with management.

The final ingredient was the visible commitment of leaders. Employees wouldn’t believe the new culture until they saw it, so they had to see it, day after day after day.

Here, management pulled all kinds of levers. Executive promotions would rest heavily on safety records. All operations around the world were to stand down so that personnel could focus on safety issues. In a company that lived in meetings, every agenda of every meeting was henceforth to begin with discussion of workplace safety—even the meetings of the board of directors and the annual shareholders meeting. 

Many other interventions and policy changes reinforced the central message. Together, all these things sent a powerful, persuasive message that safety finally did matter more than anything else.

The Happy Result . . . Until Things Changed

In the months and years that immediately followed, the company's safety performance improved noticeably. Fatalities and injuries plummeted. Today, we can confidently say that somewhere, people are alive because of the work we did.

I left Amoco in 1997, prior to its acquisition by BP. For a while afterward (BP also acquired ARCO about the same time), the toll of fatalities for BP as a whole was approximately what Amoco alone had been experiencing in the 1980s and early 1990s. It continued declining for several years.

Then, something at BP changed. I don’t know what. It does appear to be systemic, as evidence of serious problems long predated the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe this spring.

Persistent issues with the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, a crisis on another Gulf of Mexico platform known as Thunder Horse, and the disastrous explosion at the Texas City refinery in 2005 are corroborative.

(Just last week, BP was fined $50.6 million for safety violations at the Texas City refinery in 2009, four years after the 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers. The company has also committed to spending $500 million on safety at Texas City alone.)

Plainly, the safety culture that Amoco went so far to establish in the late 1990s is long gone. It desperately needs to be brought back.

Recognizing and Applying a Best Practice

If, as former Shell USA president John Hofmeister maintains, the industry has “earned the right” to continue drilling in the Gulf of Mexico by dint of its 30,000 successful wells over the course of decades, it will absolutely require a culture that truly values safety above production. For the sake of human life, nothing else is more important.

Turning around the BP safety culture will plainly be a formidable challenge. It won’t happen soon or quickly. But, as Amoco’s experience convincingly shows, it can be done. Mr. Dudley should just ask around.

— TJL          

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By the Numbers: Stark Differences in Perception of Restructurings

By the Numbers is a weekly feature presenting business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. It usually appears on Monday.

Since its inception last summer, By the Numbers has explored numerical aspects of a wide variety of issues: employee engagement, organizational culture, information overload, trust in business, strategic communication, layoffs, job satisfaction, Internet usage, the productivity of meetings, nonverbal communication, and fear in the workplace, among others. You can read any or all of those posts whenever you wish, just by scrolling down to the hundreds of short essays that follow this one.

Today we look at a striking difference between management and the workforce on the impact of restructurings.

 

Now that the economy has been growing again for two quarters—and the recession is therefore technically historical—we can look back with 20/20 hindsight and assess the damage. The last two years saw widespread cutbacks, restructurings, and even bankruptcies. Few companies came through unscathed. Some just didn't make it, period.

According to a study by Towers Watson, almost three of every four companies reported either a restructuring or a layoff or both since mid-2008, and almost nine of every ten companies reported taking at least one or two severe actions to stanch the financial bleeding. The median was 3.5 such actions. (Keep in mind, these are the companies that survived long enough to be surveyed afterward!)

That isn't what is most surprising. The recession was severe. What's most surprising is the sharp difference between employers and employees as to the long-term impact of those moves, unavoidable though they doubtless were.

Among employers, only 17 percent said the restructurings and cutbacks would have an adverse effect on either work quality or service to customers. Among employees, 42 percent said so. That's a dramatic difference in perception.

Regardless of who is right here, the stark difference tells us a couple of things.

First, it says that what you see depends a good deal on where you sit. Perspective matters a great deal. Reality is rarely, if ever, objective.

Second, it suggests that neither employer nor employee probably has a completely unbiased view. Who is closer to the truth is arguable, and the argument is probably neither conclusive nor productive.

Finally, it tells us that companies will be smart to determine for themselves just how severe the impact is likely to be, and then to get busy mitigating that damage as much as they possibly can.

For companies that act quickly, this may be the easiest path to a short-term (and perhaps even long-term) competitive advantage. Conversely, for companies that do nothing, it may passively create an advantage for their competitors. That isn't the kind of competitive advantage anyone wants—except competitors, of course.

