Last week our post, Where Kotter’s 8 Steps Gets it Wrong, generated lots of great discussion in the comments section about leading change at organizations. In this post we interview Kathy Gersch, the Chief Marketing Officer at Kotter International, Dr. John Kotter’s change company that seeks to build leaders’ capability to drive transformation in their organizations.

Change Management v. Change Communication v. Change Leadership

The CEC (Kayleigh): People often conflate “change management” with “change communication”. What is the difference between these two concepts and what is the danger of combining them?

Kathy Gersch, CMO Kotter International: I think it’s important to first differentiate between “change management,” which is what almost everyone thinks of when they think of organizational change, and “change leadership,” which is what Dr. Kotter advocates and what we do at Kotter International.

• Change management is often focused on incremental improvements with a goal of minimizing the impact a change has on an organization.
• Change leadership is disruptive by design. It gives people the freedom to change in a way that propels an organization forward in leaps and bounds.
• Change communication is too often focused on the communication about the change that has already been determined by leadership or a small committee.

Communication plays an essential role in any change process, but the quality of leadership is what determines success. Relegating communication to a reporting function (which is generally the case in change management) is problematic because it does not drive engagement.  The concepts of “leading” and “communicating” are much more complementary, as the act of leading (establishing direction, aligning people, motivating and inspiring) is inherently centered on good communication.

CEC Members: Help build “change leadership” at your company with an empowerment workshop by GlaxoSmithKline’s CPSE.

Determining What’s Urgent

The CEC: At some organizations Kotter’s first step, “Create a Sense of Urgency,” is taken too seriously, that is, every initiative is thought of as urgent! In today’s environment of constant change, it’s impossible for employees to contribute to the number of “urgent changes” required by the business. What can a communicator do to diagnose and push back against “false urgency” created by the business?

Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

If you often feel like a “one man island”—you’re not alone. Communications teams dispersed globally often struggle to interact, share information, and collaborate across time zones and geographic locations.

One way that CEC member Novo Nordisk has overcome this challenge is by launching a simple, yet sophisticated suite of online networking tools to facilitate communicator-to-communicator peer learning across their global team.  It may seem obvious, but the reality is that despite the amount of effort that we in Communications put into creating communications tools for other departments in the company, we ourselves aren’t always the best users of this technology.

Of course, just because internal collaboration tools exist, doesn’t mean that they are in use or make life easier! However, there are some fundamental pieces of advice to consider to make an online network work for your team. We had the chance to speak with Tanya Wymer, Strategy Director at Novo Nordisk, who shared the secrets behind the company’s corporate communicator network. Elements of their network include tools that:

• Help communicators find peers in other countries with shared challenges or projects
• Facilitate discussion boards that help communicators get quick help on specific questions
• Formalize peer collaboration through structured mentoring programs Read More »

They may be experts at setting strategy and managing a leading organization, but unfortunately not all of our CEOs can walk up to a podium with confidence and truly engage their employees, investors, or stakeholder audience.  How about your CFO? CIO? Are they able to lead a presentation that captures and keeps the audiences’ attention and teaches them something?

Coaching the leaders of the organization to be better communicators with their respective stakeholders is a critical skill of today’s communicators—and one that our skills maturity assessment highlights as a common development area for today’s communicators. Our goal here at the CEC is to help you be a better coach, and thus enable better communication across your organization.

Recently, the oh-so-talented team of executive advisors at the Corporate Executive Board gathered for a few days of training (yep–we’re trying to make our presentations more engaging and effective for our members as well!). Below are 10 of the top tips from CEB’s masters of effective presentations. Share them with your leaders in your next coaching session! Read More »

As part of CEC’s work on Managing Communications across Global and/or Virtual Teams, we’ve created easy-to-use tools to help you better collaborate and partner with your colleagues down the hall or in a different time zone. Here’s the first of many tools to help you determine how and when to cascade sensitive information.

Spotting Sensitive Information Issues
But first, how do you even know when something qualifies as “sensitive information?” The short answer is when it poses a risk to the entire company’s reputation or it could get you in trouble legally (e.g. potential insider trading issues, health and safety issues, etc.). For those types of issues, you need to have a coordinated and structured response from the center. Here are some quick points to help you spot “sensitive information”:

• If it affects stakeholders’ decision to do business with you
• If there is no stated company-wide view on the issue
• If you wouldn’t be comfortable with this information making front page headlines
• If the news will have long-term effects

Now that you know how to spot sensitive information, check out some guidelines for effectively cascading that information across the organization. Read More »

1:53 PM- I’m in an elevator and it’s shaking violently.  As it pinballs back-and-forth between the walls of the elevator shaft, metal screetching on concrete, all I can think is please let me get to my floor in one piece.  The elevator continues chugging along until it reaches my floor.  The doors open uneventfully and for the next few seconds I feel an intense feeling of relief — must have been an elevator malfunction.  I’ve made it!

