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 »

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

Brazil is one of the hottest countries in the world at the moment, not only as the host of the next World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, but particularly due its rapid growth and rise as one of the key emerging economies – Brazil just recently overtook the UK to become sixth-largest in the world. So it is not surprising that many members ask us about what it’s like to communicate with Brazilian audiences and how to message differently in this market. Brazil is not just the land of samba, football and beaches, but also a country of hard-working people, where relationships are key to successful business partnerships, and where internet and new technologies are rapidly expanding like in other emerging economies.

In our research of the Brazilian culture, wediscovered that internet usage is increasing in Brazil and that social media is extremely popular among online audiences, which means that there is an opportunity to connect with audiences through this channel (and actually 70% of Brazilian companies already use or monitor social media channels).

As communicators, what can you do to become smarter about social media usage in Brazil, and what does that mean for your work? Here are three somewhat surprising trends about social media in Brazil: Read More »

I’m not trying to get too Zen or anything, but chances are the answers to the questions that you are seeking already reside within… well, within your organization anyway.  Let’s take a look at what I mean.  

CEC’s latest tool, “How to Seek Existing Business Insight” sets the stage to help you and your fellow communicators uncover business insights from utilizing information that currently resides with your business partners.  Undoubtedly, there have been times when after completing a difficult project, you expressed your frustrations on what little resources you had available to a fellow colleague, only to hear them say, “Oh you should have asked me about that; I just worked on something similar.”  How much easier life would have been if you simply could know who is working on what project, right?

True to form the CEC Research team breaks down a seemingly daunting task into a few simple steps. They even provide tips and a checklist, come on!

Step 1 – Determine Information Needs

Put your thinking caps on and get ready to brainstorm.  The purpose of this integral first step is to better understand the specific information that you’ll need to achieve your objective.  By doing this, you and your team will be able to identify the gaps in your project, which will in turn lead you to the right person or function who can answer your questions. Read More »

At the heart of understanding any problem is the root cause of why such a condition exists.  Right now, I’m working through two root cause explorations in my head: how Duke possibly lost to a 15 seed in the NCAA basketball tournament (European friends, think a Premier league team succumbing to a League One club) and what’s behind the sudden professional nonchalance of Don Draper.  Communicators, of course, have much bigger problems to assess: why is no one participating in open enrollment, how should I announce a partnership with a new telecom provider, or how can we create a more unified company culture.  In order to develop communication solutions to solve these challenges, it is essential that we spend time diagnosing the root cause behind a problem.

But as obvious as that sounds, too often our business partners assume they and we already know the answer.  Consider the request to solve the company’s recruiting challenges with a fresh video (the assumption being candidates are bored by the old video) or to grow share in emerging markets through media availabilities (the assumption being stakeholders don’t view us credibly).  Time spend on a root cause analysis might actually find what was perceived to be a video execution issue was actually about the effectiveness of the medium in an age of peer recommendations and whereas domestic media builds credibility, literacy rates in your emerging market make non-traditional promotions more effective.   As part of the CEC’s Consultative Skills Workshop Curricula, I’d like to introduce a repeatable process to ensure every communication activity is addressing the appropriate root cause before moving on to execution.  Read More »

You get word that a new product has been approved for commercialization. The launch date is set. The Comms team starts strategizing and meets with business partners to gather information. You create compelling messages to drive customer and industry interest, and train sales staff members on the new products most important features. In the run up to launch day, all doesn’t go according to plan but the team gets it done.

We’ve heard a lot of stories like this in conversations with members about B2B product launch communications. The rush to get deliverables ready for launch day and the stresses of changing deadlines are almost universal. On the hunt for best practices, we’ve focused on the essential role Comms plays in collecting and distributing information about new products internally and externally.

Here are a few examples of smart approaches we’ve heard to product launch communications:

Read More »

At a certain age, I started relentlessly asking my parents questions about absolutely everything.  As you can imagine, one answer was never enough. Not a chance. I had to bug my parents and continue to ask, “why?” to every and any answer they gave me. To their credit, they embraced my inquisitive nature and kept answering until they exhausted their entire knowledge on whatever the original subject was. Of course, anybody who has kids can relate to my parents. I see the same behavior in my youngest cousin. The more he asks why, the deeper my aunt or uncle’s explanations become. Most times, the conversation shifts completely by the time he’s finishes asking why. So what can a three year old teach us about improving as communicators? The power of asking why.

I continually hear across the CEC network that communicators want to become more strategic business partners.  The problem is that we often take our business partners’ requests at face value and don’t fully analyze the obstacles that stand in our way. To make this shift, we need to do a better job of uncovering exactly where communications can add the most value. If we start asking why, we can force ourselves to dive deeper into the heart of the problem, understand what stands in our way, and determine how we can be more impactful.

 Take this example: Your head of HR asks your team to re-do the recruitment video for your company’s website because younger talent prefers the company culture of your competitors. Instead of saying, “when do you need this by?” put on your consultative hat and start ask why. Read More »

The changing nature of the communication environment  has undermined Communications traditional approach to drive influence and impact stakeholder behaviors. 

