As we’ve charted developments in the internal social media and collaboration  space, we’ve seen many overinvest in the latest and greatest technology platforms. These efforts, such as implementing internal Facebook or Twitter-esque applications, met initial enthusiasm only then to see early adoption rates plummet and to struggle justifying value created for the business. (Two that have worked well, however, are Sabre’s employee connection center or MITRE’s peer learning platform.)

For the most part, these efforts failed because the platforms were non-intuitive and without an obvious purpose or benefit. Many companies wasted time and effort on employee sharing solutions that simply couldn’t compete with employees’ personal options. Before your Communications team begins experimenting with new social media options for employees, here’s what you need to beware of:

• With significant investment and application of the right principles, companies can create tremendous value from tools that allow employees to connect with and learn from one another.
• Companies should beware of efforts that require significant investment but feel unnatural for employees to use; these efforts will disappoint.
• Communications can leverage existing live and virtual employee interactions to redirect energy towards strategies that encourage peer learning.

The question for communicators is not simply, How do I use internal social media to better communicate with our employees?, but also, How does my organization use social media as a collaboration and learning tool to drive employee performance and productivity?

The Four Fs of Social Media Collaboration

To answer this question, I turn to a framework in use by leading HR practitioners and developed by our sister program, CLC Human Resources. In their research, they simplify the 4 Keys to Effective Social Media-Enabled Collaboration into the easy-to-remember four Fs:

1. Focus: Aligning social media collaboration objectives with business objectives
2. InFrastructure: Selecting a platform that supports these objectives (admittedly a bit forced on the F here!)
3. Filter: connecting individuals with relevant, just-in-time information
4. Facilitate: Managing collaboration efficiently and effectively

Imagine if Communications, Human Resources, and Information Technology (alongside business partners) sat down and used these four keys as a starting point for a productive conversation and planning session about the future roadmap of employee collaboration? We can help you better understand these four pillars and how to use them as a guide for investments at your company by joining our upcoming webinar on Driving Collaboration through Social Media.

Join Us to Guide the Social Media Strategy at Your Organization

Be the champion for productivity-enhancing uses of social media at your organization by joining us on May 18^th for a webinar on Driving Collaboration through Social Media. In just one-hour you’ll learn how to:

• Make the business case for your organization on the benefits of creating a more collaborative environment
• Embrace three key imperatives in their internal leverage of social media to drive more effective collaboration
• Implement easy-to-use toolkits to adopt these practices at your organization

CEC Related Resources

• How to Use Social Media to Create Networks of Support Among Employees
• Fostering Supportive Peer-to-Peer Communication (The MITRE Corporation)
• Internal Social Media Vendors
• How to Work with IT

CEC Related Blogs

• 2 Reasons Why Internal Social Media Platforms Fail
• Discussions Spotlight: Using an Internal Facebook

Thoughts from the Market Research Executive Board on manager behaviors that block/enable employee agility…

For many years I looked to Bill Lumbergh as my “what not to say” as a manager tutor.  (“I’m gonna need you to…”)

But we now have an updated list of phrases that should never pass a manger’s lips thanks to workplace expert Liz Ryan.  She recently blogged the 10 things only bad managers say.  Among the most groan-inducing:

• “I don’t pay you to think.”
• “Who gave you permission to do that?”
• “In these times, you’re lucky to have a job at all.”

Don’t Let Managers Crush Employee Agility

What’s the common denominator behind these infuriating catchphrases? Clearly, it’s an overbearing approach to management, which is guaranteed to stifle any agility, innovation or creativity. Years back, this might have been deemed a minor irritant – a trivial complaint that employees’ whimsical ideas weren’t being taken seriously. But we’ve got the data to prove that this management style costs businesses money:

• Employee agility – the very quality that those hideous phrases above prohibit – is the leading driver of employee performance. It matters 3 times more than expending additional effort, and infinitely more than simply ‘following orders’, or being responsive.
• Infuriatingly, comments like “I don’t pay you to think” mean that employees leave their natural agility at home – they are nearly half as agile in the workplace than in their personal lives.

Improve Your Managers’ Communication Style Read More »

In today’s times of uncertainty in the business environment, one thing is certain – the best mistake is the one not committed. Of course, avoiding missteps is easier said than done.  So the question for external communicators becomes, how do you help your organization prevent mistakes from even happening? The CEC has analyzed some of the best practices for monitoring and addressing corporate risk utilized by our broad membership and has uncovered a number of ways to identify potential weak spots in your organization.

