Central comms is out, team comms is king.

Monologue post-starter from Lindsay Uittenbogaard Commscrumming from The Hague

Your annual communication survey results have just come in. On initial inspection, they show a fairly healthy appreciation and appetite for managed communication. As the comms responsible, you sit back feeling proud and a little bit smug actually, that the steps you took to encourage more frequent dialogs between senior leaders and staff; to ensure that Line Managers had enough of the right information to brief their teams on the latest developments on a regular basis; and to refresh your intranet pages – however painstaking it was, all paid off.

You take the results home and decide to spend a half day the following morning going through the freeform comments (while drinking your favourite coffee in your favourite mug as a kind of mini celebration).

So then, as you pore over the data – a scary thread emerges. There are some 20,000 staff in the organization and most of the respondents seem to be saying that their communication requirements differ quite considerably from the need that is articulated in your strategy in subtle but crucial ways. Many of those staff members are contractors, with an average employment duration within the organization of about 3 years. They work all over the world, although there are a few office hubs in key locations. You see that their world starkkly splits into ‘operational topics’ and ‘management topics’ with these needs:

for operations
- a great sharepoint platform with good support and site development resources, including external site capability for collaboration with suppliers and customers
- the availability of ad hoc communication support on 2 levels:1) = intelligent information administration, 2) = project management
- top quality, readily available soft skill training in, for example Best Practice customer interfacing, virtual teaming etc
- a clear, simple and intranet site with a great search function so that all of the general company information like admin forms, organigrams, latest company presentations etc can be easily sourced
- a good onboarding program, tailored to each location
- a mechanism for capturing and sharing learnings.

for management
- for their line managers to keep them in the loop at least once a month on overall organizational developments that affect their teams, as well as other developments in general
- for senior leaders to be visible and accessible enough that each staff member could have a voice and a connection at that level should they need it – but to be able to read about what the top level agenda looks like and why from the CEO via the newsletter on a monthly basis as a way of double checking what their manager tells them as well as assessing how safe the company is as an employer.
- a big, professionally managed annual event / roadshow that takes stock of the year past and the year ahead and allows people to celebrate, face to face.
- and an unspoken given – alignment with external comms, affiliation with the brand identity and professionalism.

What they say they don’t want is:
- to have to fight for communication support for their work / try to find their way around company communication and information management resources on their own.
- an intranet homepage that assumes it is their landing page, hosting a round up of news and links from in and outside of the organization. If they want to find something, google is better. The intranet is not maximised on their desktop all day long.
- a company newsletter that assumes it is the answer to all of their communication requirements, including information on staff joining and leaving, public holidays and the recipe of the month. They will scan a newsletter for around 50 seconds to see if there’s anything they need to know and that’s it. Recognition is nice. Staff appreciation is important but they don’t want to be part of a cringey, false club that is the equivalent to a ‘welcome drinks do’ on the first night of a package holiday. Real societal connections at work are local.
- a warm and cuddly communication style. People have their own lives: they don’t need their employer to ‘be their friend’, they don’t trust the ‘published communication line’ very much anyway (or they read it in context).

In short, communication management has become less about ‘mass engagement’ but more about how comms can support a team within an organization. It can facilite better quality team engagement with the overall company vision so that each member of that team knows how its work can best contribute to overall value. It can provide the right resources when needed so that team can meet the stakeholder engagement and information management requirements of teams and projects. That’s it. Forget leader as servant, forget central comms as being the centre – the team is king and the better we can support that, the more valuable we are and the more solid our footing.

Free Choice? Democracy Anyone?

Mike Klein – Commscrumming from Belgrade (sort of)

“Is Change Democratic?”  That was the question I spoke to in response to an invitation by the European Association of Communication Directors (EACD) to speak at a seminar on change communication at the University of Belgrade in Serbia last week.

Now, being Serbia, a nation with a tenuous democratic history and double digit unemployment, a majority didn’t buy the argument.  ”People don’t have a choice,” the dissenting majority said, perhaps failing to comprehend the idea that very few workers are actually hauled into their offices and chained to their desks.

But while the idea that acceptance of – or resistance to – organisational change is a function of free choice may be hard for Serbs to accept doesn’t make it any less real or powerful.  Indeed, I think the question of acknowledging the role of free choice is the single most fundamental question facing business communicators today.

Ignoring the centrality of employee choice, further, may well be the bad seed that turns the 70% of change initiatives that fail into dust, leaving them defeated rather than disintegrated.  Recognising the centrality of free choice, in turn, may well leave us with a new suite of approaches, and even refreshments to traditional tools like cascades, roadshows and newsletters.

The time has come to tackle this question head on – is free choice at the root of all organisational behaviour?  And if do, to what extent are organisations more democratic than they appear?

Kevin Keohane – CommScrum Bayswater

Pipping Dang Ray to the post – “It depends.”

Different people, different cultures, different organisations and types of organisations will all have differing degrees of expectation and behaviour in terms of “free choice”.  In the one hand many might see employment as a privilege and not a right (North America?) – “Like it or lump it, vote with your feet.”  Others, for example more Socialised countries (Germany? Scandinavia?) might see employment as more part of the social contract – “This is my job, my right, you will listen to me.”

I think the more interesting question is the second one – are organisations more democratic than they appear.  We’ve all seen “listening by numbers” with surveys and focus groups and feedback – and then nothing happens or the leaders do what they planned anyway.  We’ve also seen where genuine employee engagement and personal implication in organisational change has resulted in significant improvement in culture, systems and processes.

Another interesting thought is to look at Partnerships (i.e. professional services and law firms).  I have a lot of experience in these environments and can tell you with confidence and certainty – when it comes to driving change to improve business performance, democracy ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, brother.

Perhaps at the root of all this is “intent” – one of your favourite topics recently.  Sometimes change has to happen and it doesn’t matter whether the employee has input or not.  Other times it’s needed.

Arguably, however, deeply embedded norms and cultural artefacts can result in behaviours that have little to do with free will and choice – to what degree can you REALLY “be yourself” at work?