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Query: Actualizing Your Actual Vision

Appearing irregularly but not infrequently, Query is a short, simple, and hopefully powerful feature. It consists of a single question, or perhaps two or three—or four, or five (sometimes we can’t help ourselves)—closely related questions.

That’s it. Nothing more. It is intended to ignite or reignite a flame of introspection, reflection, exploration, and reinvention.

We won’t belabor the point. We won’t build an elaborate context. We won’t try to manage your thinking. All we want to do is start or restart some deeper thinking about your role as a leader, your efforts to engage people, and the effectiveness of your communication.

As you wrestle with each particular question, also ask yourself why we're posing it and what it means for your impact, influence, and inspiration as a leader.

• Setting aside for the moment your enterprise’s official vision, what is it that you and your colleagues are truly working to achieve? What do you want to leave behind when you retire or sell?

• Why isn’t this actual vision your official vision?

• What are you doing today, tomorrow, and this week to make your actual vision a reality?

• What obstacles and impediments are in the way? What is slowing you down?

• How are you overcoming those obstacles and impediments?
  
  

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Colloquy: Björn Edlund of Royal Dutch Shell Group (Part 2)

Yesterday and today we are inaugurating a new feature of Minding Gaps. Colloquy is a series of conversations with leaders on the trifecta of leadership, communication, and engagement. We'll talk with business executives, university professors, political figures, coaches (both personal and athletic), authors—anyone with a unique and informed perspective on these issues. These conversations may appear in two or three installments. Our inaugural conversation is with Björn Edlund of Royal Dutch Shell Group.

Björn Edlund is senior vice president, worldwide communications, for Royal Dutch Shell Group, which in 2008 was the world’s largest company by revenue (2009 data is not yet available). A global energy corporation with 102,000 employees and operations in more than 100 countries, Shell produces 2.5 percent of the world’s oil and 3 percent of its natural gas—enough gasoline and diesel to fuel 16 million cars and enough electricity to light 34 million homes. Royal Dutch Shell plc is an Anglo-Dutch company, listed primarily on the London stock exchange and with headquarters at The Hague, the Netherlands.

Mr. Edlund leads a staff of approximately 450 communication professionals, deployed in most of the countries where Shell operates. He came to Shell from Zurich-based ABB Ltd., where he headed communications from 1998 to 2005. He earlier headed communications at Sandoz, through its 1996 merger with Ciba-Geigy to Novartis. He began his international career as a news agency correspondent based in Sweden, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Mexico and Argentina, with reporting trips in Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern and Western Europe, Asia and the Midde East.

He will retire from Shell on March 1 and plans to devote his time to teaching, writing and speaking, as well as to advising non-profits and companies, hoping to stay engaged with the societal PR challenges facing organizations and their leaders.

Mr. Edlund works in English, German, Spanish, and French, as well as in his native Swedish. He and his Swiss wife, Veronika, a physiotherapist, have homes in Sweden and Switzerland.

Here is the concluding part of a two-part conversation with Mr. Edlund. (For the first part, just scroll down to yesterday’s post.)

Minding Gaps: Björn, you work internationally, and you are fluent in several languages. What cultural differences do you see in terms of employee involvement and employee engagement?

Björn Edlund: We do see differences. We see profound differences. In Europe, for example, because of the social safety net, people are less prone to panicking in a downturn, whereas in the United States in many cases, it’s do or die. If you’re unemployed, you’re really on your own. So people in the United States at times seem more wary of speaking up, which to me is at odds with the impression I had of Americans before I began in business.

Minding Gaps: I recall that, when I worked as a speechwriter for a CEO and board chairman of a large company, we had a great deal of difficulty creating a dialogue with employees. He would have town-hall meetings, but employees would shy away from asking the tough questions. Then, afterward, they would mutter something about his failure to address the subject that he wasn’t asked about. It was very frustrating.

Björn Edlund: That’s exactly right. When you compare a U.S. congressman’s town meeting on health care with a typical company’s town-hall meeting on the company’s strategy or policies, the difference is dramatic. People are outspoken on the public issues, and they’re almost mute on the corporate issues. In a town-hall meeting at work, you often have fawning questions, and there is rarely a robust conversation. We can only wonder: Where are they psychologically? Where is their soul? Are they afraid? Are they secure? Does this build trust? It is difficult to know.

Minding Gaps: What effect is the Internet having on corporate communication?