As I leave the elevator bay and turn the corner to my hallway, my stomach sinks and I feel a surge of panic come over me — I see my colleagues rushing for the emergency exit.  I want to know what’s going on, but I don’t have time to think it through.  I jump in line and ride the wave of bodies down the stairwell, corkscrewing 17 floors to the street.

As we pour on to the sidewalk I can see that everyone has their cell phones out, contacting friends and checking websites to figure out what just happened.  “My twitter feed says that it was an earthquake, 5.8 magnitude,” someone says.  “Apparently it spanned from the Carolinas to New York.”  My phone buzzes with text messages from family wondering if I’m okay.  Thankfully, at least from what I can gather, everyone and everything is fine. Read More »

Every year, corporate crises hit the news, and remind us of their potentially devastating impact on the reputations of those organizations involved. The UBS tax scandal of 2008, Toyota’s three product recalls from 2009-2010, and BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010 all had two things in common:

• They could all have been prevented
• They did significant damage each company’s reputation, and to their financial performance

With the stakes higher than ever before, CEC is updating its existing work on crisis management. And, with the above in mind, we’re looking at two different angles.

1. Building a Preventative Culture

In spite of the best efforts of companies to apply processes, rules, and expectations, this isn’t always enough to drive behavior change – we’ve all seen rules bent or broken to “get the job done”. And yet, we are reliant upon employees maintaining standards to maintain product quality, information security, legal and ethical compliance, and personal or public safety – if they fail to do so, the consequences for the organization can be disastrous.

Communications Challenges

CEC is looking at some of the reasons that employees don’t always act in accordance with the standards required by their organization, its regulators, and other crucial stakeholder groups. Our conversations indicate that many communicators spend a disproportionate amount of time building employee awareness without addressing the personal and systemic barriers to desired behavior. Indeed, research shows that only 6% of employee-observed misconduct is escalated to business leadership, preventing the business from responding to rectify the problem. We’ve thought about what prevents employees from acting in a way that prevents crises. Here’s our first shot, below: Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

Every week, employees are expected to make hundreds of decisions that affect your company’s big picture strategic goals.

The problem? Though they are often in the best position to make an impact, most employees lack the knowledge to develop business-aligned solutions on their own.

That’s where you come in. Your communications team can help immensely by equipping employees with the kind of information that enables them to solve problems on their own. There’s no doubt that you’re already sharing lots of information with employees, but is it the “right” information?  That is,  rather than doling out directive information that explains what employees need to do, how about providing tools that empower employees  to build their solutions themselves?

We got the scoop on how one member company helps business partners think get inside their employees’ heads and think differently about the information shared. ConAgra Food’s information need assessment process involves using a series of refining questions to drill down to the information employees need in order to create their own solutions. They help by:

• Clarifying business goals and challenges
• Determining  how to explain information to someone not sharing your expertise Read More »

Find yourself in any social situation where you are meeting new people, and the question that will inevitable come up is: “What do you do?”  Unless you hold a really unique job position (my internet search for “weird occupations” provided me with ostrich sitter, dog food tester, and snake milker among many others) chances are that you will respond with your job title and maybe an additional sentence or two to clarify.

However, in the last couple years the communications landscape changed substantially, as did many of the positions and responsibilities under the communications umbrella.  Communicators across our membership are moving away from being task takers and content creators to being communications enablers and valuable business partners. In order to make the transition, many communicators are adding new, non-traditional roles to their team’s repertoire and evolving some of the more traditional roles in order to adjust to the new environment.

CEC is currently creating “role profiles” of some of these new and evolved positions in order to give our members a peak into how these roles and responsibilities are changing among their peers.  Currently, we are focusing on covering these 5 main aspects of each role:

• Purpose: what is the key objective of the role in the overall communications strategy
• Reporting lines: where in the orgnaization does the position report and what are the advantages/disadvantages of different reporting lines
• Main responsibilities: what does the person with this job title ultimately do on every day basis and how do they allocate their time among these activities
• Key skills: what are the key skills that a person needs to be successful in this role
• Business partnerships: what communications and business parters do the communicatior in this role need to work with to be successful

I would love to hear your ideas on why (or why not) you would find these role profiles useful and/or what other aspects of the role description you would like to see us include in order to make these as valuable to YOU as possible. Shoot me an email at mkrausova@executiveboard.com or leave a comment and let me know!