Let’s address two of the most common challenges to monitoring and addressing risks: 1) listening out for potential risks and 2) understanding the implications of decisions.  Keep in mind while you’re going through the cases and tools that each organization has its own unique style and identity and as such use these tools as a means to make the methods and processes you already incorporate even better.

• Stakeholder-Centric Monitoring System (Monsanto)

As the saying goes, “necessity is the mother of invention.”  Given some of the controversial arguments made against genetically altered seeds, which is a major component of Monsanto’s business, they decided to become more entrenched in the discussion to better understand those concerns and face them head-on. Under Monsanto’s stakeholder-centric monitoring system, Monsanto decided to turn media and channel monitoring from a lagging indicator into a leading indicator. This allows for Monsanto to identify what different stakeholders care about, thus allowing them to target their communications strategy to reach their desired and specific audience. You can see the benefits of this strategy immediately – being proactive allows for Monsanto to identify their stakeholders’ concerns and incorporate the proper strategy to prevent at best or at least mitigate the effects of another controversy.  Read More »

Executives expect Communications to help them speak clearly and confidently in front of employees to create trust in the leadership and in the direction of the organization. While good public speaking is a desirable leadership skill, it wrongly assumes that trust in executives is a key drives of employee engagement and performance.

We in Communications bear some of the burden for the poor quality of our executives’ communication skills. For so long we have helped solve the symptoms of bad executive communication—sloppy PowerPoint presentations; boring, jargon-filled messages to employees; even bad outfits for video shooting—without forcing executives to think through how communication can be used as a business tool, not just as a megaphone to shout out decisions already made.

It’s time for Communications to help leaders not just communicate clearly, but communicate to drive stakeholder action!

Here are the 5 most common questions we get from communicators looking to help leaders drive action through communication, our CEC take, and relevant support tools from the membership.

1. CEC Member Question: How do I help leaders and employees have productive dialogues?
CEC Perspective: Equip leaders to lead dialogues on the implications of company strategy to help employees understand goals and believe that they can impact them positively.

How-to: Use workshops to teach leaders to break dialogue into simple, practicable steps | See how Shell did it and use CEC’s out-of-the-box training materials

Visit the CEC website to learn more about how to:

• Turn one-way leader messages into two-way dialogues | Use the CEC Dialogue Map
• Help leaders blog about their unique perspective to improve employee decision-making | See 10 Questions for an Executive Blog

2. How should our leaders share strategy with employees?
CEC: Leaders’ strategy messages shouldn’t tell employees what to do, but rather be built back from the decisions employees need to make in support of strategy.

How to: Build employee understanding of cause and effect relationships in the market | See how Eli Lily did it

Visit the CEC website to learn more about how to:

• Personalize market information help employees grasp implications of the company’s external forces | See how Saudi Aramco did it
• Help leaders consider business challenges from the employee’s perspective | See how ConAgra did it

3.  How do I help leaders become better storytellers?
CEC: Equip leaders to weave stories and personal experiences into their communication to make a concept feel much more “real” to the audience, driving their energy and enthusiasm to support it.

How to: Help leaders turn storytelling into a simple, repeatable process | See how Continental Airlines did it Read More »

CEC members ask us questions about improving internal communications on a daily basis. They want to know about communicating new strategy, cascading new company values, reducing e-mail volume, improving employee engagement, implementing a culture shift, etc. etc. etc. What’s interesting is that we don’t hear the question that is perhaps one of the most important of all – “How do we enhance our line manager dialogue?”

Employees need to talkwith someone who grasps both their world and the bigger picture. Senior leaders, communications, or anyone at the corporate center can never have the proximity, credibility, or understanding of employees that managers have. We’ve found that effective line manager communications is not only employees’ preferred source of communications, it’s also the most effective way to create a personal connection between employees’ day-to-day jobs and company goals.