Björn Edlund: It’s huge, it’s really huge. Transparency and therefore consistency are being forced on companies. Openness is coming into organizations—and into politics for that matter. This is a good thing, a fantastic thing. You’re not creating unnecessary disappointment. People will understand the situation better and calibrate their own expectations more realistically because of it. If open is good and closed is bad, we’re learning now that partnering is good and participation is even better.

Minding Gaps: That’s quite a dramatic shift in a short time.

Björn Edlund: Well, there are still organizations that think they’re in control. They still believe that, by controlling the time and depth of information, they’re in control. What they don’t understand is that people will laterally compare the information a company provides with information they already have or with information they can easily obtain.

Minding Gaps: It sounds like a wake-up call for a lot of companies.

Björn Edlund: The hardest thing for a corporation to do is to let go, to let things happen between and among the players in the outside the world. Large companies need to be clear about who they are and what they stand for. Then we have to realize that it isn’t possible to control everything around us. We have to trust the social interaction between and among people. In today’s world, pushing messaging is almost detrimental—certainly pushing information that isn’t completely true. Conversation is king, as they say. Content is often just something to talk about. Being a participant on a conversation of empowered players—listening, making your point, getting others to engage with you, seeking good outcomes—is what seems to matter most.

Minding Gaps: Internally as well as externally?

Björn Edlund: Yes. Employees are citizens, too. They’re not going to suspend their disbelief. A company’s not walking the talk is the surest path to losing credibility, and employees are in a better position than anyone to see that.

Minding Gaps: Social media—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Wikipedia, and even blogs like Minding Gaps—are only a few years old. Can you see any impact of them yet?

Björn Edlund: Social media is going to have a huge impact, because, again, it represents empowerment. Compare the institutions of a few decades ago with what you have now. Everything is so much more splintered now, so much less homogeneous. Look at the Obama presidential campaign in the United States in 2008. It used social media very effectively, and one can argue the result of the U.S. presidential election was determined by it, at least in part.

Minding Gaps: Are there some drawbacks to social media?

Björn Edlund: Yes, it can be a distraction. Lots of people have opinions on things they don’t know anything about. By itself, it isn’t good or bad, but it will have an impact. Virtual communities flex their muscles all the time.

Minding Gaps: There seems to be an overwhelming amount of data out there.

Björn Edlund: You also have to learn to ignore a lot of it. Someone did a search for mentions of Shell on the worldwide web and found 15 million in 90 days! We can safely ignore nine-tenths of that, but we also need to follow the top blogs on sustainability, human rights and energy. It is possible to follow every trend but it isn’t possible to have your voice heard everywhere all the time. What we must do is keep an eye on the conversation about us, and participate when we are asked to – or when we feel strongly about what is being discussed.

Minding Gaps: What do typical operations managers and supervisors most need to learn about communication?

Björn Edlund: They need to learn and remember to listen before they talk, and they need to learn and remember that people will watch what they do more than hear what they say, so they have to do the right thing. Not just do it right, but do the right thing. Period. End of answer. That’s all. That’s it.

Minding Gaps: What big lessons in communication do senior executives seem to learn the hard way?

Björn Edlund: They seem to learn most lessons the hard way. As they climb the ladder, they acquire a wider set of audiences. When they first become a manager, they have just their team. Then they get a promotion and they have teams and suppliers. With another promotion, they have unions. Then they have communities. As they reach the top of the organization, they have the news media and non-governmental organizations, or NGOs.

Minding Gaps: What are the implications of that?

Björn Edlund: Learning to have an external mindset and learning to see yourself and your company from the outside in rather than from the inside out. How do you fit in? What is your company’s contribution, really? How can you talk about that? How do you listen? How do build engagement with people and organizations so that they listen to you? Are you aware that business today, especially large corporations, is met with enormous suspicion?

Minding Gaps: If you could offer one piece of advice to an executive, what would it be?

Björn Edlund: The best thing you can do is to stay who you are, be true to yourself. Let me elaborate a little. Realize you don’t know everything, even if more and more people will agree with you as you progress up the ladder. Don’t let the trappings of power change your value system. Try a daily dose of humility. Your capabilities and your ambition got you to the top. Make sure your integrity keeps you on the right track. Leaders engender legends, and too often begin to believe in them, themselves. Over-leveraging your power gets you into a relationship debt with people around you—and sooner or later they’ll want to cash in. And then your position, and holding on to it, becomes more important than your own self. That’s how bosses go imperial, and in the end, very brittle. Staying yourself is easier said than done. But in the end, it is the thing that matters most.

