Managing stakeholder perceptions has always been challenging, but given the growing complexity of the current communications environment, it can often feel like an insurmountable task.  Think about it — as our companies’ business operations continue to change, our customers, employees, and external partners are all becoming far more diverse than ever before.  At the same time, the channels and sources that these stakeholder groups use to consume information continues to evolve.  It’s no wonder that a recent CEC poll Heads of Communications revealed that proactive reputation management was the 2^nd overall priority for 2012, only two percentage points behind employee engagement efforts.

Given the need to address this important topic, the CEC recently launched its next major research initiative —Building an Outcomes-Focused Reputation.  As part of the study we’ve already spoken with communications executives at several dozen leading organizations to better understand the challenges that they are facing in managing stakeholder perceptions as well as the tactics they use to measure, monitor, and improve and their corporate reputations. (Take our 2 minute Quick Poll and tell us what you’re doing to manage your reputation!)

Current Approach:

Faced with increased stakeholder scrutiny and fickle audiences, most companies are focusing on building their company’s reputation by turning up the volume on positive messages related to their organization.  Read More »

Most leaders believe that effective communication helps to inspire and direct stakeholders. The best leaders, however, believe that effective communication helps to facilitate and equip stakeholders to take action. These leaders realize that their role is less about driving stakeholder buy-in to a set strategy and more about enabling stakeholders to adapt and be agile.

As a result, the goal and type of support that Communications provides leaders must evolve. As I argued in a previous post, it’s no longer enough to craft polished speeches for an executive. Your role as communicators must move beyond just speech writing to include activities such as building leader comfort with informal dialogue and everyday communication.

Help Shape CEC’s Research on the 3 Most Common Challenges of Leadership Communications

It’s difficult to help convince and coach leaders to make the shift from commanding and controlling to facilitating and enabling. And while we can’t solve every problem overnight or with this lone post, we can debate where to focus CEC’s research efforts across the next month!

Here’s a look inside my mind right now as I think about where to direct CEC’s resources to supporting communicators’ biggest challenges related to leadership communications. Which question are you struggling with most? Which product idea would you find most valuable? Share your thoughts in the comment section or email me to set up a conversation at kokeefe@executiveboard.com.

1. Engaging Stakeholders

• How do I help leaders to engage with stakeholders? Should we start a CEO blog? How do we make town halls more of a two-way dialogue versus an hour-long strategy presentation? Which communication channel would be best given a leaders’ style, the audience, and the intent of the communication? Leader stakeholder engagement encompasses a wide range of challenges for communicators.

CEC Potential Support: What if CEC created and shared a database of the best tactics communicators are employing for the specific purpose of building leader-to-stakeholder? Here are a few basic principles to follow at your next leader town hall to build engagement with employees.

• How do I build a leader’s external profile? Whether organizing an executive speaking engagement or hosting a conference, communicators are struggling to devise thought leadership strategies that raise both the executive and company’s presence.

CEC Potential Support: What if we clearly mapped out the key elements of an outcomes-focused thought leadership strategy? Would that help you know how to get started and measure impact? In the meantime, consider the difference between inside-out and outside-in thought leadership strategies.

2. Communication Skill Building Read More »

“How should my company use Twitter?” is an intimidating question and it’s only the tip of the iceberg. What should and shouldn’t we tweet about? Are people retweeting our posts? Do we have enough followers? And at the end of the day, what do the hours monitoring Hootsuite and TweetDeck really get us?

We set out to determine how and why companies should use Twitter and found that it becomes much easier to answer these questions with clear business outcomes in mind. Here are some of our key insights:

Why bother with Twitter?

• Twitter is a powerful information sharing network. When your supporters actively spread your messages with their networks on Twitter, they reach a broader audience. And whether it’s in the form of a retweet, mention or hashtag, the message gains credibility since it isn’t coming directly from the company. We’ve taken our analysis even further than the last time we discussed the value of Twitter.

What should we do on Twitter? Read More »

Every year, we survey our members to understand not only their budget and staffing levels but also their resource allocation choices.  Many thanks to the scores of member organizations who participated!  The results can be revealing as to executive priorities, especially when you look at them over time.