Lindsay Uittenbogaard in Delft

It would be a whole lot easier to implement change if change was less democratic and more dictatorial, wouldn’t it? As much as I like to think that among an organisation of mature citizens, the appetite for change ( and success of it ) be would determined by some kind of invisible mass judgement that kind of magically and systemically steers the best path forward … that’s just not always the case. Of course Kevin, you’re right, different levels of democracy exist in different places, I suppose that my tuppence on this is this… let’s not assume that more is better.

Democracy does save an organisation from making bombastic royal-size screw ups, but there are a whole load of people who can sustain their own skewed perspectives without being led otherwise if they can have a voice in preventing change that move against their agenda or view.

Dan Gray – CommScrum London

Indeed, KK (and Lindsay), you’ve pipped me to the post!

As CommScrum’s “anorak-in-residence” I find myself reaching once more to situational leadership theory and – in particular – Daniel Goleman’s six leadership styles, which would tend to suggest that, at least when radical change is in the offing, a democratic approach is probably a poor choice.

I’d also point to a model from Dunphy and Stace, which I think frames things rather more concretely. They also suggest a contingency approach to change implementation, ultimately boiling down to the assessment of three factors:

• The nature of the change (incremental or transformative)
• The time available to make the change (time/no time for participation), and
• The degree of support that already exists among key interest groups

Bottom line, if time is available and key interest groups support the change, then by all means drink deeply from the well of more collaborative and consultative models – “participative evolution” and “charismatic transformation” (which essentially map on to Goleman’s “democratic” and “visionary” styles). But when the brown stuff’s about to hit the whirly thing, that’s a different matter.

Command and control ain’t always wrong, ‘kay. It’s just wrong if that’s the only style in your locker.

The most colossal mother of all change programs ever

Lindsay Uittenbogaard – Commscrumming from Kuala Lumpur

I have just finished watching the most thought provoking documentary I’ve ever seen: Zeitgeist – A Way Forward.  If you haven’t heard already, it’s a lengthy film that presents an irrefutable train of logic to show that our economic systems are at the root of the world’s poverty, hunger, health, crime and environmental crises.  It was as if bell had rung in my head when I realized, while watching the film that connecting these world issues to money as a root perpetuator, was of course a simple truth.   Somehow I had just not seen it like that before.

Like being given a terminal illness diagnosis, the conclusion is that our future is definitely not going to get better.  But what could be possibly suggested as the solution?  Surely we would all know about a way out of this by now, if there was one…

The film illustrates how computer-based global resource management, the abolition of money and ownership, and new way of life for all could achieve a central worldwide goal: efficient use of resources for the sustainability of life.  New cities, designed from scratch, would incorporate infrastructures of intelligent systems to dispose of waste, supply water, transport people and goods, as well as grow local food produce. All goods would be designed to last and most would be built by automated machinery – all of this drastically reducing the need for labor.  People would live as equals in standard, efficiently designed homes with naturally sourced power.

What would this give us?  It would make free healthcare, housing and education available to every single person on the planet and it would eliminate crime, poverty and unnecessary harm to our environment.  It would give us all an attractive future.  Wow…  And there is nothing preventing us from taking this course of action – except ourselves.  If it went to a vote of the world’s population, we would have a majority ‘yes!’ and we’d be on the case tomorrow.  But for many reasons, there are millions of people who wouldn’t be able to comprehend participating in such a radically changed world such as this.

As a communicator, I felt a whole aspect of this vision was missing from the film.  Assuming that somehow, every country did agree to adopt the Zeitgeist way, how would we actually manage the change?  Imagine 2050 as being the year assigned to the ‘cut off point’: the collapse of all monetary systems and legislative ownership.  How would people behave in the years leading up to that deadline?  Would it be an all out show of indulgence and hoarding, of doing all the things we will never be able to do again? Or would extravaganza seem pointless?  How long would it take to arrive at our new physical world after 2050?  Maybe it would take 250 years to demolish, design, rebuild, and re-landscape high-spec living provisions…for 6 billion people?!

Then what about human nature?  Could we be happy in a global society like this?  What about our need to keep busy discovering, differentiating, rebelling and satisfying our vanity and egos?  Would the arts and education keep these wants at bay?   The film was clever to show that human behaviours are learned, not genetically predetermined.  Behaviours are contextually triggered – or not, so perhaps just the first one or two generations in this new world will have the most behavioural challenges – before it becomes normal not to be greedy, ambitious and competitive.

The ‘old world’ will seem like immature history and the decision to manage resources together, quite commonsensical.  The mind boggles.  I hope we take this direction – it seems like the best possible future we could carve out for ourselves and I’m in.  And I’d also like to be involved in implementing the most colossal mother of all change programs ever.

Kevin Keohane – CommScrum Colorado

Read this in Colorado and just landed in London, which gave me some time to think about this on the plane.   I think this is a topic that most of us ponder pretty regularly – and wiser heads than mine from Hegel to Milne and many others have philosophised about human beings and their nature.

One part of me, the cynical side, says “No way.” The adage that “If you can’t change your people, change your people” might play in a company of 10,000 or 100,000 people, but is such change scalable? Has it ever been attempted? (Al Gore has had a pretty good run at it I suppose). And of those 6 million folks who might want to drive (and benefit from) such change, how many of them will really be able to buy into this vision – whether due to their government, their access to information, their education, their literacy…  The accumulation of wealth and therefore power has been relentlessly moving in the opposite direction for some time now.

One part of me, the idealistic side, says, “Well, maybe.”  Social communication has been enabled by technology on a scale never seen before, so it is hard to predict its longer-term impact – but events in Egpyt, Libya, Bahrain etc. demonstrate that movements can gain momentum once they hit a tipping point.  The real question is sustainability – in both its narrower and broader sense.

My conclusion?  Everyone probably thinks this is a good idea in theory, but in practice will believe that everyone else should change (the tragedy of the commons).  Until an economic model that works with 0% growth that is 100% sustainable, we’re kind of screwed.

Mike Klein – Commscrumming from Zeitgeist (er…Denmark)

The distinction between quantity and quality of life is a big one.  Systems that are designed to be “fair” usually end up degenerating into repression, be it of the active brutality of the Stasi in East Germany or the passive brutality of Scandinavia’s “Law of Jante” or the Dutch admonition to “just be normal, that’s crazy enough.”