Minding Gaps: Thank you, Björn. Good luck wherever life takes you in retirement.

Björn Edlund: Thank you. I don’t think of it as retirement, but as being financially independent at a comfortable level, and thus able to work on stuff that interests me, or still puzzles me, with people that I like.

 

By the Numbers: Still More Data on Engagement

 

By the Numbers is a weekly feature presenting business data that is noteworthy, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. It usually appears on Monday.

Since its inception last summer, By the Numbers has explored issues of employee engagement, organizational culture, information overload, trust in business, strategic communication, job satisfaction, nonverbal communication, and fear in the workplace, among others.

 

For the last two Mondays in this space, we have presented data on the erosion of engagement and satisfaction among employees. Today we have more data. Just can’t get enough, it seems.

On January 4, this column cited a 2009 study by Towers Perrin (now known as Towers Watson, by the way). It found that only 21 percent of corporate employees worldwide are truly engaged in their work. The rest are about evenly divided between disengaged and sort-of, kind-of engaged: 38 percent describe themselves as mostly or entirely disengaged, while 41 percent are in the mushy middle.

Then on January 11, we reported on a new Conference Board study that found continuing evidence of a 22-year decline in job satisfaction among American workers. Of 5,000 people contacted for the study, only 45 percent said they were satisfied with their jobs. That is down from 61 percent in 1987. Moreover, the trend is pervasive, across all demographic cohorts.

Today (right on schedule!) we have a new report from Gallup, the folks who gave us the Q12. According to its research, only 28 percent of US-based workers are engaged, while 54 percent are not engaged, and 18 percent are actively disengaged. (Curiously, in presenting such dispiriting numbers, Gallup headlined its press release: Despite the Downturn, Employees Remain Engaged. Huh?)

You might wonder about the variability. Part of it depends on the methodology of the research, and part of it depends on the loose definition of engagement. Still, the core of the problem is plain: Companies are paying people to work, and all too many people (38 percent or 79 percent in the Towers Perrin study, 18 percent or 72 percent in the Gallup study) are doing only enough to get by.

To my thinking, that just isn’t good enough. It isn’t even close.

 

Ten Strategies for Leadership Communication

Last week we explored three “talk traps” and their alternative. Talk traps are conventions of internal communication (for leadership in companies or other organizations) that often prove problematic. The three we discussed are small talk, happy talk, and scare talk.

As we explained, each of these three talk traps works just fine in the right place and the right time, but they all backfire in the wrong place or the wrong time.

We also took a long look at some difficulties that beset straight talk, the preferable alternative to those three talk traps. It turns out that straight talk can often pose its own challenges, few of which are obvious to the leader. (To read those posts, from January 5 to January 7, just scroll down.)

Here are ten ways to make sure that straight talk is serving the purpose of your leadership:

1. Lay a good foundation. You cannot begin talking about your business environment early enough. If you’re not in the habit, start now. You needn’t talk about future plans that are not yet finalized. Just talk about the past and the present. If you don’t begin now, people won’t be prepared when you do. The straight talk you eventually offer will very likely come as a shock to the system.
   
   
2. Establish a broad context. Address the weaknesses of your processes and products as well as the strengths. Talk about changes in technology, customer expectations, and speed to market. Deal openly with your culture, its advantages and its disadvantages.
   
   
3. Discuss the business from multiple perspectives. It’s important to view reality from the point of view of customers, investors, hourly employees, even competitors. Consider forming a small communication council consisting of articulate individuals at various levels of the organization or team, both non-management and management, who can provide diverse perspectives on what’s going on.
   
   
4. Recognize the fact that senior management has the luxury of time and typically a sophisticated educational background to help it absorb the need for change, while rank-and-file employees typically do not. By the time a new policy or strategy comes down, its imperative is clear to senior managers but can still be a mystery to ground-level employees.
   
   
5. Be sensitive to the words and phrases you use to describe the business landscape and to establish the direction and the case for change. Jargon and acronyms that are part of your own day-to-day vernacular can be meaningless to others, especially to employees who must execute your strategy. Language that has no meaning cannot possibly have any credibility or impact.
   
   
6. Test your stated values against the real drivers of your decision making. It’s easy to invoke a list of pretty values and nominally pay homage to them. It’s quite another thing to recognize the powerful impetuses that truly direct and shape policy. What really matters? That’s what your values are, like it or not. (One good test: Ask yourself whether you're willing to fire a senior manager you personally like but who violates a value.) 
   
