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 »

As a former journalist, ohhhhhh how I HATE media hyperbole. Don’t you? Every bad weather system that’s described as (this year’s) Storm of the Century…every one-day drop in the stock market that has investors reeling…every tragedy that forces local residents to rebuild the shattered pieces of their broken lives. Uhhhhhhgggh.

When I think about what’s become of the news business, I don’t know whether to laugh, cry or go out on the front lawn and start eating grass (isn’t that what animals do when they think they’re about to barf?).

But I gotta say — although you may already be getting a little queased-out from the relentless coverage of this Joe Paterno/Penn State story — for once, this ain’t hype.  This really is the biggest scandal in sports history. More than just another ringing bell for the Pavlov’s Dogs of Media to salivate over, this is a cautionary tale for EVERYONE in a position of authority at any big organization in the world.

Here’s a strong recommendation from your friends and colleagues at CEC: Use this moment as an opportunity to have an important discussion with your CEO.  Particularly if he (90+% chance it’s a he) is a football fan (gut guess on my part = there’s a 75+% chance he at least likes football).

All you have to do is ask him, “So, uhhhh, whadda ya think about the whole Paterno mess?”, then sit back and let him spew. Whatever he says next will enlighten both of you about his understanding of “the way things work” in today’s media environment.

Chances are you’ll get one of three responses: 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 »

Building a Bank of Goodwill

Financial advisers often emphasize the importance of building a personal emergency fund.  What they’re referring to is a rainy day fund, consisting of a certain amount of money (e.g., 8 month’s salary) which can be drawn down during tough financial times.  Should you lose your job or get slapped with an unexpected major expense, you could rely on these savings to help you weather the financial storm.

In the communications world, a similar concept exists with regard to an organization’s reputation — this is the concept of the “bank of goodwill”.  Much like your rainy day fund, the idea behind the bank of goodwill is that companies can stockpile their reputation assets when times are good and lean on them as a buffer from negative stakeholder perceptions when times turn bad.

On its surface, the concept seems plausible.  After all, in the financial savings example, few would argue that having extra money in the piggybank wouldn’t give you some degree of financial breathing room.  But whereas money can be universally spent on a wide range of goods and services, perceptions are complex, specific to each stakeholder group, and increasingly fickle.  Additionally, academic researchers struggle to quantitatively prove the theory of the bank of goodwill.  Nevertheless, one need only look to the news for examples of big, well respected companies who have been recently blindsided by massive financial and reputation hits due to crisis or scandal.  I’ve spoken with some of these companies and they’ve all said that, if there is bank of goodwill, it gets exhausted quickly. Read More »