Three observations stand out in particular:

1. After a sharp decline in 2009, Communications budgets as a percent of company revenue are largely back to pre-recession levels.  This suggests long-term stability in terms of Communications’ role.  Survey respondents in 2011 were less optimistic about next year’s budget level than in prior years, likely due to concerns about near-term company growth. Read More »

Whether it’s the sites we check when we first get to work in the morning or what time we run out for coffee, routines can be hard to break. But choices like these aren’t usually worth doing a critical analysis each time we make them.

The real problems arise when we start to rely on similar tactics for making more important decisions, like internal communication channel selection. Rather than ask yourself, “What is the best way for employees to be informed about this leadership change?” it’s easier to jump to, “I’ll just write a quick post on the intranet.”

Falling into bad habits like this prevent you from strategically selecting channels to make your communication more effective. Luckily, we have a cheat sheet to help you stay out of a channel selection rut.

This channel selection guide will help you choose the optimal channel based on what you want to achieve with your target audience. By considering what information is most effectively communicated through different channels and weighing the pros and cons of each, you’ll be able to quickly choose the best channel for your objective. Read More »

I recently watched the movie Outsourced and despite being filled with cultural stereotypes and exaggerations, it highlights how a lack of understanding of another culture can create miscommunications and impact business results.  It also reminded me of my university course on intercultural communications where we looked at how different cultures influence people’s perceptions and interactions.

We did role-playing exercises where we were assigned specific countries and had to simulate business negotiations or casual conversations. I probably learned more practical and valuable lessons in that course than in most of my core business classes. Having now lived in three different countries, I am more aware of how the culture I grew up in shapes my communication style and what to be mindful of as I work with colleagues from diverse backgrounds.

We communicators need to build our own cultural awareness, as our companies become more global and are made up of more culturally diverse teams. In fact, CEC’s Competency Diagnostic found that building global perspective and cultural awareness is the biggest competency gap for communicators (Just only 13% of the communicators we surveyed excel in this area).

Cultural awareness is important in three scenarios:

1. Supporting leaders in business partners as they develop global strategies.  As one member told me, “As we expand in emerging markets, we really don’t have a good understanding of these cultures, and we have had to learn through painful mistakes.”
2. Collaborating with our globally dispersed teams:  Another member revealed, “We want to make sure everyone on the team has a voice, but this is not always easy—in some cultures, it is not acceptable to speak up, and we surface problems too late.”
3. Messaging to audiences around the world: How do we effectively customize messages so that we are sensitive to local culture and language limitations?

How can you as communicators increase your own awareness of other cultures? Of course you can’t possibly get to know every country in the world (and true, each individual is different), but you can start building the foundations of your own global acumen and cultural awareness through a couple of useful frameworks:

Read More »

Everyone knows that the ability to hold one’s tongue is the most important skill to practice with family over Thanksgiving. After all, if you don’t speak, you can’t get in trouble for what you really think.

Going mute, however, isn’t the healthiest way to enjoy the upcoming holiday. Practice these three communications skills from the 16 skills of a modern communicator to get the most out of the words that you do say.

Dialogue Enablement: I enable dialogue and facilitate peer-to-peer interactions in my communication strategy where appropriate. I can spot—and help others spot—opportunities for creating a narrative around a given message.

On Thanksgiving, family members travel from near and far to convene in one place for a decadent meal. Shortly after the initial hugs and requisite statements that, “You look so good,” each person turns his attention back to their device of choice. Your brother flicks his finger on the screen of an iPad to dictate the trajectory of AngryBirds. Your mom asks Siri on her iPhone, “How do I make cranberry sauce without cranberries?” Maybe you all just have less to say now that you can monitor each other’s movements on Facebook?