   
7. Set a high bar on standards and accountability, but acknowledge that none of us is perfect or perfectible. Make clear what rises to a capital offense and what doesn’t, and underscore the hard importance of aspirations. Don’t be impetuous or fickle. Do insist on common rules. If you expect an hourly employee to pay a parking ticket on company time out of his own pocket, the same rule has to apply to a senior vice president.
   
   
8. Appreciate the problems inherent in cascading. By cascading, we mean disseminating strategic information through an organization one level at a time. Cascading spawns rumors and creates a tangled web of misinformation and misunderstanding. It is a big problem in a lot of companies, yet it is routinely accepted as necessary and even desirable. It’s neither.
   
   
9. Take emotions into account. Emotions are a big part of everyone’s personality. Ignore them at your peril. Probably no emotion is more ubiquitous at work than fear: the fear of speaking up, the fear of questioning authority, the fear of offering an idea. If you’re not dealing with it, you’re being victimized by it.
   
   
10. Get into the nitty-gritty of specifics. It is one thing to lay out a grand strategy. It is quite another thing, and much more difficult, to translate that big strategy into detailed implications for rank-and-file employees. You must do this; the failure to do it is all but an abdication of management in support of leadership.

There’s more, but that’s enough to give you pause as you move forward. Don’t let it paralyze you, and certainly don’t allow it to keep you from speaking the truth. Honesty is still the best policy. Just be careful out there.

 

Quote / Unquote: Eric Hoffer on Change and Continuous Learning

Quote / Unquote is a feature that appears irregularly but frequently. It offers a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, or business. In most cases we also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion.

 

Eric Hoffer was a longshoreman first and a philosopher second, and that makes for a powerful kind of philosophizing—its roots deep in the reality of hard work and harder living. Blind from the ages of five to fifteen, he was so thrilled to regain his eyesight that he began to read books voraciously, and he never quit.

The books and essays he himself wrote were always unorthodox and provocative. He was among the first to probe the psyche of the follower, the loner, the outcast, and the fanatic. He realized long before others the importance of self-esteem and the effects of self-doubt, isolation, and anxiety on social cohesion.

Hoffer, who never attended college but whose intellectual curiosity was towering, had a gift for packing a lightning bolt of meaning into a candlestick of prose. Thus, we are blessed with many quotations from his pen, like this:

In times of change, learners inherit the earth,

while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped

to deal with a world that no longer exists.

As you reflect on this quote, ask yourself some questions:

• What are the changes you and your organization face today?

• To what extent are you already insightful, or learned, about these changes and their impact?

• To what extent are you and your colleagues disposed to learning?

Translate Your Strategy to Specific, Day-to-Day Behaviors

 

One of the biggest mistakes you can make as you adopt a new strategy, roll out a new initiative, or bring about any change is to neglect interpreting or translating the grand strategy to specific, day-to-day tasks and responsibilities for employees.

By and large, people want to do the right thing on the job. Often, however, they don’t know what the right thing is, and they guess wrong. Instead they do what they have always done, and they do it the same way. They do what their peers do. They do what they assume customers want. They think they understand the new strategy, but they don’t. And so on.

To successfully introduce a new strategy or roll out a new initiative, management must go from the big picture to the little picture. This is employee communication writ small. It is a necessary step for any management team introducing change. It requires serious thought and the involvement of front-line managers, because an employee’s boss is in a position to determine what gets done and how.

Here is an example. A new seafood restaurant is opening next spring on Long Island. The owner is focusing not only on the menu and the ambience but also on the dining experience; he wants to change the way restaurants treat customers. He wants to make sure that customers return to his restaurant in part because they receive unparalleled service from waiters.

Now it’s one thing to simply tell waiters to put a special emphasis on each and every guest and to make all guests feel comfortable. That’s fine as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go far enough. It doesn’t get specific.

To go from the big picture to the small picture, management must interpret the broad idea to actions and behaviors as customers would experience them. Ideally, it should be a collaborative effort by everyone from top to bottom, including front-line employees and conceivably even customers themselves.

Bruce Buschel, the new restaurant owner, has done something like this. Writing in The New York Times, he lists 100 things he wants waiters in his new restaurant to do or not do. It’s a lengthy list of dos and don'ts. After reading it, you can only wish that every restaurant would post it in the kitchen and require every waiter to memorize it.

