“Transformation is impossible unless hundreds or thousands of people are willing to help, often to the point of making short-term sacrifices,” Kotter wrote. “Employees will not make sacrifices, even if they are unhappy with the status quo, unless they believe that useful change is possible. Without credible communication, and a lot of it, the hearts and minds of the troops are never captured.”
Kotter, a professor at Harvard Business School, went on to suggest that companies undergoing transformation typically devote only a minuscule share of their formal internal communication—newsletters, brochures, Intranet sites—to their new vision. His estimates ranged from just .0001 percent to .0005 percent. In a subsequent book, Leading Change, he generously calculated it at .58 percent, still leaving 99.42 percent of a company’s formal in-house communication to non-strategic matters.
Quibble about decimal points, if you will. Kotter’s essential point is still on target. The messages that an organization’s leadership presumably considers the most important—messages which can make the difference for the company between profit and loss, between innovation and catch-up, between growth and stagnation—are typically lost in the din of minutia and noise.
The bottom line: Transformations fail in large part because of the absence, for all intents and purposes, of clear, compelling, credible, constructive communication. You cannot expect employees who lack awareness, understanding, and acceptance of a strategy to become enthusiastically committed to carrying out the strategy.
We can take Kotter’s argument a step or two further, by addressing another critical fault line in strategic communication. For even the organization that carefully orchestrates its formal media in support of transformation still faces long odds against success—unless and until it brings its semi-formal and informal communication in line with its strategic intent.
Not only is the overwhelming share of formal communication usually given over to non-strategic matters, the overwhelming majority of all communication within an organization stands quite apart from strategic messages in those formal media.
Most workplace communication by far is semi-formal or informal. Unfortunately, many line managers (and even some communication professionals) mistakenly fail to regard semi-formal and informal communication as real communication at all. But it most certainly is, and average employees most certainly realize it.
Semi-formal communication includes those official programs and initiatives, procedures, systems, and processes that carry the organization’s imprimatur. They function as communication because they convey meaning to people and induce or impede certain thoughts or behaviors in response. Specific examples might include a performance management system, the requirement for some but not all to attend a management training institute, or a recognition and reward program, perhaps honored mainly in the breach.
Informal communication consists of relationships and routine conversation—comments, questions, complaints, humor—as well as those myriad decisions, attitudes, behaviors, and choices on the part of leadership that so often “speak louder than words.” Some real-life examples, good and ill: on the positive side, using consistent, focused questions to establish priorities and a sense of urgency; on the regrettable side, a dangerous decision to direct an unskilled worker to repair an electrical box.
Ironically, semi-formal and informal communication is often more strategic, more powerful, more contextual, and more credible than a company’s formal communication. In many respects it is the communication that matters most.
But because it is typically not regarded by management as deliberate communication—at least not as official communication—semi-formal and informal communication is often left to work against the organization’s formal communication. Indeed, it has the potential to corrode employee perceptions of the organization’s strategic intent.
Let’s take a closer look at all three voices—formal, semi-formal, and informal communication—to see the need for bringing them together.
The Formal Voice
Intranet sites, interactive kiosks, and closed-circuit television are rich cousins of the old standbys of formal communication—newsletters, brochures, all-employee mailings, videos, leadership packets, telephone recordings and the like. Irrespective of their technology, they all function much the same as the old-fashioned bulletin board. They transmit information.
Formal media, of course, are an essential component of internal communication. They are the first building block of awareness, and they serve as a reference bank or a universally accessible source of what one hopes is “the straight scoop.”
But relying exclusively on formal media to communicate strategy is a grave mistake—albeit one made frequently even by sophisticated companies. Because its thrust is an episodic, one-directional, top-down flow of information, it cannot generate the ongoing dialogue that is necessary to develop understanding and acceptance, let alone commitment.