Aside from the fallacy that “fairness” can work as a viable social model, it’s also worth questioning the basic definition of “sustainability” at play.  Indeed, all discussion of “sustainability” internally or externally warrants giving the inferred definition a good kicking.  “Zero environmental impact” vs “continuing the business for another 100 years” are two entirely different sustainability ball games.  Indeed, alarmist propaganda like Zeitgeist can actually detract from more sustainable sustainability approaches, while hardening internal opposition to world-friendlier ways of doing business.

Dan Gray – banging his sustainability drum in London

Hmmm… How to contribute without descending into a major polemic (you have, after all, strayed into my pet area)? I think the best answer is probably just to provide a couple of links…

Firstly, speaking to Mike’s point on definitions, I humbly direct you to the ‘executive summary’ of my own position on what it means to be truly sustainable here – A better way to bigger profits. In addition, I’d point you to Umair Haque’s brilliant HBR blog for a customarily provocative portrayal of the battle ground – what he frames as The Capitalist’s Paradox.

I will allow myself one additional parting shot…

KK, it’s not about growth or no growth, but what do you want to grow?

Mike’s right about the distinction between quantity and quality of life (at least if I’ve understood him correctly).

It’s long been my view that what the economic orthodoxy has yet to grasp is that their kind of growth has not done one jot to actually make people *happier*, largely because they’ve similarly failed to grasp that wealth is not an absolute concept but a *relative* one.

Thus, whilst in absolute terms, economic growth may well have lifted people out of poverty, in *relative* terms they have actually become worse off, since the proceeds of growth flow so disproportionately – as most perversely illustrated by the extortionate bonuses being paid once more to the bankers, while Mr and Mrs John Q. Taxpayer are still carrying the can for their thirst for the quick buck.

Lessons in the Jasmine?

Mike Klein – Commscrumming from København

Having talked about “revolutions” over the last year or so, I find myself oddly flat-footed when it comes to discussing the wave of revolution sweeping the Arab World.  In some measure, this is because my severe pro-Israel bias makes me skeptical about how this will all turn out.

I also find I have little to add beyond what my friend in Boulder, CO, Rachel Berry has to say (http://ow.ly/480xm).  While I think corporate executives often can think in dictatorial terms, today’s workplaces are generally more democratic than the violent Arab dictatorships that are being overthrown and that we ought to use caution when drawing deeper parallels.

One exception I will make is that of speed.  While corporations like to think of themselves as “big”, a company with 200,0oo employees has fewer people than the third ranked cities in Egypt or Libya or Iran (or Arizona for that matter).  In the time it takes to mobilise a flashmob in Alexandria, smartphones and a good sense of an organisation’s social landscape can send a rumour or pronouncement around “the company world” in seconds.

Contrast this to days-long and even months-long approval processes for even routine documents.  These are a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, today’s communication speeds can punish errors swiftly and seriously.  On the other, official communication can and does increasingly find itself behind observable facts and the spread of rumor.  The speed of socially fuelled revolutions should serve as a caution to those who dither about what and when to communicate.

Lindsay Uittenbogaard in The Netherlands

Agree: the pot of unrest in the Arab world has been brewing for decades.  You could say that the speed of social communication is directly proportionate to the mass will behind / significance of the desired new outcome.  Either that or social communication is just about some inconsequential ‘interesting’ gossip.  Conversely, ‘official’ communication to reactionary events has less momentum – an automatic disadvantage.

Kevin Keohane – London

In the foggy mists of my education I recall something called “stability delay analysis” which was all about the phenomenon that building in deliberate delays in financial transactions, legal actions, engineering, etc., are sometime built in to ensure “flash in the pan” decisions don’t create serious breaches, distortions, accidents or errors.  It could be argued that this is a critical role that bureaucracy plays in government and business.  In this world of instant gratification and any form of delay being seen as “administrative b.s.” – I want it all, I want it now, I want it fast – it could be that the rapidity we see in expectations of the “consumer experience” are being translated into expectations about bigger social change.  A guy on the street with a smartphone isn’t making academic distinctions necessarily … but I ramble.  Raises some questions:  How fast can revolutionary change happen without destabilisation?  Too big for my brain … Berlin Wall, Velvet Revolution vs. the overthrow of Ceasucescu (probably spelled that wrong).  Is it possible to stem the tide of a revolution to help ensure its success?

Dan Gray – screwing in his studs in London

Mike, I’m probably going off on a wild tangent here, but when it comes to assessing the malaise of ‘traditional’ communication approaches, framing the lessons to be learned from these events purely in terms of speed is, IMHO, to ignore something much more profound.

If only it were as simple as addressing the tendency of organisations to dither about what and when to communicate.

As tempting as it may be to believe that ‘If we could just do things a bit faster, loosen the reins a bit, rid ourselves of some of the treacle of bureaucracy etc.’ then everything would be peachy, the reality is much more complex than that.

It’s not just traditional, hierarchical, centrally controlled models of communication that are ill suited to a world of rapid change; it’s the whole system – the business and organisational ecology – that spawned them.

Reshaping communication and reshaping the organisational orthodoxy go hand in hand; otherwise all we’re doing is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and the use of social media (however effective) just ends up being a ‘sustaining innovation’ solution to a much more ‘disruptive innovation’ problem.

Motivation, Schmotivation

Commscrummer Lindsay Uittenbogaard Kicks Off in The Hague

Sometimes I wonder why communicators cling on to a steadfast interpretation of how communication adds value – when actually it’s completely context-related.

Here’s a fictitious scenario.   Imagine company x had a difficult time last year:  some organizational and staff changes led to drops in quality.  These same changes made seamless customer partnerships a little less seamless.   Salaries did not increase by much.  Training kind of dropped off the table and staff morale is low.  Customers are not delighted and some negative publicity rears up - staff morale becomes lower.  Altogether, it’s not THAT BAD.  It’s just a bit tough.

That’s when you realize just how little communication has got to do with motivation in this case.  No matter what is transmitted / shared / discussed / workshopped in this context – the message doesn’t mean much when the substance isn’t there to support it and when faith in the company direction ebbs away.  Sure – an amazingly engaging leader can give a fabulously energizing speech enlivening everyone to a motivating vision – but that’s the leader, not the communication resources behind him or her.