So what’s the problem? Most managers are not natural communicators. They don’t understand dialogue’s importance and they don’t feel comfortable holding dialogue. More often than not, managers will forward on an e-mail or read talking points from a corporate memo and go back to their jobs thinking they have just effectively communicated with their employees. Is that effective? Absolutely not. Here are three ways you can improve internal communications by enhancing line manager dialogue:

Prepare Managers for Difficult Conversations

It’s no surprise that managers face difficult conversations when changes occur in a company. With difficult conversations come difficult questions. With this uncertainty, managers are reluctant to hold dialogue because they know they won’t have all the answers. Nordea addressed this issue by creating “dialogue prep sessions” where managers work out concerns in a low pressure environment. With any major event, they bring their managers together and have them brainstorm questions that will likely field. More often than not, managers had not thought of all the potential questions that might be asked. They then practice handling these questions and communicating new information with each other making dialogue more approachable. Not only can managers practice answering difficult questions themselves, but they can learn different approaches by listening to their peers practice. Read More »

As communicators, we instinctively know that we provide consultative support to our business partners. However, as much as we bring to bear critical thinking, outcomes focus,  and business acumen capabilities to our conversations with partners, there continues to be a disconnect with how our partners value this consultative approach.

The Council ran a workshop for our European membership last month in Zurich, as part of our effort to help Communications teams move up the value chain.

In the workshop we asked all of the 43 participants out loud if they think they add value to the business. All responded ‘Yes’! Then we asked them to write down what they think their business partners think of them, and we got a very different story. Communicators are the people who ‘write press releases’, who are ‘the right-brained, creative ‘types’’, who ‘help you put pretty colours on the website’.

But, is consultative skills just a ‘buzz word’ or do they really matter for communicators? And if they really do matter, then how and why do they matter? Here are 5 reasons why we want to help you develop consultative skills through attending one of our training sessions:

• Anyone can be a consultative business partner:

As a communicator, you already possess the skills needed to be a consultative business partner.  However, in order to be effective, you need to engage your business partners by asking ask them about what they think they already know.

• Anyone who was not part of the original process can catch up with what you already decided, in a matter of minutes: 

If you take the initiative to record this process, then this allows for any member of your team to quickly get up to speed by reading your notes – which is part of the benefit of making it a process.

• If you don’t get the results you were hoping for, it is easier to make mid-course corrections: 

Since you’re now creating a process and recording the sessions with your business partners, you now have the ability to go back and conduct a step-by-step analysis to uncover the weak or missing link. 

• The process lets your business partners see a direct link between what Communications does, and a metric-orientated outcome that allows them to be more successful:

Remember that you ultimately want to work with your business partners to determine what your target audience should be doing differently.  Your success then will be determined on your ability to help drive the behavioral change that will lead to the desired outcomes. Your business partner is an intrinsic part of the discussion where you set the metric; ipso facto they will appreciate the discussion.

• Over time, partners begin to see the real consultative value of the Communications function and come to you with increasingly more strategic & higher value requests: 

Once you begin to embed this process, you’ll be on your way to creating successful products for your business partners. It now only makes sense that by consistently providing your business partners with quality work that they’ll continue to seek your advice in the future!

We’d love to join you on-site to train you and your team on consultative partnership with the business. Learn more about this skill development offering.

CEC Related Resources:

• Consultative Partnership with the Business
• Critical Thinking
• Outcomes Focus
• Business Acumen
• Supporting Business Partners
• How to Seek Existing Business Insight
• Building an Outcome-Focused Communication Plan

One of my favorite parts of the job is moderating and reading the conversations on our member discussion forums. Recently, questions around Communications’ mission statements in both our External Stakeholder Relations Forum and our Employee Communications Forum caught my attention. I have been wondering about Communications missions and how the function positions itself to business partners in the last few weeks, as we work on our main study for this year Unlocking Communications Business Impact…what if with our function’s mission statements we are creating the wrong expectations with the rest of the organization on what kind of value can Comms add? When I speak with CEC members, I often hear frustration that Comms is seen as a service provider. Are we setting incomplete perceptions with business partners through our mission statement, and limiting our full potential to contribute to business results – or even the way we view our own role as communicators?

With these questions in mind, I went on the lookout for other CEC research around mission statements to see what commonalities I would find to the ones shared on the discussion forums…to paraphrase, some of them include: Read More »

One of our most popular diagnostics is the Skills Maturity Assessment.  It is a two part, quick survey in which individuals assess themselves on their maturity levels across key 18 competencies and they are also assessed on the same competencies by their manager. As a result, managers and individuals can have a productive conversation about the key strengths and development areas for the individual, but also about what the manager can be doing to support his or her direct report’s development.

Looking at the data that we collected from the 1500+ individuals who participated, we found that managers and individuals perceptions of which competencies are the most important for the individual’s success within his/her role are very often not well-aligned. Managers often place importance on very different competencies than their direct reports.  We found that the gap in alignment between manager and individuals is often correlated with the amount of support an individual receives from their managers.