Without a dialogue, without mutual listening, formal communication on matters of strategy is unable even to build lasting awareness—and it cannot begin to create the understanding, acceptance, and commitment an organization needs to execute its strategy. To be successful, strategic communication requires continuing dialogue and a broadly integrated approach, emphasizing semi-formal and informal communication. Only then can it secure the buy-in of employees.
Traditionally, companies have placed too much emphasis on formal communication and too little on semi-formal and informal communication. The danger of overemphasis on the formal media is one of both impact and credibility. It is the semi-formal and informal communication that furnishes context for information.
When formal communication is deemed by employees to be irrelevant, or when it conflicts with the reality that employees perceive through semi-formal or informal communication, it renders the organization’s leadership as either out of touch or not credible.
To quote Kotter once again: “Communication comes in both words and deeds, and the latter are often the most powerful form. Nothing undermines change more than behavior by important individuals that is inconsistent with their words.”
The Semi-Formal Voice
All those programs and initiatives and systems that people love to ridicule have a reason for being. They’re institutional tools intended to facilitate or direct some aspect of the organization’s work. Unfortunately, they’re not always designed to serve one of their principal functions—namely, communication.
In fact they are powerful means of communication, simply because they do what internal strategic communication does or should do: create meaning for people, and encourage or discourage certain types of thinking and behaving. Unfortunately, when left to themselves, initiatives and systems may send confusing or wrong messages. Sometimes they inadvertently send negative messages even when they’re used as designed.
Production quotas are a common example. Supervisors may perceive quotas to be in conflict with other strategic goals, such as quality, customer service, or safety. If the quotas are an absolutely rigid requirement while the quality process, customer service conditions or safety precautions are somewhat less rigid, then the quotas will prevail. The implicit rank ordering is a powerful message that quality, customer service, and safety are Jobs Number 2, 3, and 4.
Another example: an annual training requirement for managers. If the content of the training is perceived as too theoretical and not immediately applicable on the job, some managers will complain about the new burden. Meanwhile, those lower-ranking supervisors and staff employees who weren’t required to take training may feel left out—disenfranchised from the organization’s important work.
In the other direction, the manager who abrogates his or her obligation to attend training sends a message of a different sort back to upper management. In response, senior management sends yet another signal in the manner of its reaction to the truant manager.
The Informal Voice
One of my favorite questions to ask employees in focus groups, or while touring plants and factories, is: “What’s really important around here?” And another: “How do you know?”
The responses I get are instructive. In the best operations, the responses align almost perfectly with the strategic vision and the professed values of the organization. And employees will say they know that to be the case because they “see it all around” them, in routine decisions and behaviors on the part of their leaders.
In inferior operations, employees will answer flippantly or caustically: “kissin’ butt” or “keeping your mouth shut.” Pressed for more substance, they will paint a portrait of an organization that says one thing for the record but does something else.
Such are the relationships and routine conversation—the casual comments, questions, complaints, humor—as well as all those day-to-day decisions, attitudes, behaviors, and choices on the part of leadership that communicate so very powerfully. All of us see them every day. And all of us glean meaning from them.
How often have you heard people say: “The facts speak for themselves.” Or: “What you see is what you get.” Or: “Experience is the best teacher.” Or: “Look at his track record.” Or: “You think she’d have learned by now.” Or: “Actions speak louder than words.”
All these are different ways of observing a central truth: that what people do counts for more than what people say. In the workplace, that may translate to what managers place on meeting agendas and who is invited to which meetings. It may be what standards of work are expected, what tools are provided and what skills demanded (and furnished through training). It may be the indulgence a manager shows to an employee who isn’t carrying his weight. It may be what is purchased and what is not. It may be how much time is given to what kinds of activities.
This isn’t to say that informal communication is never verbal. On the contrary, managers communicate informally through their casual remarks and comments, their sense of humor, their assignments and deadlines, and the questions they ask of employees.
Once, some years ago, the new chairman of a Detroit automaker visited an assembly plant. As he toured the plant and chatted with workers, he asked essentially the same question, over and over, and patiently listened to the answers.