However, imagine now that the same company just won a major piece of new business and the mood is high.  The company is on a roll and people are actually smiling.  There is more internal investment and more importantly, more affirmation from the market that the company is on the right track.  Recognition programmes become meaningful…  media messages are more believable…  engagement events become more popular: people trust that what the company is doing is working and they want to join in.  Media communication boosts that wave and carries the company further.

The point here is that our value is fluid , which is why it can so easily slip through our fingers.

Kevin Keohane, CommScrum Londinium

Clearly the “value” of communication derives from (a) the problem it solves or (b) the end result to which it contributes.

That’s where a lot of employee communication loses its way, so the point of fluidity is valid: moving the “engagement driver” score up 1.2 year on year neither solves a problem nor contributes to a direct result, as the scenario you outline above brilliantly demonstrates.  Often times communicators who have been brainswashed about the importance of “measuring success” measure things that are irrelevant or only loosely connected to the reality of the business.  Service-profit chains and statistical “best friend at work” gymnastics notwithstanding, ultimately it’s results that matter – and often communicators who are too deeply technical in their expertise, experience and outlook can wind themselves into springs or wander in the wilderness — very busily.

So is “employee engagement” an input or an outcome? Answers on a postcard…

In fact, our own Dang Ray is working with me on an organisational change project where there is a huge culture shift within the communication function itself around exactly this issue: why are we communicating anything that isn’t connected to the strategy of the function/business (and I’ll even accept an ‘indirectly’ answer here)?  Similarly I ‘m advising a Corporate Communications director about phase 2 of an internal brand engagement effort and it’s as much about business strategy and organisational alignment as it is about any “communication” that helps make that happen.

So the “fluid” nature of value comes down in some ways to chasing the right KPIs… I suppose it’s all about focus.

Mike Klein – Cømmscrum  København

Not all that is valuable can be measured, and not all that can be measured is valuable.  A truism, but never more true than in the realm of communication.  This dichotomy becomes even more poignant in a “results now” environment, where time and political capital that could be invested in building a sound infrastructure and developing finely targeted stakeholder communication gets spent on dumbed-down broadcast messaging well before there is real action to trumpet.

On the other hand, one man’s dumbed down broadcast messaging is another man’s proof of life and confirmation of viability.  The real difficulty in measuring the value of communication is measuring who the communication is valuable to.

Coming up with a single corporate measure may be defensible in justifying spend, but it is also narcississtic.  It may capture a relationship to the company’s bottom line, but underrate the contribution the communication made in settling a rattled employee, for instance.

My ultimate measure, if we want to go for broke in the measurement department, is to see if communication-driven alignment in an organisation can reduce the organisation’s dependence on line management.  If we could prove that one smart comms person is worth more in productivity, value and concerted action than ten managers, then this whole conversation would be rendered moot.  Who would like to fund that PhD thesis topic?

Dan Gray – CommScrum London

Can’t say I’ve got a tremendous amount to add to the excellent rucking above. Kind of connected to Mike’s last point, though, I find it interesting to note that one of my own personal favourite theses on motivation (that of the great Frederick Herzberg) places “relationship with supervisor” (that supposedly sacrosanct relationship in all organisational communication) firmly in the hygiene factor camp alongside salary, working conditions etc. Hmm…

To KK’s question above, as I’ve said many times before here and elsewhere, ’engagement’ is entirely subjective, in my view - it’s a state of mind, as individual as the individual. Some folks thrive on the opportunity to innovate and be creative; others are just stoked when their numbers add up. Fundamentally, it’s about a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose and a sense of achievement. 100% outcome, in my book, and one (if I might be so bold to suggest) over which the comms team exerts little or no direct influence.

A (hopefully relevant) analogy…

KK emailed me earlier this week about a Forbes list of – supposedly – the world’s most sustainable companies. I say supposedly because the list was topped by an oil company and contained a hefty number of banks to boot!

Now I don’t know enough about the research methodology, or the activities of the companies concerned, to comment definitively, but I’m willing to bet that (much like the Gallup 12) it concentrates on a bunch of supposedly ‘standard’ indicators around corporate governance structures, CSR reporting etc. which bear very little relation to what it really means to be ‘sustainable’.

I raise the example because, for me, comms is to engagement what CSR is to sustainability. The former is a leading measure of activity, frequently divorced from the broader business context in which it sits. The latter is a lagging measure of the cumulative, long-term impact of everything you do. (Hence the importance of our profession brushing up on Systems Thinking.)

Winning a Two-Front War

Mike Klein–Commscrum Copenhagen

While this may be the best of times for business communicators—with a growing realisation that the work we do is actually done at the core rather than the periphery of the value chain, there is an equivalent recognition that neither most business leaders nor even much of the profession is willing to embrace that realisation, choosing instead to see business communication as mainly a source of internal journalism and driver of yet more top-down cascading.

Few are exempt.  Even cutting edge pros—members of the CommScrum linked-in group, still find themselves selling and delivering a higher percentage of top-down executional programs than they would prefer to, and as yet, are unwilling to fall on their swords for more effective if less easily explained alternatives.

Leaders as communicators, communicators as leaders.  Two distinct fronts, one distinct war.  At stake, not only the relative performance of business communicators as a profession, but potentially, the performance and viability of business itself.

The core issue is the same—communication is not merely a facilitator of performance but is part of both process and output.  The understandings required of C-suiter and Lead Communicator are fundamentally different, and the conversion experience needs to be quite different.  Neither group can be ignored, particularly if we are to shift this conversation within the next year as CommScrum does.  But neither group can be treated equally.

The C-Suiter needs to see, touch and feel how communication shapes and smoothes each aspect of process, production and acceptance.  S/he needs to see the maps and verbatim quotes that demonstrates that the organization is much more of a dynamic and relatively freely connected social system than a neat series of boxes and lines through which information flows downwards pristinely and immediately.  S/he needs to also recognize that “engagement” isn’t some kind of a whistle-while-you-work-for-peanuts employer nirvana but a series of states which offer challenges as well as opportunities for improvements in innovation as well as productivity.