Here is how participating communicators managers stack up:

• 60 percent of communicators agree that their manager is a great coach
• 74 percent feel that their manager is open to new ideas
• 72 percent regularly receive formal feedback  from their managers
• 71 percent regularly receive informal feedback from their managers
• 55 % of communicators say they have an IDP (Individual Development Plan) that emphasizes the skills needed to succeed in their organization

The good news is that it looks like many communicators are receiving quite a lot of feedback. Yay!  But when it comes down to coaching the manages ratings start to fall a bit, and once we get down to actually having something concrete, like an IDP explicitly written down, suddenly we are down to barely more than half of the respondents.

So if you are one of those communicators whose IDP is not quite what they would like it to be, where do you start? CEC has a bunch of resources to help you with your development and you can check them all out on our website. Or even better, why not send this blog to your team leader and see if your entire team can participate in the diagnostic so you can get a real 360 assessment and start a productive dialogue with your team and your manager about your development.

Recommended Resources:

Communications Training Resources

Plan Your Development

Skills Maturity Assessment

Responsibilities and Competencies of Key Communications Roles

I’ve met two kinds of communicators in my years with the CEC: those whose CXOs “get it” – the value and importance of communication objectives like reputation, that is – and those not so fortunate.  These unfortunate communicators ask for help proving the ROI of communication activities and the connection between communication outcomes (like “trust” or employee engagement) and business outcomes (like market share or employee productivity).  The lucky ones listen to this conversation in smug relief, since their “enlightened” executives support good communication practice – transparency, authenticity, proactive outreach – without needing a quantitative business case. 

But the uncomfortable truth revealed through these discussions is that there isn’t a lot that communicators can do to transform their senior executives from skeptics to ones who “get it.”  When that transformation does occur, it’s usually brought on by a crisis or similar hit to corporate reputation (for example, financial services companies have a lot more enlightened CEOs today than in 2007) – precisely what communicators work to avoid!

What if there were another way?  That is, what if you could so clearly align Communications’ activities to specific business goals that even a skeptical CXO would “get it”?  We’ve seen a few leading communicators do just that – some under pressure, others proactively – with amazing results: demonstrable impact on business goals like safety, operating cost savings, market entry, and speed to market.  And more traditional communication goals like reputation, employee engagement, and trust come along for the ride! 

These leading communicators recognize that some – but not all – business priorities require a key stakeholder group to change certain behaviors.  And that Communications can do much more than influence perceptions to drive that behavior change. 

The CEC research team is busy uncovering the true scope of Communications’ opportunity for business impact and practical strategies for unlocking this full potential.  These include:

• Enabling the whole Communications team to spot opportunities for high-value business impact (not just the company’s top priorities);
• Uncovering the true drivers of stakeholder behavior (not just awareness and perceptions) and creatively employing communication tactics to influence them; and
• Reinforcing these actions in Communications’ planning, staff development, and performance management systems. 

 Our work will be completed in May and will be shared at a series of in-person and virtual events and on our members-only Web site. 

 Join us at an upcoming event:

•  Seniormost Communications executives may register for an Annual Executive Retreat to discuss this content with their peers by clicking here.
• All other staff at CEC member companies may attend one of our regional briefings by clicking here.  We will likely add 1-2 more dates and locations to the “road show.” 

In the meanwhile, follow our progress here: Unlocking Communications’ Potential for Business Impact

When an executive asks you to jump, do you respond, “How high?” Could you ever imagine responding with “Why?”

As our content deliverer Rick likes to say, “Sure, you can imagine that…On your last day with the company.”

Executives bombard Communications with requests to write speeches, build town hall presentations, craft memos, and orchestrate engagement campaigns. Eager to show how high they can jump, communicators get caught “doing communication” for leaders. As a result, leaders never get good at communication and communicators run themselves ragged.

We think Communications can fight back! Politely, of course.

Follow this three-step communication triage process to help recondition leaders understanding of communication and shift their expectations of the type of support that Communications can deliver.

1. Preparation: Connect to Business Objective

In the upfront part of the triage process, your goal is to connect the leader communication request to a business objective. By asking consultative questions, you will begin to recondition a leaders’ communication thought process. No longer will mass communication after a decision be a given. Instead, the leader will be forced to think about communication

• Sample triage question: What are you trying to achieve and why is it so important?
• Access the full Communications Triage Process for the other 2 preparation questions Read More »