The list is so long it is in two parts. Here is a link to the first fifty things, and here is a link to the other fifty. As you can see, Mr. Buschel gets specific. Readers weigh in with their own suggestions, just as customers might.

Now my question for you: In your business, is the larger strategy translated to specific, day-to-day behaviors in this manner? If so, give yourself a pat on the back. If not, you have some real work cut out for you. 

 

 

 

Strategic Focus Is the Foundational Work of Leadership

Lou Gerstner, who was so successful in turning around IBM in the 1990s, often remarked that nothing in business is more important than focus.

A company's focus must be sharp. It must be true. It must be sustained. It must be robust and relevant. Above all, it must be shared and widely embraced.

Sadly, few companies have such a focus, even in their senior management. What passes for a vision is typically nothing more than a grandiose dream devoid of meaning and value. Most visions that I've seen lack substance and specificity. Moreover, they are unaccompanied by real-world priorities, roles, metrics, resources, accountability—the very watchwords that are universally acknowledged as essential to business success.

That's a real failure of leadership. Think about it: Without a common focus, a company can have no real sense of direction. Without direction, there can be no progress. Without progress, there can be no achievement. And without achievement, there can be no success.

To build a common focus, the leadership team must first have one. The strategic focus must be a clear and sharp. After all, you can't share what you don't have.

Establishing and occasionally refining the strategic focus is the foundational work of leadership. It is absolutely imperative. In the absence of a 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—those programs of the month that everyone reviles—few or none of which have the earnest, sustainable commitment of leadership.

People see right through those programs; they inevitably become their own mockery. Each successive program, to quote Shakespeare, betrays 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? Why do your customers choose you over your competitors? 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 toward executing the strategy, so that the leader's focus becomes everyone's focus. Thus a 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 organization's 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 houseplant leans toward sunlight. But that takes time and leadership.

By the Numbers: The Stalemate on Quality

Last summer we introduced a weekly feature we’re calling By the Numbers, published at the start of each business week. Here we present a relevant 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.

Thus far, the data appearing in this feature have explored the tradeoff between income and satisfaction on the job, the explosion of information in the media, the role of front-line supervisors in building strategic engagement, the degree of trust that Americans hold in business, the extent of candor and honesty in supervisory communication, the economic impact of employee disengagement in U.S.-based companies, the nature and extent of disengagement in the workplace, the frequency of projects that fail, the link between employee disengagement and absenteeism, the myths around the impact of nonverbal communication, and the fear of recrimination in the workplace.

Today we examine sluggish progress on quality in business.

 

By the appearance of it, you would think that quality is institutionalized in business. Thousands of books have been published on quality. Dozens of professional organizations focus on it. There are standards and certifications that managers everywhere study to earn.

And in terms of product quality, we do see signs of progress. Certainly the much maligned American automobile is of better quality now than it was a decade ago. Moreover, to the extent that innovation reflects a drive for greater quality, we can take satisfaction in new products that no one dreamed of just a few years ago: the iPhone and iPod, search engines, the BlackBerry, wikis, blogs on every conceivable subject, and more.

Still, quality in business operations is not yet part of an enduring cultural ethic. According to research by McKinsey & Co., the global consulting firm, 67 percent of companies report that their quality efforts have “stalled or fallen short” of yielding real improvement. That figure comports with my own conversations with business leaders, few of whom are satisfied with their own company’s progress on quality.

As you reflect on this data, ask yourself:

• What is your company’s vision of quality, and how are you progressing toward it?

• Taking off the rose-colored glasses of management, what do you think is really happening on quality in your organization?

• What has your company (or organization) done to create not just a process of quality but a culture of quality?

• What are the specific charges on quality to leadership at all levels?

• What resources and training are devoted to it?

Why Change Fails

Unfortunately little has changed in the years 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 non-formal 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.

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 focus, and it must be clear and well-honed. 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.

 

By the Numbers: The Tradeoff Between Income and Job Satisfaction

Two months ago we introduced a weekly feature, By the Numbers, which leads off each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a relevant 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.

Thus far, the data appearing in this feature have explored the explosion of information in the media, the role of front-line supervisors in building strategic engagement, the degree of trust that Americans hold in business, the extent of candor and honesty in supervisory communication, the economic impact of employee disengagement in U.S.-based companies, the nature of disengagement in the workplace, the frequency of projects that fail, the link between employee disengagement and absenteeism, the myths around the impact of nonverbal communication, and the fear of recrimination in the workplace.