The Lead Communicator, in turn, needs a transfusion of facts, images and cojones to be able to win a wrestling match with a C-suiter when the C-suiter asks for posters, mouse mats, Facebook page or a cascade.

CommScrum will do our part—this is the direction our live activities for the coming year are heading in.  But what more can we do?  The opposition is fierce—not only the comfort that executives take in the seeming stability of hierarchical approaches, but also a communication conference and association industry that has more to gain by selling skills instead of upgrading attitudes.

Any ideas?

Lindsay Uittenbogaard–Commscrum The Hague

OK – we keep talking about the need for this step change.

The distinction you make Mike, between 1) leadership recognition of the potential value of communication and 2) the willingness of leaders to embrace that value, helps to clarify this ‘problem’.    But it’s not as if our leaders ’got it wrong’.  It is our job – in part – to cascade  messages top down and drive programs to meet the needs of our sponsors.   The step change we communicators are talking about here is that communication can make a bigger impact.  It can improve business performance, employee motivation and innovation.  BUT HOW, EXACTLY?

Tangibly speaking, what does this extra piece actually look like?  In practical terms – how can we describe how this extra, golden dimension of possibility works in real life, without becoming so lofty and abstract that we lose our audience?

I don’t think that people are unwilling to embrace communication, I think they are unable to – because they don’t understand how to.   People in business will do anything to move faster, better, cheaper.   Why would they have any reason to ‘block’ that hidden value we communicators seem to be sitting so uncomfortably on top of?

We click in the minds of our leaders as resources when they want x - but we don’t click in their minds as resources when they need y and z. Why not?  Because there are dozens of other execution processes that people know and use that don’t involve communication as we might.  It’s a slow re-education process and these people need to be shown the alternative – how it fits together and what the better results can be.

Winning the two-front war means working with leaders to truly understand what they need, connecting and articulating a communication involvement that makes sense to them and them showing that it works.   Not easy.

As a starter, here is a challenge: is there a Commscrummer out there who can write down clearly what that extra communication involvement means while keeping their feet on the ground?

Kevin Keohane - CommScrum London
Geoff Barbaro makes the point that leaders who are “poor communicators” can nonetheless be effective in their roles (heaven forbid).  Granted this might well mean they deliver EPS quarter on quarter and their companies are hell-holes, but in other instances they may well preside over fully “engaged” workforces in fully sustainable businesses.   Visionary, charismatic orators able to inspire legions to a clear and compelling shared Mission, Vision and Values do not great leaders (necessarily) make – they can run businesses into the ground as well as anybody else.  [Just as great writers are not by default great communicators (Liam Fitzpatrick already took that bullet so I should be safe).]

If there is one thing that agency life provides in spades, it’s perspective and variety.  In a given week I am advising the CEO of a European technology company on strategic positioning, and then sitting with the Vice Chairman of a Big 4 firm about a major change initiative, and then advising small professional services firm on aligning their values to their talent development framework, and ending the week launching a corporate website launching/repositioning a brand “from the inside out”.  Perhaps if were part of the internal comms team at a big insurance company, or head of employee engagement at a technology company, or head of communications at a law firm, my perspective would by definition be quite different. {Back to the CommScrum Typology of Internal communicators(TM)].

But if there is one trend I’ve detected, it’s that for the most part the end justifies the means when it comes to communications and employee engagement – in a world where all too often there seems to be a communicator’s mentality of entitlement (the means justify the ends).  Just as ad agencies need to live in a world where the answer might not be a :30 second TV slot, communicators need to lead in a world where the answer isn’t about “communications” as they define it but the results they deliver by hook or by crook.

So – I’ve boiled it down to this: the so-called “talent” agenda is, according to both McKinsey and The Economist, in the Top 3 in terms of driving sustainable growth (just behind availability of credit and economic recovery).  A recent SAS study of more than 20 Global Fortune 500 companies clearly indicates that the effort to attract, engage, and retain talent almost always falls over at the functional leadership and line management level (years ago, it was about making the case to “leaders”.  Many communicators seem to be stuck there).  Communicating with employees is clearly an important element in addressing the opportunities to add value through talent.  But so does Marketing, and so does HR, and indeed IT and others.  Therefore, it’s Darwinian.  Those who can demonstrate the ability to connect the dots at a “higher level” than the packaging and distribution of content will contribute greater value to their organisations and will be “communicators as leaders”.  Those who continue to believe that “internal communications” has some sort of sacrosanct mandate will be like the Recording Industry of America trying to outlaw MP3s and become channel managers – with content management too if they are lucky (?).

“New” leaders in employee (talent) communications will probably not come from traditional “internal communications” camps (though some certainly will).  And some organisations, and the practitioners within them, will trundle along quite happily along the tried and true “old world” tracks.

Deborah Hinton – Commscrum Montreal

Is it just a two-front war?  Most days the challenge seems more complex than that!

On the question of Communicator-leaders or leader-communicators, I think we should be developing way more of more of both.  In the short to mid-term that’s what the ‘talent’ agenda needs Kevin.  And, if we positioned ourselves to go out of business for the longer-term [someone said that on this space a while ago, and it wasn’t me] we’d be headed in the right direction.  Leader-communicators rule!

Mike I agree that far too many of us are spending far too much time on delivering tradition top down communications and fighting fights that we would all like to think are behind us.  Is it because after all everyone knows how to communicate?  Or is it because of what Lindsay suggested:  Somewhere along the line either we aren’t delivering the value that organizations expect/need [and we’ve promised] or we have not gotten the credit for the value we’ve delivered.

If we aren’t delivering the value why is that?  Is it because we don’t have the skills and knowledge we really need to deliver value today [see other conversations here and the current discussion on the CommScrum Group on LinkedIn: Building communication mastery in a cross-disciplinary inside/out world].  Or, is it because we have the skills and knowledge but haven’t been given the chance?  And, if we aren’t being given the chance then how do we position ourselves to get/take the chance?

Or, is it because when it’s done well, communications are so integrated in the discussion and so seamlessly delivered that we don’t [and perhaps shouldn’t] get credit? Or, is it all of the above?

Side bar:

I spent nearly two days last week at the Mellon Colloque at the Canadian Centre for Architecture [www.cca.qc.ca]. Part of an occasional attempt to break out of my bubble.  The topic was “The expanding curatorial field”.  Pretty isoteric stuff.