Relevant CEC Resources

• Modern Communicator’s Skill Set
• Skills Set Webinar

With all the volatility in the financial markets over the last few weeks, employees are asking questions.  Meanwhile, leaders’ posture straddles the awkward gap between wanting to reassure (I’m reminded of the “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters distributed in wartime Britain) and needing to prepare for the possibility of a second recession even before the world’s developed economies recover from the last one.

So what are we supposed to communicate to employees and their managers?  The big lesson from the Council’s most recent look at communication in high-change environments like this one is to resist the temptation to focus on building buy-in to the company’s current strategy.  It’s not that we don’t want employees to understand it or believe in it – of course, we do – but that communicating to build buy-in has two undesirable side effects:

• Lulling employees into waiting for leaders and managers to decide
• Setting them up for disappointment or cynicism when unforeseen events require a change in strategy Read More »

If you’re going to lead a change, John Kotter’s 8 steps are a pretty safe bet. If you’re trying to build your organization’s overall ability to change and adapt quickly, I wouldn’t recommend training all staff in this philosophy. Why?

Three Primary Flaws of Kotter’s 8 Steps for Leading Change

1. Kotter’s model embeds the mindset that change is a one-time event, a process that must be meticulously managed and promises stability at its end. If we’ve learned anything over these last three years marked by global uncertainty, it’s that maybe life won’t “return to normal.”
2. It promotes the idea that real change can only come from the C-suite. This approach makes it easy for employees to lose trust and credibility as leaders make changes to the change they’ve just touted as the most significant in the company’s history!
3. It forces employees to be objects of change, futile pawns vulnerable to the decisions made to protect the King and Queen. Employee stress increases as their control of their lives decreases. We’ve heard many executives tell us that, during a major change, employees “turtle;” they retreat into their shells and try not to be noticed in order to “survive” the change.

This final flaw is the most damaging because by driving employee buy-in for one change, you may actually be undermining your company’s longer-term ability to evolve and compete.

Unfair Pressure on Change Leaders

Think about it. The 8-step model puts enormous pressure on leaders and managers, but doesn’t ask for much of employees. Managers are expected to ease fears, have all the answers, be expert communicators, and manage talent. Employees are expected to follow along. How can managers and leaders possibly know the full implications of a change initiative or the full potential of employees to spot opportunities to change that which is in their span of control? Kotter’s focus on buy-in and following leadership direction can lead to “learned helplessness” of employees, whereby they don’t think for themselves and become over-reliant on others telling them what to do.

Employees in the Driver’s Seat

What if we invited our employees to take more control of change needed to transform our company? What if we enabled them to determine how they can impact the change? What if we provided them with the very same context that executives use to determine strategy to guide their decisions? You can alter your communications strategies to help employees be drivers, not objects of change. You can support leadership communication that empowers employees, connect employees to relevant peers and mentors to learn new ways of working, and you can share information that helps employees see the bigger picture.

Drop the Word “Change” from Your Lexicon

Employees (like yourself!) are your company’s greatest asset…or at least they should be. You hired them, you are paying them, now it’s time that you expect them to not tacitly or begrudgingly buy-in to change, but to drop the fears, assumptions, and feelings of helplessness associated with change. A first step might be dropping the word “change” from the corporate lexicon. I don’t mean replace it with a synonym like transformation. I mean let it be known that, guided by your corporate mission and vision, your company will be constantly evolving, never sitting still. This will require that everyone get comfortable with the uncomfortable.

Ultimately, Kotter’s model and what we’ve learned about change management at CEC are not entirely at odds. What if you following Kotter’s approach to gain buy-in to the concept of agility among your staff? Imagine an 8-step campaign that “institutionalizes the change”…of change.

Questions for Discussion

Have you followed Kotter’s 8 steps? Did they work? What did you learn? After following the model for one change initiative, was it easier to get employees to change their behavior for another change event?

CEC Related Resources

• Building a Change-Ready Organization
• Change Management Toolkits

CEC Related Blog Posts

• Change: To Be Appreciated, Not Just Accepted
• Top 5 Takeaways from “Building a Change-Ready Organization”
• 3 Ways to Build a Change-Ready Organization
• Spot the Symptoms of Change Fatigue