This blog is part of our Building a Global Mindset Series to help communicators increase their own cultural awareness and global perspective.

As more companies are growing both their operations and their sales in India, supporting that growth and building a strong company brand become priorities for the global PR team.  But maintaining truly global perspective and awareness of the nuances in each of the countries where the company operates is a daunting challenge.

India may be a welcome bright spot in this landscape, as the PR in India is very much in keeping with – and in some ways ahead of – trends in the United States and Europe.  Trends Western PR professionals will find familiar:

• Empowered consumers who do their own research online and are more influenced by peers than by company messages.  Social media use in India is by some metrics higher than in the United States and United Kingdom, although its character is quite different – smart phones rather than computers.
• Breakdown of audience silos, reducing the influence of specific media outlets and making it impossible to compartmentalize messages
• Professionalization of PR, including the presence of major global PR firms in the Indian market. Read More »

We all know that the effectiveness of what you write depends in large part on how well you speak the language and values of your audience.  This is doubly so in today’s socially networked environment, where your audience is also the messenger – if they choose to be (CEC members click here for more on that).

So it’s no wonder that the 850+ participants in the CEC Skills Maturity Assessment have indicated a real interest in improving their ability to create engaging content and – as a necessary precursor – to listen to audiences and learn what they care about.

There are many ways to learn about your target audience, all featured in a new CEC member resource center dedicated to developing this skill.  I want to call attention to a tool we’re adding to the mix, thanks to a partnership between CEC and Iconoculture, the leading syndicated provider of up-to-the-minute, segment-level insights into consumer values and trends: audience understanding in less than five minutes.  This series of one-page outlooks – grouped by industry, demographic segment, and geography – gets you quickly up to speed on key values, trends, and language.

I’ve mined these for three trends to watch in 2012, as they cut across many countries and demographic groups:

1)      Idealistic youth + social networking technologies = higher standards.Young adults expect institutions (both government and private) to do good, not just seek profit or power.  Most – especially in Asia – remain quite optimistic, despite macroeconomic challenges.  And all are quite ready to mobilize.  In many ways, this isn’t brand new – earlier generations of young people have felt the same way.  But modern social networking technology let them share information and ideas faster and wider than previous generations (think “Arab Spring”).  This means that unflattering information about your organization will be discovered in the blink of an eye and that “social responsibility” initiatives had better be more than lip service.   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 »

Can leaders do anything right?  A lot of our work over the last few years – especially on Mobilizing the Workforce and Building a Change-Ready Organization – has challenged conventional wisdom around leadership communication:

• Be transparent?  Insufficient.
• Build buy-in?  Misses the mark in a high-change environment. 
• Give clear direction?  May actually do more harm than good.

But this doesn’t mean that leaders don’t matter or can’t communicate in ways that motivate employees and boost their productivity.  It’s just that we need leaders to play a different role – to empower:

• Seek employee feedback and input.  I don’t mean a “suggestion box,” which puts the burden to act back onto the leader.  Empowering leaders ask employees questions that they can answer to take action within the scope of their day-to-day work.
• Coach, don’t tell.  Empowering leaders – when possible – guide staff to figure out what to do rather than tell them what to do.
• Provide opportunities to experiment. Empowering leaders point out learning opportunities and help staff seize them and other employees share in what is learned.
• Connect employees to helpful people and tools.  Empowering leaders’ broad reach within the organization lets them make staff more productive by making smarter connections.  Read More »

Some companies seem to have an edge.  Whether their industry is doing well or struggling, they always manage to outperform.  This phenomenon prompts an endless array of business books and consulting-firm studies explaining why.  “Green Companies Do Better,” says A.T. Kearney.  “Corporate integrity” drives superior share performance and employee productivity says our sister program, the Compliance and Ethics Leadership Council.  Numerous studies point to “customer focus” as the key to competitive advantage.

With most of these sources of advantage grounded in corporate identity and culture, it’s no wonder communications professionals work so hard at strengthening the corporate brand.  But what brand attributes matter?  Should all companies try to be known as green, responsible, and customer focused?

In collaboration with our members, the Council has looked at this issue in depth.  Our conclusion: these attributes are very likely good ones, but defining your brand around them is just as likely a losing brand strategy.  Read More »

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 »

A few months ago, I asked why collaboration with other functions is so hard. I heard at least one person’s take on the subject.

Meanwhile, as many of you know, the CEC research team has been hard at work studying what it takes to build a change ready organization, and specifically what Communications can do to enable agility across the enterprise.  It is impossible to consider a subject like building change readiness without revisiting the subject of cross-functional collaboration; this endeavor is, without question, a team sport.

So, let me suppose that you are a communicator, totally bought into the idea that it would be great for employees to be agile, ready for change. And you see how communication within the organization can help employees be more agile. But now, you confront the ugly truth: you can’t make this communication happen on your own. Read More »

The Communications Executive Council hosted 17 heads of Communications at CEB’s headquarters near Washington last week to discuss Building a Change-Ready Organization.  My colleague Rick DeLisi moderated (as he always does) a lively, engaging, and interactive discussion.  Members can find our latest updates on this work here.

At the end of the day, we asked these leaders for their top takeaways from the meeting. I personally find their responses incredibly insightful in terms of where the communications profession needs to go next.  Drum roll, please!

Top Takeaways

5. Better communications = quantifiable impact on the bottom line. There is a measurable – and large! – link between (a) what communications can do to drive employees’ agility and (b) company performance. For the average large organization, a 10% improvement in three aspects of the communication environment drives over $16 million in incremental profit per $1 billion in revenue. A 10% improvement isn’t unreasonable: it’s essentially moving up one quartile in relative performance from wherever you are today.

4. How to use your seat at the table. The key to creating this measurable value lies not so much in better writing or other traditional communication skills, but in enabling more effective communication within the organization.  What are the new skills and how can you get them?  Check out the Council’s resources here. Read More »

As you may already know, we at the CEC are about to unveil our biggest initiative of the year, Building a Change-Ready Organization, at a series of live events across the next six months.  Many of you are already registered; for those still on the fence, let me suggest three reasons to take a day out of your schedule to join us:

1. Change fatigue.  According to our recent survey, 79% of employees in large enterprises experienced a major change (such as M&A, layoffs, or reorganization) in the last 2 years; 60% experienced two or more such changes.  No wonder so many of you have told me about the “change fatigue” that you sense from staff – before they can recover from one major change, they confront another!  Communications can help make employees “change ready,” so that recovery is less of an issue. Read More »

As members of a staff support function, communicators are no strangers to cross-functional collaboration.  Nearly everything we do is in partnership with some senior executive with a need to communicate: an announcement or press release, a speech, an event, etc.

But there are two kinds of collaboration: (1) using our expertise to help someone else achieve that person’s goals, and (2) working with someone else to achieve our goals (or a mutual goal).  For most of the communicators I talk to, it’s that latter form of collaboration that often proves challenging.  For example, many of our members, especially those reporting directly to the CEO, are working to build a more agile organization – one that “leans into” and embraces change.  This goal cannot be achieved without HR, and perhaps IT as well.

I’d love your help understanding why this collaboration can be so difficult.  Here are some of the specific challenges I’ve heard most frequently: Read More »