Interestingly what I discovered is that the curatorial world is facing some of the same challenges/issues we are.  What are the boundaries of the field?  What is the role of the curator?  How do you curate – the noun and the verb, the process and the product?  And what has primacy – in this case Architect-artist or Artist-architect rather than Communicator – Leader or Leader – Communicator.  And, disappointingly though I learned a lot, there were no evident or easy answers.

The Age of Intent

Mike Klein: Commscrum Scandinavia

Intent.

For many years, there has been a big chase on to find out what drives performance—and profitability in organizations. This chase has led to a lot of suspects, a lot of ideas, and more than a few insights. But the real truth—the real driver of extraordinary performance—has been buried in a pile of terminology and obscured by sectarian selfishness.

“Engagement” screamed one pack. “Behavior change” howled another. “Policies and procedures!” “Values”! “A sense of higher moral purpose!!!!” “Better communication!!!!!” “Leadership!!!” “Management!!!”

The problem with these words and their associated sectarian sentiments is that they all spoke to manifestations of something far bigger, more powerful and more universal—a factor I think is as big as financials and operations at the very heart of organizational performance.

Intent.

Intent is the organizational “why”. Every organization has an organizational why—an intent of some sort. And intent is no less powerful than resources—or skills—in the financial and operational arenas.

Why is this a “new” conversation? Partially, it’s because our thinking has only just become clear and sharp enough to look at the range of behavioral, motivational and cultural issues as manifestations of one core corporate driver, and partially, it’s because the business world has continued to focus on finance and operations as “the real work”.

The ramifications of identifying and addressing intent as a third core driver of performance are monumental—and I hope stimulating of a long, powerful and productive conversation. But here are a few hypotheses to start the discussion with:

• Purposes, values, goals and performance measurements are all manifestations of intent and need to be treated as such
• The lack of coherent or stated purposes, values, goals, and performance measurements is also a manifestation of intent
• Intent is at the heart of the value chain and creates and destroys the bulk of an organisation’s value. And those who work with refining, championing, and sharpening the delivery of that intent are people who do “real work.”
• If communication and communicators are to be quick winners in this world, we need to start taking ownership of intent—consistency, integrity, resonance and distinctiveness of actions as well as words
• Organisational inconsistencies are inconsistencies of intent rather than simply inconsistencies of internal and external messaging that a good old-school PR pro can handle
• While the CEO and Board are ultimately responsible for the public definition (or unspokenness) of organizational intent, communicators and HR people are extremely well situated to reinforce, amplify, illustrate and operationalise that intent into actual daily practice.
• Intent drives sustainability strategy.
• Intent drives strategy, period.
• Nothing destroys value like a measurable gap between stated intent and actual performance.
• Nothing creates value like a measureable path between stated intent and actual opportunity.

It is important—vital—for today’s communicators to recognize that intent is “our” space. The only thing that is really new is that the opportunity is there for the rest of the business world to recognize its centrality—or absorb a beating from choosing to ignore it.

And this is not a breaking down of silos between internal and external communication—indeed, internal and external comms will require different craft skills for some time. It’s a breaking down of the glass walls that have kept communication on the organizational periphery. And it looks those walls have even been melted down into the clear, clean and substantive links we form at the very heart of the value chain.

Kevin Keohane – CommScrum London

I’ll keep it uncharacteristically brief and not very Commscrum to say I agree, but I do. I think the issue is – what intent, whose intent? Or – perhaps more importantly in your post – the LACK of it. It’s probably the latter that is oddly the most pervasive in many organisations. Business As Usual allows you to not worry about intent.

Enter Value Disciplines, stage right, again. Is the intent Operational Excellence? Products and Service Excellence? Or Customer/Market Intimacy? Sure, many of these “intentions” will overlap but I just conducted an exercise that demonstrated that a company that stated the “intent” of Customer/Market intimacy spent 90% of its effort engaging and communicating about Operational Excellence. Which wasn’t contributing much to consumer insight. Maybe that’s another post… exit, pursued by a bear, on the road to hell.

Lindsay Uittenbogaard – Commscrumming from The Hague

And another agreement here, wholeheartedly! Fantastic post, MK. Seminal, possibly

This ‘intent’ that you describe, seems immediately to overshadow and connect a combination of efforts in our field that now seem immature: cross-discipline alignment, congruence across the whole organizational strategy – and truly living that, connecting the brand with behaviors etc.

Now, dare I burst this pink fluffy intellectual bubble by asking – isn’t the identification of ‘intent’ just wrapping up lots of old things together into one new! improved! challenge that still has the same barriers to overcome?

The leaders of any given organization would probably not contest the notion of really nailing ‘intent’ as a driver but might have some doubts about whether or not his / her team of individuals (that all have their own perspectives, cultures, styles, competences…) are able to actually ACHIEVE a strong and unified level of ‘intent’ to the extent that you envision. Of course in many different ways, people have been trying to pin down a common core intention (particularly leaders, communicators, HR practictioners, change agents etc) for many decades. The difficulty is bringing these people together to really think and act as one – and the crux of the problem is that ‘intent’ is something that individuals or teams need to own, to fine-tune themselves… it is almost personal. It would need to be recognized that political games would need to step down, as would innovative thinking of the ‘rogue’ kind (that has been known to end up contributing to wider strategy as a fluke).

The above concern around DOABILITY could just be something that sounds right but is just infact pure pessimism. Can a mass of individuals in an organization pull together to manufacture and deploy clear, crisp and consistent intent?

What do you think?

Dan Gray – CommScrum London (at least for now)

Bugger. I’d deliberately hung on till last in the hope that either KK or Lindsay might say something that I could pile in on, because I too love the post, Mike (all very un-CommScrum I know!).

You’ll recall that when you and Mr Trainor had your usual spat about terminology on the “Time to say goodnight to employee engagement” post, I referred to these labels as “the first signal of intent” (a phrase that’s also used by Bill McDonough in one of my favourite TED Talks on design for sustainability). So I’m intuitively drawn to your thesis.

