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 »

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 »

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 »

Each November, the parent entity of the CEC, the Corporate Executive Board, releases to our members a widely read Executive Guidance briefing outlining management imperatives for the coming year. This year’s document addresses one of the most common challenges raised by Communicators – the promise and perils of globalization. The opportunity is clear: between 2010 and 2030 the percentage of global GDP from emerging markets is expected to grow from 37% to 59%; however, most organizations focus on market-level investments and fail to address how corporate center functions such as Finance, IT, Legal, and of course, Communications need to adapt. The Corporate Executive Board has outlined six management disciplines critical for long-term success in emerging markets (and members will have upcoming opportunities to digest them all); however, one in particular struck me as a place for immediate impact from a high-functioning global Communications department: Accelerated Collaboration and Innovation.

While access to new markets and talent should offer opportunities for market shaping innovation, less than 40% of employees perceive effective collaboration – even in just one location. The results are troubling: innovation vitality (the percentage of sales from new products) is troublingly low to keep up with the necessary pace of growth in these new markets and less than a third of R&D staff in developed or emerging markets report high levels of trust with their global counterparts.

So how is this all a Communications problem (other than the fact that everything is a communications problem!)? Corporate Executive Board research shows that most organizations wrongly attribute these deficiencies to the innovation skills of geographically dispersed R&D centers; however, leading companies instead focus on increasing 1) the willingness of global employees to share and receive information and 2) the strength of connections to actually identify and apply new ideas – in other words, the effectiveness of the communications environment. Two lessons from our research into global intranet platforms suggest some immediate solutions. 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 »

“Honestly, Dana, we’re such a small team. There aren’t even 10 of us so:

…we can barely keep up with the requests that come from our business partners.

… demonstrating our impact comes more from getting stuff done than specific measurement strategies.

…it is probably less important that we have a planning template as it is easy for us all to be looped in.

…we don’t have the time or money to invest in staff development.”

Believe me, I hear you! While we all wish it weren’t so, the typical company between $1-5 Billion in revenue has only 10 communicators. We’re talking a median of only 2.1 communicators for every 1,000 company employees who need to understand their role in strategy, who needs more valuable information from the intranet, newsletters or events, and who needs a manager and senior leadership team who is comfortable communicating with them. And we can’t even quantify the number of external stakeholders we’re trying to influence!

All of that said, when you’re in a small communications team, you may actually be in a uniquely positive position. Imagine trying to coordinate the projects, channels, agency relationships or budgets of 50 or even 100 different communicators working on simultaneous activities.

No–when we’re few in number, we can be a lean, mean, and highly effective communications team. We just have to learn to think like our “big” peers and come to work every day with the same drive as a team of 3, 5, or 10!

Here are 3 ways to think and act BIG, even when you’re small: Read More »

Searching for strategies to cope with information overload turns up countless articles, blog posts and how-to guides. The light at the end of the tunnel seems to be that the more we understand how our brains function under the constant bombardment, the better we can be at filtering through it — or the better Google and Amazon will be at doing it for us.

But there are some instances where we just have to say “enough,” and one of them is company-wide communications. The cumulative impact of multiple functions across a firm sending company-wide messages can quickly swamp employees and managers. Rather than take time away from their primary responsibilities individuals turn to the simplest solution, the delete button. This presents a serious threat when truly important messages are lost in the noise.

So how can Communications help curb the runaway messaging problem? It can be hard to tame functional groups across the organization because they have little incentive to curb their output, which only makes up one slice of the prolifically messaging pie. Policing company messaging systems is often too resource-intensive for Communications to take on single handedly and wouldn’t solve the root cause of the issue. Read More »

For the past couple months, I have been working on compiling 16 different “role profiles” of some of the traditional and not-so-traditional roles that you can find on current communications teams.  For each profile, I have interviewed several communicators holding this position to pick their brains on the key responsibilities and skills that their role demands. The resulting role profiles reflect not only their current responsibilities but also some of the more aspirational activities that they would love to add to the list in the near future to increase their impact and effectiveness.

However, not all communications teams have a large number of communicators which can be strategically allocated among all of these 16 (or more) different roles.  A quick look at our membership shows that a quarter of the communications teams have 10 or less people and about half of them fall in the 20 and under full time staff members category.  So what do you do when you have a small team that requires everyone to wear “multiple hats” to get the job done? Read More »