In order for Communications teams to have (and demonstrate) real impact on stakeholders perceptions and behaviors we need to take another approach.  That means starting with the behavior you want to change and working back from there – the outcomes-focused approach.  We also need to be “stakeholder-centric” rather than “company-centric” – so rather than thinking about what we want to say, we need to think about what the audience wants or NEEDS to hear in order to change their minds and their actions. 

That seems logical enough… but it does throw up a couple of challenges. A focus on what really drives audiences to do or think things requires a new level of audience understanding.  Here are 3 things you need to know (and remember) about audiences when creating your communications plan:

Understanding doesn’t mean doing: While attitudes can influence behavior they don’t always.  The “values action gap” describes times when a person holds values that are inconsistent with their behavior.  For example you might care a lot about global warming and the environment but you might not take your own bags to the supermarket, recycle as much as you want to etc. Recent research into pro-environmental behaviors show that 80% of the behavioral driver DO NOT stem from knowledge and understanding.

• Implication: We must understand what truly drives behavior so we don’t make assumptions that if we tell our audiences the right thing to do, they will do it. Active listening through focus groups, ethnography or just asking smart questions will help you focus communication strategies on the things most likely to shift behavior.

Decision making is rarely rational: When we are busy or stressed we take shortcuts to make decisions. We fall back on inbuilt biases: 1) people prioritize short term reward over long term gain 2) we put more effort into avoiding loss than ensuring gain 3) when faced with a difficult choice people will tend to stick with the old way to avoid having to make a decision.

• Implication: Communications can do two things: 1) help make biases/habits conscious to help  people change them, 2) provide information that makes decisions easier for people. ConAgra shifted to providing information that helped audiences to make the right choices rather than telling them what to do and risk people falling back into old habits. Read More »

What does good leader communication look like? For the leader, it looks like a polished speech delivered with conviction and well-timed hand gestures. For the employee, however, good leader communication is something that is not only heard, but seen and felt. Hear me out.

Leader communication is the composite of what leaders say, the communication behaviors they model, and the decisions they make in support of a communicative and collaborative environment.

If you only measure the quality of a leader’s speech, you’ll only be capturing a superficial snapshot into the leader’s presentation skills, not necessarily the impact of his message or the environment in which that message is inserted.

To measure the effectiveness of leaders’ communication, then, you’ll want to ask questions of employees that test their ability to take action as a result of the leader communication.

Questions to Ask

Communication for Employee Action

• How effective are leaders at linking what you (the respondent/employee) do to the company’s strategic priorities?
  This question tests whether employees derive meaning from the work that they do on a day-to-day basis in support of company strategy.
• How effective are leaders at sharing trends in the business environment that are impacting the decisions or trade offs the company needs to make?
  This question tests whether employees are exposed to the same information that leaders use to quickly adjust decisions based on changes in the external environment.
• To what extent does formal communication from leaders help you meet your objectives?
  A version of this question can give you a baseline of employee perceptions of the value of leader communication to begin with!

Behaviors that Support Communication

These questions would be best to ask managers or even the direct reports or team of a given leader. Read More »

You’ve long championed the need for an employee collaboration platform at your organization. After building a business case and securing resources, you launched a brand new social media platform for employees. However, the sad realization dawns soon. After some days of buzzing traffic, the platform looks deserted with just a few irregular visitors. You’re left disappointed and wondering why employees aren’t taking advantage of the opportunity to connect and share, given that they were clamoring for it.

Sound familiar? You’re not alone! Most companies struggle to not only drive initial adoption but also ensure sustained employee interest when they deploy internal social media platforms.

Here are two main reasons why it’s such a challenge—and what you can do about it.

1)  Limited Visibility: Having limited knowledge of who they can connect to and learn from, employees resort to connecting with those they already know (i.e., obvious connections based on function, title, and proximity), and thus don’t quite achieve the anticipated benefits of networking.

2)  Extra Effort: Due to the complexity of sifting through overwhelming irrelevant content, employees struggle to remain engaged with the network.

Leading communicators realize that it’s not the size of an employee network that matters, but the quality and diversity of connections that impacts employee performance. Moreover, the platform needs to be as intuitive to use as anything else that employees use in their personal life to find answers and stay in touch with friends.

Case in point: MITRE

MITRE developed an internal social media platform “Handshake” that automatically suggests relevant peer connections and aggregates relevant content for each employee based on his activity on the platform.

• Relevant peers are recommended based on shared interests (e.g., submissions around same topic, common memberships, etc.), irrespective of function, hierarchy, or geography, thus helping employees to build diverse, non-obvious connections across the organization. 
• Relevant content is recommended based on the employee’s activities and interests (e.g., keywords searched, discussion forums participation, etc.), enabling employees to quickly view and join relevant conversations.  

CEC members can learn more about how MITRE’s internal social media platform enables employee sharing and learning.  

CEC Related Resources:

• Peer Learning Platform (The MITRE Corporation)
• Principles for Peer Sharing and Learning
• Customizable Business Case for Internal Social Media

 CEC Related Blog Posts:

• Improve Your Performance through Peers
• What Makes Novo Nordisk’s Global Collaboration Effective
• How MITRE Measures the Impact of its Internal Social Network