Then KK brings up Value Disciplines again as a valuable lens to identify and institutionalise that “intent” – to get organisations thinking about, and structuring themselves around, that one thing (the crux of Lindsay’s comment) that they can really excel at. Zero disagreement there either. Damn it!

IABC at 50: The View from Cape Town

(The following is lifted from a fictional [?] 3 June 2020 copy of the Wall Street Journal purloined from the Time Travel exhibit at the Ontario Space Centre in Toronto during this week’s IABC World Conference)

CAPE TOWN:  In what has become the world’s most-covered business gathering since it supplanted the World Economic Forum in the number of press credentials requested last year, the International Alliance for Business Communication (IABC) convened its 50th annual World Conference amid unprecedented interest in communication as the central discipline of successful enterprises worldwide.

“When I came to my first IABC World Conference in 2010, IABC and business communicators were facing great opportunity–but scared to walk away from our roots.  We wanted to be good at serving, and afraid to be good at leading.  Baby, we’ve come a long way.”

So said Intel CEO Jerry Schultz, recipient of the Alliance’s Exceed Award, given to communication professionals who have risen to major leadership positions in global enterprises.  Schultz, 43, credited a key decision by IABC leaders in 2010 to treat its mission and its business objectives as related but separate challenges, as the catalyst for the Alliance’s spectacular growth, and ultimately a shift in the self perception of the communication profession into one capable of leading major enterprises.

“When I started out, we worked for the accountants, technology folks and finance people.  Now, more and more and more, around the world, they are working under our leadership.  There was never an 11th commandment that said ‘Thou shalt work for bean counters.’  It’s not about ‘proving our value to management’ any more.  Now, more of us communicators are the ones in the front of the table, and we are connecting, engaging and mobilizing people for growth, change and sustainability on a previously unimaginable scale.”

Such accomplishments, along with 900% membership growth over the last decade, were indeed unimaginable for IABC in 2009, when, buffeted by the last recession, the organization was losing members to social networks and found its international growth prospects hemmed in.  The time for pottering around the edges of an outmoded model and philosophy had clearly come to an end.

“We stabilized ourselves in 2009-2010, but quickly recognized that our audience and our members were not interested in a stable association.  They needed to become dynamic, no easy task in a group that saw itself less as a movement and more as a family,” said IABC President-Emeritus Julie Freeman.  ”We had to take a long, hard look in the mirror and realised that focussing on the status quo would be the road to extinction.”

“The transformation of communicators from corporate servants to corporate leaders directly paralleled IABC’s own transformation from a North America-focused association of 15,000 into an alliance incorporating national and online communication networks – as well as several related associations in the PR and HR arenas such as PRSA, CIPD and others – with more than 200,000 advocates worldwide,” said Prof. Eb Banful of the Kellogg-Medill School at Northwestern University near Chicago, the first of several merged business and communication faculties at leading institutions.  “As the grumblings about ‘why don’t we get a seat the table’ shifted to a mission to bring communication  and communicators to the head of that table, it caused IABC to rethink and reject its core business assumptions.  The power of communication in all fields of human endeavour prevailed over discipline-specific territorialism, and’it’s all about communication’ became the new mantra for many of our high flying students.”

Current IABC President Rob Briggs of London was at first skeptical.  “We were great as an association–we had a dedicated membership, great camaraderie and great events.  But when we really saw this opportunity, we took bold decisions like reducing membership dues 90%, shifting to a sponsor-based financial model, and focusing on building the world’s best business audience.  We built it, and they came.”

And it’s not just ‘communicators’ who jumped on the bandwagon — indeed, slots and seats were at a premium in Cape Town.  The 3,000 Delegates, selected by their peers, received free travel and perks from sponsors seeking coveted access to their networks and enterprises.   Key sessions, such as tonight’s keynote debate between UN Secretary General Barack Obama and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and the finals of the Gold Fibre Awards are boom-casted to member gatherings around the globe.

“After the dues reduction, the scariest decisions were to integrate our chapters outside North America with those of local associations who then became Alliance partners, and to spin off our accreditation program,” said former IABC Chair Mark Schumann, who set IABC’s redefinition in motion.  ”We moved the action close to a broader audience.”

“But the benefits of those decisions drove a surge in membership and advocacy, a deepening of our global reach and our global connections, and the development of a credential that became attractive to business leaders from other disciplines seeking to demonstrate their communication bona fides.  Indeed, the ABC began to become a sought-after credential not unlike the MBA at the turn of the century, and was integrated into curricula at schools like Kellogg-Medill.”

Where does IABC go from here? “We still need to raise our game,” said Briggs.  “When business realized that communication was the world’s real currency, it started to welcome communicators to the top table.  But organizations communicate not just through their leaders, missions and performance.  Governance, ownership structures, and balancing shareholder and stakeholder interests are now things we’re being asked for answers about.  But these are challenges we are happy to face.”

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Time to Say Good Night to “Employee Engagement”?

Commscrum Belgium–Mike Klein

To be sure, the intentions behind the “employee engagement” movement of recent years were more-or-less honorable, to create working environments where employee participation was appreciated, and to ensure organizations used language that didn’t discourage such participation out of hand.

But as time went on, a prevailing definition for “employee engagement” came to indicate “the discretionary effort contributed by employees,” (as if there was such a thing as “non-discretionary effort” in organizations that benefit neither from slavery nor sleepwalking). Moreover, many in the internal communication industry leapt in as offering “employee engagement solutions” that could help generate extra-special-discretionary effort well beyond that warranted by what their clients were willing to reciprocate with.

Such efforts, in turn failed to protect many from outsourcing and recession.  The frequency with which I’ve heard ‘I was engaged, but I got fired’ from my fellow unemployed internal comms pros, indicates evidence of a perverse one-sided inversion of the original intent of “employee engagement”, one not lost on those who’ve survived those troubles.  And yet, not only is this deemed acceptable in some quarters, but the route suggested by many traditionally-minded folks in our industry (and in HR, to be fair) to move organizations beyond the layoffs, outsourcings and upheaval of recent years is, guess what, “more focus on ‘employee engagement’”.

No way.  Indeed, it’s time to kill the term “employee engagement” and spread its ashes all over Iceland.  To our industry, it’s become no less toxic than the term “sub-prime mortgage” in the finance world.

Don’t get me wrong. We need engagement all right.

