As an internal communicator, chances are you’ve been asked to support leaders and managers at your organization in the following ways:

• Provide strategy talking points and FAQs
• Create scripts and decks for presentations
• Maintain an online portal with news and information
• Facilitate presentation and storytelling training

What if I told you that this effort and energy were all for naught?

You’d probably call me a quack research analyst!

And you’d be right.

Right, that is, if your goal in supporting leaders and managers is to drive employee buy-in into changes happening around the organization.

But, if you’ve been following our work on Building a Change-Ready Organization, you know that we think there is a goal far superior to employee buy-in…employee agility. When employees (and ourselves) are agile, we as communicators don’t need to ratchet up the change-management machine every time a “change” happens within the organization.

And if the goal is agility, not buy-in, then the role of leadership, and therefore, Communications’ support for leaders needs to change. In short, leadership—while unable to “exhort” agility—still matters, but it looks a bit different as shown in the graphic below:

Think of Communications’ typical support I bulleted out in the opening paragraph. It primarily focuses on helping leaders determine what to say and how to say it to be seen as transparent and human in order to drive buy-in. When employee agility is the goal, these tactics fall short because communication is more than what leaders say, it’s how they act and the subsequent signals that employees receive. This requires a different-in-kind approach from Communications, one that we’ve seen leading companies adopt.

These leading communicators help leaders feel comfortable empowering employees by building leader self-awareness of their common habits to identify and correct behaviors that send the wrong signal.  Here are just three examples of questions that we’ve seen communicators ask leaders to think about to help them realize ways in which they may be inadvertently disempowering their staff:

1. Decision Making: When an employee comes to you with a problem, who typically solves it, you or them?
2. Management Style: What percentage of time in your one-on-one meetings do you spend listening and asking questions vs. directing and giving instructions?
3. Confidence Building: In the last week, what have you done to help build your employees confi dence in their own ability to solve problems?

Want to learn more about how you can start building a culture of empowerment at your organization? CEC members, join us on Wednesday, 22 June for a webinar on Leadership Communication that Empowers: GSK CPSE’s Empowerment Workshop for Leaders. You’ll learn how the Communications and HR teams within a GlaxoSmithKline business unit facilitated workshops that help leaders to overcome barriers to empowering staff.

If you join us you’ll get:

• A blueprint for conducting similar sessions with your leadership
• An empowerment self-diagnostic for leaders (or yourself!)
• Empowerment guidelines for managers
• Tips and tricks for how to embed the principles of the sessions into your everyday interactions with leaders and managers

CEC Related Resources:

• Webinar: Leadership Communication that Empowers: GSK CPSE’s Empowerment Workshop for Leaders
• Line Manager Communications Topic Center
• Manager Dialogue Online Training Module
• Dialogue Workshop for Leaders
  

CEC Related Blog Posts:

• Harness the Power of EmPOWERment
• 3 Ways to Build a Change-Ready Organization
• The Surprising Truth About Communications’ Role in Motivation