Don’t let this scene happen to your family! Someone’s going to have to facilitate conversation, and that person can be you. To get the family to drop their device and start to communicate with one another, I recommend that you take a topic of shared interest—let’s say your family’s last vacation together to the beach—and follow these simple strategies:

1. Ask open-ended questions. For example, “What was your favorite part of our trip to Ocean City this summer?”
2. Make sharing safe. Show genuine interest in everyone’s perspective. Avoid a critical or dismissive posture. Don’t say, “Dad, really? You liked those oily boardwalk French Fries? That’s disgusting.” Instead try, “That’s interesting, Dad. Can’t say I loved the fries, but I did have a delicious crab cake one night.”
3. Forge connections. Point out links or contrasts between family member opinions. Aim to cultivate a “network effect” of communication among the family rather than a series of direct exchanges with you. For example, note “Mom, it’s interesting that you and <brother> both commented on the large crowds on the beach. Where would you want to go next year to avoid the crowds?”

If this approach sounds far-fetched for the dinner table, give it a shot back in the office with the help of CEC’s Dialogue Self-Service Tools.

Negotiation: I take time to understand business partners’ views and find “win-win” solutions. I stand strong when faced with pressure to perform non value added activities.

Read More »

Tiered Communications Service

Can you relate to the following statements?

• My team has a difficult time saying “no” to routine or low-impact partner requests.
• My team spends too much time supporting tactical projects and too little time on high-value initiatives.
• My team is concerned about allowing non-communicators to “self-serve” their communications needs.

If you nodded in agreement to any of these statements, it might be time to reevaluate (or create!) your existing service level agreements. The truth is all of us in Communications have felt exasperated at times when business partners ask us to complete low-value work. In recent years, this frustration has been compounded as Communications budgets remain flat while business partner requests increase.

Of course, you likely already have some tacit agreements in place with business partners or have agreements tucked in a dusty file cabinet somewhere. In theory these SLAs are great, in practice they are harder to implement because it’s hard to: a.) assign value to individual activities, b.) shift partner perceptions of what Comms can do, and c.) ensure consistency and quality of communications pushed back to the line.

When we explored this challenge, ING Insurance Americas tiered service-level framework stood out. What made it better than your typical SLA? Three things:

1. It was co-created with partners to prioritize their business needs and the related communications support most critical to those needs. Read More »

I spent a little time recently looking back at some old news releases, to see what has changed over the years and how they’ve adapted. I stumbled across one from the 1950s that covered the launch of four new products which must have been very cool in their day – one of which was the first ever electronic typewriter! It’s fascinating to look back on. I wonder if anyone in the mid-1950s could have guessed at how the typewriter would one day be outstripped by computers, tablets, and smartphones, and most of all, by the notion of linking those devices together via the World Wide Web?

Starting Strongly

What really struck me, though, was its opening line:

“Four revolutionary new products to accelerate the trend towards office and plant automation…”.

It’s true – with the benefit of hindsight, products like the typewriter were revolutionary. Interestingly, this is still a commonly used opener in press releases today – the only problem is, these days every company claims their latest product is revolutionary/spectacular/groundbreaking/earth-shattering… from a journalist/stakeholder perspective, I wonder how often they’ve heard those lines and simply zoned out?

Look at the difference between that opening line from 1956 “we’ve just created four revolutionary products”, and this present-day example from HSBC, in which they announce results from recent consumer surveys looking at “The Future of Retirement”. HSBC’s opening line is this: Read More »

Do you have a sneaking suspicion that what it took to be a good communicator just five years ago may no longer cut it today?

Increasing business complexity, continued social media channel explosion, and employee change fatigue have made your job as a corporate communicator all the more challenging. To help you redefine your role to succeed in this environment, we’ve mapped out (and shared with you at length) the 16 competencies of the modern communicator.

While each competency is critical, it’s unreasonable to improve all 16 at once.  You need a tailored plan for action! We’ve uncovered how key skill strengths group together and how these groupings create four distinct Communicator skill profiles:

• The Presenter—Knows What to Say and How to Say It
• The Influencer– Builds Relationships Across the Organization
• The Consultant– Solves Business Problems
• The Coach– Helps Others to Communicate

These profiles emerged from our analysis of 600 communicators’ responses to CEC’s Skills Maturity Assessment, a self and manager diagnostic of communicators’ proficiency across the 16 competencies. The value in knowing which “type” of communicator you are is two-fold: Read More »