Internally, we need “two-way, cards on the table, let’s come to grips with the new world of business’ engagement”.  We need a kind of internal engagement that openly addresses employee expectations about transparency and the viability of business strategies—and facilitates mutual recognition that employees are representatives of their businesses inside and outside working hours and need to conduct themselves accordingly.    And, for organizations to win, they need to create a kind of engagement that aligns the best things those organizations have to offer with the best things that employees (and other stakeholders) have to contribute.

We also need a kind of engagement that respects (and where apt, incentivizes) different kinds and degrees of engagement—so that if the goal isn’t to turn everyone into a smiling 20-year service award winner, but perhaps into innovators, change agents or even competent but temporary staff, the tone and policies of the an organization appropriately reflect this.

I’m not saying “disengage”—indeed, it’s time to engage.  Not capitulate, not self-flagellate, but really, deeply and powerfully engage. In as many directions as required.  And not hide behind a sweet-smelling but easy-to-see-through fig leaf called “employee engagement”.

Dan Gray – Commscrum Riyadh

For once, let me see if I can get in ahead of KK with a few views that I know we share…

Above all, there’s one line in this post that cannot be emphasised enough – “We need a kind of engagement that respects (and where necessary incentivises) different kinds and degrees of engagement…”

Amen to that. Context is everything!

There’s a reason that Treacy & Wiersema’s “value disciplines” continually top the unofficial Gray-Keohane (or is that Keohane-Gray?!) index of top management models. It’s that, in nailing a company’s colours to the mast of operational excellence, product leadership or customer intimacy, it forces the organisation to consider how they structure themselves accordingly.

The underlying dynamics, systems and processes – including those related to communication – are, or at least ought to be, completely different, depending on that choice. (It’s why one of Indy’s earlier comments about creating a seamless offering across comms and organisational consulting is absolutely spot on.)

Likewise, there’s a reason we repeatedly return to the subject of situational leadership. It ought to be self-explanatory that the kinds and degrees of engagement necessary vary dramatically between, say, a team or organisation in crisis mode versus one that is already highly-motivated and working well.

Anyone who peddles the myth that there is a universally applicable set of engagement drivers and “solutions” for improving business performance is, frankly, talking out of their hole!

Engagement is far less a process than it is a state of mind. It is, by definition, subjective and different for each individual and collections thereof. Some get their kicks from the freedom and opportunity to be geniunely creative; others are just stoked when their numbers add up!

One final thought – if we truly believe in the power of diversity (as all HR departments and organisations profess that they do these days), then it is also, by definition, in a constant state of flux. If we truly respect and value difference, then the group dynamic is redefined by each new member.

Lindsay Uittenbogaard – Commscrumming from The Hague

As Mike says, the original intentions were good – my understanding is that employee engagement was originally a way of involving staff in organizational developments so that they could contribute to and share ownership of the journey and the results.    Call me naive, but I don’t think there was ever any perverse thinking that purposefully twisted that good intention to squeeze the last energy out of people.  I just think employee engagement is difficult to implement and even more difficult to find sponsorship for.  A lot of people who try it haven’t seen best practice, don’t have the experience, warp their plans through compromise and simply mess up.

Engaging employees successfully is tricky because firstly, most big organizational decisions do not benefit from being discussed en mass, so its critical to identify the more detailed parts of strategic decisions that can benefit from the input of multiple perspectives and ideas.   Based on this then, secondly, once an employee engagement has programme been well designed (assuming for the sake of this discussion it is for a specific purpose, rather than as an ongoing mindset), it is even more difficult to implement that plan because staff and leaders alike are riddled with biases, political pursuits, motivations or criticisms that can color their views on what should change, could change, and how.   Their schedules are also a force to be reckoned with because at least the beginning of any engagement exercise has to be face to face.  Finally, if you can get your leaders fully behind this so that you have the resource and support that you need, and you’re coming close to a miracle.

I would guess that because so many well-meant attempts to engage employees have led to less than positive experiences and outcomes, the meaning of employee engagement has taken a negative spin.  Maybe we should be blogging about what works and how to get it right rather than about changing the name.

Dan writes about the importance of context and it has always struck me that, just like how the Myers Briggs Type Indicator tool breaks down personality characteristics into 16 traits, there must be a similar way of classifying communication contexts.  It would be great to see proven approaches to different communication challenges set out based on their various contextual differences.   Employee engagement would be one of those challenges well worth investing that prep time in – it is one of the more inspired strings to the communication bow, after all.

Kevin Keohane – CommScrum London

Nothing gets my back up quicker than someone coming in and challenging the definition of what “engagement” is: there’s a guy on the conference circuit who always begins his presentations with “It isn’t about engagement – it’s about involvement.”  As if involvement is somehow absent from everyone else’s definition.  So I agree with Lindsay, let’s not waste our time or anyone else’s splitting hairs about the definition.  I think we know what we are talking about here.

To me, as Mike says, engagement got slightly perverted by two issues.  The first was a belief that, thanks in no small part to the Measurement Mad, suddenly it was about moving numbers on reports up – if the “drivers of employee engagement” were identified, and actioned, and the numbers went up, people were therefore engaged.  The second was the continuing lack of joined-up/cross-silo cooperation among internal functions — so “engagement” from the HR perspective tended to be all about The Gallup Q12 and making sure the employee experience was positive; while from the Brand and Marketing side of things it was all about wthere you had Brand Champions, Sideliners, Mavericks, or Major Losers (you know, the 4-quadrant model of who was and wasn’t engaged in living the brand and delivering the right experience to the customer).  Seldom did the ‘twain meet.  That ties into Mike’s point:  most of the benefits are pointed inward (the business benefits of employees liking coming to work) or outward (the business benefits of employees focussed on customers), all of which benefits the organisation … but also ends up looking like a  Mexican standoff.

I don’t think the focus on business benefits is a bad thing at all; it’s how you get resource released to do what we do.  What needs to happen is a more holistic view and a disciplined (that’s right Dan: a Value-Disciplined) approach to it that all points inexhorably to one thing.  What that thing is depends on what the business is trying to achieve and how it is going to get there (and more often than not you’ll need your people to get there so why on earth would you separate them?).