Corporate Communications often finds itself at the mercy of the organization to sets its agenda for the year. While Communications’ efforts should certainly support company strategy, consider these 5 Communications-specific trends that will influence the function’s ability to have a real impact in 2012.

1. Stakeholders have (even more) power.

The age of individual control over what, when, and how to consume information continues in 2012.  New devices, like the Kindle Fire, new services, like Spotify, and new mobile apps, like Zite, that took off in 2011 will further enable people to act in ways natural to them. Chances are, reading/viewing/listening to dry corporate messages isn’t something most people like to do naturally! As a result, Communications’ approach to everything it creates must be stakeholder-centric, not company-centric.

Smart teams will kickoff the year by asking themselves, “Do we know where our key stakeholder groups go for information?” Determine how your stakeholders consume information with CEC’s audience listening guide, and then use that information to develop a stakeholder-centric communication plan.

2. Communicators look to build their business partnership skills.

In 2012, the Corporate Communications function grows up. Once just the PR-engine for the company, Communications is now expected to impact business results in a much different way by coaching leaders to communicate more effectively, developing internal communication systems for employees to connect with one another, and feeding stakeholder insight to business leaders, to name a few roles.

A new set of skills is required for communicators to live up to these new expectations. Clear writing and a solid understanding of channels won’t cut it, but a focus on business partnership skills such as critical thinking and negotiation will enable communicators to grow into the position of consultative business partner.

CEC members, we can help you: See how your skills stack up compared to peers; develop a plan for your skill development in 2012; and equip yourself with smart tools to build skills in the moment.

3. A global mindset pervades the function.

Communications execs are asking two things of their teams this year: 1.) partner with colleagues in remote locations and 2.) customize messages for local audiences in other countries. At the root of this global focus in the function is the simple fact that emerging markets are key for corporate growth. Communication teams that spend time in 2012 building an awareness of cultural differences of local audiences will discover new solutions to age-old collaboration challenges (e.g., Why does no one use our intranet portal to share information?) and deliver messages that are more resonant.

Visit our Global Management Topic Center to take the stress out of collaboration or download communicator’s guides to India and China to get up to speed on cultural trends that impact the function’s communication efforts.

4. Blanket trust-building to strengthen corporate reputation is called into question.

Tight budgets over the last few years have forced communicators to think hard about where they place their investments, and dollars spent tracking high-level reputation measures are being scrutinized more than ever before. One communicator sums it up nicely: “We have done reputation measurement for several years and I have not taken any radical, meaningful decisions as a result of any of the data we’ve got.”

In 2012, we expect to see leading communicators focus reputation efforts not on building an even bigger bank of goodwill through high-level reputation tracking, but instead on sharing information that influences a small set of targeted stakeholder decisions that drive business outcomes. Contribute to our 2012 research on Building an Outcome-Focused Reputation.

5. Agile workforces meet the challenges of uncertain environments through strong communication and a focus on learning.

Much remains uncertain and unsolved in 2012. And yet, the show must go on. Companies will attempt to grow. The smart ones know that employees who proactively adapt, seek to learn from peers, and feel a personal connection to the company are excited by and contribute to these fast-moving companies.

Communications, then, must support the development of an agile organization by helping leaders to share key market context that helps employees to make decisions in line with strategy, partnering with HR to connect employees to one another, and supporting a culture that empower employees.

CEC Related Resources

• 2012 Strategic Priorities for Communicators
• 2011 Communications Budget Benchmarks
• What’s in the Works from CEC in 2012

CEC Related Blog Posts

• 4 Comms Execs Priorities in 20123 Stakeholder Trends to Watch in 2012
• Top 3 Insights from Communication Gurus in 2011
• Top 5 CEC Blogs of 2011

We sit at the center of a global network of over 350 Heads of Communications and their teams. This privileged position gives us a unique vantage point into the shared challenges and priorities of executives who, regardless of industry or company size, all aim to boost the function’s performance in a wildly complex business and communications environment. Our daily conversations, executive retreats, workshops, and Q&A session on webinars, have yielded tremendous insight into the future of the function, but none quite like these!

Here are three top insights from CEC members that portend a very different posture for Communications in 2012 and beyond.

1. Communications as Business Partner, not Trusted Advisor

“A trusted advisor is someone who might know media relations or the Communications business cold, but they don’t necessarily know the business cold. A business partner is someone who really understands the organization’s business, reason for being, and goals and objectives.”

–Teresa Paulsen, Vice President, Corporate Communication, ConAgra, The Modern Communicator’s Skill Set webinar.

We would agree that it’s no longer enough to be an expert communicator; business partnership skills are paramount. This is mostly due to the dramatic shift we’ve witnessed as the function moves from acting as a message creator to an enabler of business outcomes. Yet despite many communicators’ desire to be a consultative partner with a “seat at the table,” seniormosts of the function lament that their teams lack the confidence and skills to meet business partners’ heightened expectations.

In 2012, we’ll look to help the CEC network build their confidence in consultation and business partnership through resources and training opportunities on critical thinking, being outcomes-focused, and business acumen.

2. Communications as Roadblock Remover for Leadership Communication 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 »

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 »

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 »

A lot of communicators are jealous of you, Mr. or Mrs. CEO or C-suite communicator. That’s right, your functional peers envy your access to the CEO and your ability to put words in his mouth that make him sound genius. The CEO trusts you to make him look good and sound smart, and you deliver with captivating speeches that reiterate strategy and motivate people to act. You have the proverbial “seat at the table” that communicators covet!