Today we examine public opinion on tradeoff between income and satisfaction on the job.

According to research by Frank I. Luntz that appears in his new book, What Americans Really Want . . . Really: The Truth About Our Hopes, Dreams, and Fears, Americans overwhelmingly prefer job satisfaction to economic prosperity.

Some 84 percent of Americans say they would prefer making “a lot less money” in a job they love to the converse. Only 16 percent of Americans say they would prefer making “a lot more money” in a job they hate.

As you reflect on this, consider these questions:

• What correlation, if any, do you see between job satisfaction and the execution of a business strategy?

• How important do you believe job satisfaction is to customer satisfaction?

• In your position and role, what can you do now to leverage the importance of job satisfaction?

• What have you done recently?

• How has the economy compounded the difficulty of ensuring job satisfaction?

• What steps can you take to improve job satisfaction in spite of a lackluster economy?

Beware the Metamessage

We don’t coin many words around Minding Gaps, but there’s a real need for this one: the metamessage.

Actually, we coined it years ago. Those of you who have participated in our workshops on leadership communication should remember the term.

Anyone in management or its strategic support functions is familiar with messages. These are the statements of what matters to a company, of where the organization is headed, of how products and services need to be improved, of just what lies ahead.

Messages are plainly important, but focusing on them exclusively as they’re stated plays a nasty trick on management. It is too easy, altogether too easy, for management to believe that a message as stated is a message if and as received, if and as understood, if and as believed, and if and as applied—when, in fact, it may not be any of those other things.

The natural inclination is to assume that because you said something, other people got the message. Unhappily, as we know from extensive research, that is often just not the case. Focus groups repeatedly tell of messages that come across as happy talk, fast talk, sweet talk, or even double talk—or as just incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo.

The trouble is, no one tells management, because no one knows what the intended message was.

It’s a real hornet’s nest.

The solution to this problem is to focus on messages not as they are stated but rather as they are heard. The truth is, messages are rarely heard as they are stated.

In business, employees commonly filter messages through their own lenses. Each employee’s lens is unique. So the “rays” of a message bend this way for one employee and that way for another employee.

The message as bent is the metamessage. Meta, as a prefix, means changed or changing, beyond, transcending, over and above. The metamessage, then, is a message that has undergone some change that takes it away from its intended meaning. It's a kind of parallel universe of communication. We ignore it at our peril. 

In my mind’s eye, I envision a glass prism. A message is a beam of light headed into the prism. The prism consists of the environment of the organization, the experiences of employees on similar and related messages, and the expectations of employees as to management’s integrity and intent. All those things refract the message to render it somewhat different.

If the firm’s environment is stable and prosperous, a particular message will have one meaning. If the environment is unstable and uncertain, the same message may have a dramatically different reading. The same is true of experiences and expectations. Each bends the message.

The beam of light as refracted through the prism is the metamessage: the message as heard or not, as understood or not, as believed or not, as applied or not. Unless you are acknowledging the metamessage, you are not communicating as you intended to.

It’s the metamessage that counts. Beware the metamessage.

By the Numbers: The Information Glut

Two months ago we introduced a weekly feature, By the Numbers, which leads off each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a relevant 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.

Thus far the data appearing in this feature have explored the role of front-line supervisors in building strategic engagement, the degree of trust that Americans hold in business, the extent of candor and honesty in supervisory communication, the economic impact of employee disengagement in U.S.-based companies, the degree of disengagement in the workplace, the frequency of projects that fail, the link between employee disengagement and absenteeism, the myths around the impact of nonverbal communication, and the fear of recrimination in the workplace.

Today we examine the phenomenal increase of data itself in the business environment.

According to Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut by David Shenk, more than 3,000 discrete messages descend on each of us every day. A single message may be anything from an item in the news to a television or radio commercial to an email to a newspaper editorial to a whispered intimacy by that special someone.

These messages account for more than 1,000,000 words—the equivalent of twelve to fifteen book-length novels—per week.

Most alarming of all, Data Smog was published in 1997, before the explosion of email and spam!

As you reflect on this data, ask yourself:

• What does this deluge of data mean for executing a business strategy?

• What does it mean for creating relationships of mutual trust, dignity, respect, and interdependence?

• How does such a "fire hose" of data affect a quest for greater focus in the workplace?

• What, if anything, can you do to mitigate its effects?

• How, if at all, can you use it to your advantage?