But what if I told you that what got you that seat won’t necessarily help you keep it, especially given a change in CEO? Allow me to propose that being a solid speech writing is no longer “enough” to be an effective supporter of CEO communication.

Hear me out. What if today’s best executive-level communicators are those that act more as coaches than true speechwriters? Imagine. In this capacity, you would spend less time writing and editing drafts to get to “the perfect speech” and more time feeding insights and perspective from the front lines to challenge executive thinking. You would spend less time orchestrating major presidential-like events and more time hosting small discussion groups among employees.

Help Execs in the “In Between” Moments
Now why would you, an executive communicator, lessen your focus on your bread and butter activity? It sounds crazy! Well, you might if you believed that executive communication today is a lot less about formal “wow” presentations at the typical “big” moments like the annual strategy kickoff or the quarterly investor relations call and is a lot more about what’s happening in between those major moments.

Many of you tell me that you struggle with closing the say-do gap at the executive level. It’s painful to write a speech that focuses on being more flexible as an organization only to see the CEO enforcing red tape or pressing for more analysis to make decisions. So how can you help executives help themselves by aligning daily behaviors to momentous speeches?

For starters, think like a coach. Ask yourself: Read More »

Ongoing change is a new reality. In the last two years, employees worldwide have experienced, on average, 3.5 major changes (enlarge graphic to the left). That means that most communicators have spent a lot of time planning for and talking about change. To help you craft a change communication plan that works, I suggest that you ask yourself the following 5 questions:

1. What is the desired stakeholder behavior change?
2. How will this behavior change impact the stakeholder?
3. What information should we share with stakeholders about the change?
4. How do we help leaders and managers to drive stakeholder behavior change?
5. How do we sustain change over time?

These questions will help you craft a change communication plan that builds your employee’s agility—their ability to adapt to any change—because as you plan to communicate about one change you are really:

• Creating communication systems that connect employees to people and information
• Equipping leaders and managers with the skills to help employees make their own decisions
• Enabling employees to lean in to change (rather than simply process and accept that change is happening to them)

Let’s take each question in a bit more detail. Read More »

Selling is not about relationships.

Our sister program, the Sales Executive Council, made this bold statement on Harvard Business Review’s blog last week, creating a firestorm of divisive comments.

To sum up their research, every sales person falls into one of five types. The highest performing “type” is the challenger, the salesperson who uses their deep understanding of their customers’ business to push their thinking and take control of the sales conversation. The other types, the relationship-builders, hard workers, reactive problem solvers, and lone wolves don’t match the challengers’ performance.

In this post, I propose, what if communicating wasn’t about relationships either? What if your focus on developing strong personal and professional relationships with your clients and generously giving your time to meet those client’s every need was a misguided, and likely draining, approach to your job?

Let’s give this a try.

In the HBR post, the SEC researchers describe the three traits and skills of Challengers. What if, just for fun, we replaced “Challengers” with “Communicators,” “customers” with “internal clients,” and “sales conversation” with “communication request”? Here would be the definition of a challenger communicator and their three key attributes:

Communicators use their deep understanding of their internal clients’ business to push their thinking and take control of the communication request. They’re not afraid to share even potentially controversial views and are assertive—with both their internal clients and bosses.

1. Communicators teach their internal clients. They focus the communication request not on the channels but on insight, bringing a unique (and typically provocative) perspective on the internal client’s business. Read More »

Dirty little (anecdotal) secret: Most CEOs don’t write their own blogs.

That’s right. Despite CEO’s best intentions to write frequently and informally, most communicators end up having to write—or heavily edit—these personal posts.

Ghostwriting your CEOs blog can be an exhausting endeavor! You have to come up with an idea, craft a post that mimics the CEO’s voice and vision, incorporate substantial edits from the CEO, make the post live, and then, wait, fingers-crossed, hoping that the post will receive enough comments or views to prove that blogging is indeed a worthy pursuit, which, of course, it may not be at all! CEC Members, visit our Leader to Employee Communication Topic Center to consider the appropriate channel for leadership communication given your objective.

CEO blogs come in a variety of audiences, intents, and styles, but for the purposes of this discussion, let’s focus on the CEO blog that sits on your corporate intranet and whose main audience is employees. If you’re going to have to write the post anyway, why not write about something that will have an impact on employee performance?

Here are my top 10 questions that your CEO’s next employee-facing blog post could answer:

1. What are the strategic goals of our organization? Which ones are the most ambitious? Why?
2. Which market trends should employees pay most attention to?
3. Which key markets matter most to our company? Will those be the same ones in 2020?
4. What are the risks our company is facing? How are we mitigating them?
5. In what ways might pending government regulation in key operating regions impact our company?
6. How have people or teams from across silos of the business come together to produce amazing results?
7. How is our company building an infrastructure that enables employees to communicate and collaborate more effectively?
8. Which of our competitors do you admire most and why?
9. What publications and people do you follow to stay informed on our business and industry?

10.  What’s the most surprising customer or consumer trend you’ve seen develop over the last five years?

To be clear, I’m not advocating that your CEO spill your company’s proprietary secrets in a 500-word blog post; that just wouldn’t be smart business. What I am advocating is that your CEO shares the bigger picture trends and assumptions that most employees, who must focus on a small piece of the business, might fail to appreciate. Would you rather talk about the CEO’s upcoming marathon or newly adopted golden retriever? Read on to learn why that approach won’t move your organization forward.

Why Talking Trends Works Better than Being Personal

Read More »